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Introduction

The New York School

Aaron Siskind in Context
November 7, 2003 - January 25, 2004

During the early 1940s, many New York artists were tremendously affected by the political events of World War II (1939-45) and began to question the direction of their work. In 1967, Adolph Gottlieb, described the wartime period as one with a “sense of crisis. I felt I had to dig into myself, find out what it was I wanted to express.”

Many, including Aaron Siskind, found license to pursue more personal work through surrealism, a European art movement influenced by the new science of psychology. Surrealism developed in the aftermath of World War I (1914-18), originally as a literary philosophy. The surrealists rejected rational thought and many values of Western culture, believing these had led to an unprecedented violence. By 1939, many European surrealists had relocated to the U.S. to escape Hitler’s persecution and the war, and their work was widely exhibited in New York. As their American counterparts struggled to understand a level of brutality new in their experience, surrealism seemed increasingly relevant.

Artists of the New York School embraced the surrealists’ idea that the unconscious could be as great a force on life as the conscious. Ambiguous imagery drawn from the subconscious mind seemed much more attuned to modern realities. The New Yorkers were particularly interested in the surrealists’ notion of automatism, a kind of stream-of-consciousness writing. They saw in it a path to unpremeditated, spontaneous gestures and a method that could direct their work. Another key idea absorbed by New York artists from surrealism was the importance of subject matter, especially that which could express, in Barnett Newman’s words, “subjective thought, a feeling, a subjective idea.”

Both Newman and Gottlieb were longtime friends of Siskind, who came to know through them many other New York School painters, later to be called Abstract Expressionists. This gallery contains some of their formative works. In the adjacent gallery, their more familiar mature styles are represented.

Selected Objects

Willem de Kooning

Black and White Abstraction, ca. 1950

Ad Reinhardt

No. 18, 1956

Joseph Cornell

Untitled, 1949-1952

Joan Mitchell

Untitled, 1966

Philip Guston

Winter Forms, 1963

Buffie Johnson

Palimpsest, ca. 1955

Franz Kline

Studio Shapes, 1951

Helen Frankenthaler

Holocaust, 1955

Mark Rothko

Untitled, 1954

Louise Bourgeois

Still Life, 1963

David Smith

Untitled, 1960

Jackson Pollock

Magic Lantern, 1947

Karl Knaths

Composition 2, 1945

Jackson Pollock

Untitled, 1939-1940

Hedda Sterne

Untitled (Radar), ca. 1949

Romare Howard Bearden

Ritual, ca. 1965

Elaine de Kooning

Untitled, ca. 1949

Anne Ryan

Collage #441, 1953

Morris Engel

Aaron Siskind at Egan Gallery, ca. 1949

Arthur Swoger

Guston Show at Sydney Janis, 1958

More objects +

Exhibition Checklist

The New York School : Aaron Siskind in Context

November 7, 2003 - January 25, 2004
View Checklist PDF

RISD Museum

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