Feelings over figures: art

view on Economist Espresso -- fan qiang -- Dec 15th 2018

Feelings over figures: art

On Monday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York an exhibition opens featuring Abstract Expressionism, an art movement born from the psychological rubble of the second world war.

“We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce World War” said Barnett Newman, a leading figure who painted fields of color separated by lines he called “zips”.

“We actually began...from scratch, as if painting were not only dead but never existed.”

Easels were too flimsy to adequately capture the human condition—and figurative painting could never successfully convey things like pain, anxiety and loss.

Jackson Pollock dripped paint across gigantic canvases on the floor, Mark Rothko created huge works that were immersive meditations on color and emotion, and Carmen Herrera, a Cuban-American woman who did not gain recognition till the early 2000s, made geometric pieces that reflect what she called “a lifelong process of purification”.

• the Metropolitan Museum of Art 大都会博物馆；大都会艺术博物馆
• Abstract Expressionism 抽象派表现主义；抽象画派；抽象表现艺术
• psychological 心灵的；心理的；精神上的
• rubble 瓦砾；毛石；粗石
• from scratch 从头开始；从头做起；从无到有
• flimsy adj. 劣质的；不结实的；薄而易损坏的；不足信的
• dip 滴彩画；泼洒
• canvas 油画；画布；帆布
• figurative 比喻的；形象的
• immersive 浸入式；沉浸感
• gain recognition 获得认可；得到赏识；得到认可
• geometric 几何的；几何学的；几何体
• purification n. 纯化；洗净；精制