The Fear and the Fury: Abstract Expressionism
Online
Dr Matthew Holman
10 pre-recorded lectures with 5 live Zoom seminars at 18:30, and where necessary, also at 20:00 [London time], over 5 weeks from Wednesday 23 April to Wednesday 21 May 2025
£395
Course description
This course explores an unparalleled period in American art and provides an in-depth survey of a movement that is associated with the boundless creative energy of 1950s New York. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, this was “an age of anxiety”, of improvisational jazz, of Beat poetry – and of ‘Abstract Expressionist’ artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko breaking with American self-doubt about its artistic provincialism and unleashing a new confidence in American painting.
The movement subsequently laid itself open to waves of criticism with its earnestness, high-mindedness and machismo, but more recently new ways of contextualising Abstract Expressionism have emerged. They range from the reappraisal of the extraordinary contribution by women artists to Abstract Expressionism to an understanding of its gestural painting in the context of related innovations in artistic centres as far apart as Cologne, Copenhagen and Caracas. Exploring these new approaches along with recently discovered archival material, our course aims to arrive at a fresh perspective on this important movement in modern American art. We shall look closely at the careers of individual artists, from the Armenian refugee Arshile Gorky to the Parisian émigré Joan Mitchell, and contextualise key painters and artworks in thematic lectures that examine Abstract Expressionism in relation to contemporary philosophy, art criticism, exhibition history, and the intrigue of Cold War politics.
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Lecturer's biography
Dr Matthew James Holman is Lecturer in Literature and Fine Art at The University of Hertfordshire. Previously, Matthew held the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Courtauld and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. A specialist in American modernism, Matthew completed a PhD on curatorial history and the Cold War at University College London, and has held research fellowships at Yale University, The Smithsonian, and the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin. His first book, Frank O’Hara: Curator of Modern Life, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.