The New York School

1972 / 55 min. / color
Directed by Michael Blackwood

Featuring Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Gottlieb, Al Held, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Morton Feldman, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg

The band of American artists known as the New York School toyed with tradition and rebelled against the Renaissance. In the early throes of Abstract Expressionism artists such as Jack Tworkov and Robert Motherwell were intent on working from the unconscious, eager to stray from the structured composition of the European work they had studied throughout school. Feeling as though free association yielded their best results, the painters, poets and performers of the New York School took a surrealist approach that was concerned less with aesthetic and more with expression. Those associated with the School were unified by their desire to create from within. While walking through the studios of Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, and Lee Krasner, writer and narrator Barbara Rose notes, “Many were immigrants to America, but slowly they turned their eyes from Europe, looking into themselves and into their own subjective conflicts and experiences. As a result, they created a monumental, dramatic art that remains a singular expression of the crucial modern quest for individuality and personal freedom.” Never knowing exactly how their pieces would turn out, the artists of the New York School embraced their own complex humanity and worked from a place of bold, sporadic realness.

Biography and significance of Adolph Gottlieb on the Art Story.