نطق اول

Lecture 1:

Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.

Okay. At the end of our last class I started to talk a little bit about a dominant movement in the United States painting in the late 1940s and the 1950S,and I said that the artists involved shared a spirit of revolt against tradition and belief in spontaneous freedom of expression. This significant art movement is know as Abstract Expressionism.

Now, Abstract Expressionism is kind of hard to define but ifs basically an attempt by the artist to convey meaning or feeling in an abstract way. So the artists didn’t worry about v^ether they were painting familiar subject matter like the kinds of things you’d see in the world around you.They paint, well, abstract things, on a huge canvas,Which itself was a break from traditional technique, and it was common among artists to apply the paint to the canvas very rapidly and Vvith great force.

So lefs look at the work of the most famous American abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollock.

There was nothing in Jackson Pollocks training as an artist that suggested he would come to be seen as some sort of artistic revolutionary.In the 1930s he studied dravving and painting at the Arts Students League, a popular art school in New York City.

What he did later, in the 1940s, was a startling innovation.Jackson Pollock used a technique, the so called “pour and drip” technique, for which he is best know.He didn’t use the traditional easel. He laid his wall-sized canvas flat on the floor so he could move around it and work it from all sides. Then he poured and dripped his paint onto the canvas Vvithout touching it Vvith a brush. Just poured and dripped.

Now, the physical movements involved in Pollocks painting technique have led people to call it “action painting”,which almost suggests that the process of creating the painting, physically, was at least as important as the end product itself.In fact, people used to watch him work in his studio, dripping and pouring paint and other materials onto his canvases.

This could make you think of Pollocks work is being kind of like, wild or chaotic or random, but the truth is that Pollock was in complete control of his materials and his paintings.Pollocks pour and drip works were quite revolutionary and at first they shocked the art world.Pollock used massive canvases. They seem more like portable murals than anything else.

A good example of his technique is the painting Autumn Rhythm,which Pollock painted in 1950. Autumn Rhythm, at first glance, looks like basically just a whole lot of squiggly lines. Rather bizarre, just like a bunch of pointless drips and swirls.But if you look closely, you see why it’s so admired. Beneath all the apparent chaos there’s really a very definite structure of lines, rhythms and sensations that makes the whole piece work. Sheer randomness would not be nearly as Usually appealing as this painting is. You need some structure, even if it’s not readily apparent.

I read some articles by other scholars who。in their discussion of Pollock some of them like to point out that he painted his canvases while looking dow at them since they were on the ground, as I said, but when we go to a museum they’re up on a wall. They think this is significant because it makes our perspective different.

But I mean, well, think of photography. We’ve all seen photos of the sky, the ground, meaning that the photographer was shooting from different angles. Does that mean that we should put a photo of the sky on the ceiling?Of course not! It wouldn’t matter if you’re looking at it on the wall or in a photo album on your lap and I think it’s the same with Pollock.lt doesn’t matter from which angle we ^iew his paintings. it’s ok that he painted on the floor and we look at it on the wall.

But in spite of his work being shocking and even misunderstood at first. Pollocks work became so influential in the development of Abstract Expressionism that the artistic community started to shift its attention from Paris,which had been the center of the art world, to New York, where Pollock lived and worked.So Pollocks breakthrough work helped move the focus of contemporary art and that’s one of the measures of his greatness really.

nd for all the same reasons.