Art History - Past & Present

"BARCELONA.- The Fundació Joan Miró presents Explosion! The Legacy of jackson pollock, an exhibition curated by Magnus af Petersens and organised in conjunction with the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. After the Second World War, many artists wanted to start from scratch by attacking painting, which was seen to represent artistic conventionality. Explosion! takes off where modernism ends; when it was so ripe that it was on the verge of exploding. Which it did, in the form of a variety of new ways of making art. Practically every door was opened with an aggressive kick, and a new generation of artists began seeing themselves not as painters or sculptors but simply as artists, who regarded all material and subjects as potential art. That is how the North American artist and writer Allan Kaprow, the man who invented the word “happening”, described the situation in 1956 in his now legendary essay “The Legacy of jackson pollock”. Even if doors were opened to all techniques, much of the new art - happenings, performance and conceptualism – sprang from new approaches to painting. There was a development, a shift of focus, from painting as an art object and as representation, to the process behind the work, to the ideas that generate art, and performative aspects."

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