CIA Reading Room 06797578: THE WASHINGTON AND NEW YORK SCHOOLS OF COLOR

📝 Description

Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797578 The Washington and New York Schools of Color The Washington School of Color, represented by many of the paintings in the New Headquarters Building, belongs to a period in American modernism immediately following World War II; its lineage can be traced, however, to 19th century Europe, especially France. During that period, art was set in a radically different direction, in part due to: - the industrial revolution, which created a middle class that not only changed the nature of art patronage but also changed the subject matter of art from grandiose depictions to mundane moments in contemporary time and place, - scientific and technological developments, at a time when the science of optics examined the passage of light and its impact on the human eye. Although photography: had initially been seen as a threat to painting, artists during this period.came to see it as a liberating force, freeing,* them from the traditional role of recorder to one of explorer, - philosophy, reaching from Aristotle, for whom color was "flawed light, a tragic necessity between divine radiance and stygian darkness" to the late 19th century mystical and occult movements, who claimed that colors were symbols. Artists began to examine the myth and art of past cultures�including non-European ones. - the development of Freudian and Jungian psychology, which examined the dream world state and the production of new, biomorphic images--a major factor in the development of Surrealism. The Washington School of Color was art with an agenda! This was not, however, a new concept--in the 17th century, the powerful Dutch mercantile class sponsored oil paintings to espouse the tenets of the Reformation. The work was in stark contrast to the elaborate and emotional frescos in Italian churches, which were promoting the cause of the counter-Reformation. It is important to view the works of the Washington School of Color relative to those of the New York School, represented by "gesture" or "action" 'painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem deKooning. Artists in the New York School, known as the Abstract Expressionists, used large, simple areas of color that inundate the eye. They had been influenced by Edmund Burke, an 18th century English philosopher whose passages on the nature of the sublime led them to seek "the effect of infinity". Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797578 Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797578 Beth groups, enveloping the philosophy of Existentialism, were reacting against the ideologies of the 1930s, which were seen as morally and philosophically bankrupt after the devastation of World War I. These artists avoided fixed ideas, patterns, or standards. The American art vanguard of the 1940s moved decidedly toward a highly sulbjective and personal art, exploring for ways to uncover fresh images. An understanding of optics led to an awareness that the artists' sought-after sense of boundlessness was further intensified w