The Expressive Fallacy
The Expressive Fallacy
Chapter 2 historicizes the concept of expressionism as a central concept in Modernist painters’ understanding of authorship. The chapter looks at the mid to late 1950s, when a diverse group of American Modernists found themselves grouped into a newly formed style called “Abstract Expressionism.” Looking at the contents of It Is. A Magazine of Abstract Art, an art journal edited by Philip Pavia, which extended debates that first took place in “The Club” (an early New York School meeting place), along with the definitively expressionist paintings of Jack Tworkov, this chapter analyzes the ascendancy of “gesture” as a marker of authorial presence in Modernist painting. It shows that the increasingly explicit use of gesture as a device was in part the outcome of debates over the differences between and possible joining of two stylistic modes previously thought to be at odds: abstraction and expressionism. This chapter returns to that moment when abstraction and expressionism, which now seem so indelibly linked, represented two divergent modes of making and thinking about authorial presence in painting.
Keywords: abstract expressionism, abstraction, art journal, The Club, expressionism, gesture painting, It Is: A Magazine of Abstract Art, Philip Pavia, Jack Tworkov
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