Abstract Expressionist Masterpieces from MoMA at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Written by Nestor Fullbright Monday, 30 May 2011 21:38

Toronto.- Jackson Pollock. Mark Rothko. Robert Motherwell. Joan Mitchell. Franz Kline. Lee Krasner. Willem de Kooning. These are just a few of the legendary 20th-century artists whose artwork is now on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in an unprecedented international exclusive. "Abstract Expressionist New York: Masterpieces from The Museum of Modern Art", on view until September 4, features more than 100 works from the unparalleled collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by the legendary artists whose drips, splatters, and fields of incredible colour catapulted New York to the centre of the international art world in the 1950s and changed the course of art history forever.

Abstract Expressionism was an American painting movement that flourished in the 1940s and ‘50s. More than sixty years have passed since the critic Robert Coates, writing in The New Yorker in 1946, first used the term “Abstract Expressionism” to describe the richly coloured canvases of Hans Hofmann. Over the years, the name has come to designate the paintings and sculpture of artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and David Smith.

As you experience the artworks in the show, you will see there is no one style that they all share. The range goes from work that is incredibly gestural, aggressive and high- energy to work that is very silent and contemplative. Although the work of each Abstract Expressionist artist was highly individualistic and distinct, they all shared a common sense of purpose — to create a new beginning for art. This was a generation of artists who had just come through the Great Depression of the 1930s, and who had witnessed the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Instead of falling into despair, they sought to invent a new language of art, which by extension would imply a new culture, a new civilization and a new beginning for humankind in general.

Abstract painting was not new, but large–scale abstraction was the breakthrough of this group — artmaking was no longer confined to the canvas on an easel. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler unrolled their canvases on the floor and used their entire bodies to paint. Painting became choreography. The scale of the works the Abstract Expressionists produced literally declared the artists’ belief that what they were doing was big. They used the canvas as “an arena in which to act” rather than as a place to produce an object. In his famous 1952 essay, “The American Action Painters,” art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote, “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Following the pioneering “drip” paintings of Jackson Pollock, artists like Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman developed their own distinct visual vocabularies. Where Pollock and de Kooning used agitated gestures in paint to convey the urgency of their vision, Rothko and Newman relied upon fields of colour to envelop sight and transport the viewer to new realms of emotion and perception.

Visitors to this exhibition will come face-to-face with exhilarating artworks that changed the course of modern art. The diverse works on view in Abstract Expressionist New York display the intense originality of a diverse group of artists, including painters Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and Robert Motherwell; photographers Robert Frank and Harry Callahan; and sculptors Louise Bourgeois, David and Isamu Noguchi. This exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to experience firsthand the creative ingenuity that made New York the centre of the art world.


The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is located in Toronto's downtown Grange Park district. With almost 50,000 square meters of physical space, the AGO is the 10th largest art museum in North America. Its collection includes more than 70,000 works spanning the 1st century to the present-day. The museum was originally founded in 1900 by a group of private citizens, who incorporated the institution as the Art Museum of Toronto. The museum was renamed the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1919, and subsequently the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1966. The current location of the AGO dates to 1910, when the gallery was willed the estate known as the Grange, a historic Georgian manor built in 1817, upon the death of Goldwin Smith. In 1911, the museum leased lands to the south of the manor to the City of Toronto in perpetuity so as to create Grange Park. In 1920, the museum also allowed the Ontario College of Art to construct a building on the grounds. Designed by Pearson and Darling in the Beaux-Arts style, excavation of the new facility began in 1916, and the first galleries opened in 1918. Expansion throughout the 20th century added various galleries, culminating in 1993, which left the AGO with 38,400 square meters of interior space. Under the direction of its CEO Matthew Teitelbaum, the AGO embarked on a $254 million (later increased to $276 million) redevelopment plan by Pritzker Prize winning architect Frank Gehry in 2004, called Transformation AGO. The new addition would require demolition of the 1992 Post-Modernist wing by Barton Myers and Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects (KPMB). The AGO reopened in November 2008, with the transformation project having increased the art viewing space by approximately 50%. Notable elements of the expanded building include a new entrance aligned with the gallery's historic Walker Court and the Grange, and a new four-storey south wing, clad in glass and blue titanium, overlooking both the Grange and Grange Park. The most characteristic outward-facing element of the design however is a new glass and wood façade called the Galleria Italia (named in recognition of a $13 million contribution by 26 Italian-Canadian families). The completed expansion received wide acclaim, notably for the restraint of its design. As well as the galleries, AGO contains world-class conservation, research and education facilities as well as a restaurant, café, bar and museum shop. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.ago.net

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