9th Street Art Exhibition
The 9th Street Art Exhibition , also known as the 9th St. Show or Ninth Street Show , was an art exhibition held from May 21 to June 10, 1951 in a derelict commercial building on 9th Street in New York . The exhibition showed the new American art of the 20th century, brought together numerous well-known artists and marked the start of the New York avant-garde of the post-war period, which subsequently became known as the New York School . Well-known participants included the Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning , Robert Motherwell , Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann .
background
The studios of the most artists were in the late 1940s in the area of 8th and 12th Street between First and Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue). The artists were commonly referred to as the "Downtown Group". In 1949 the Downtown Group founded the “Artist's Club” at 39 East 8th Street. With a few exceptions, the members were all war veterans and professional artists with an average age of 40 years. Weekly meetings were held in the club. Since the artists felt too little attention from the art criticism of the post-war period, the idea of organizing an extensive retrospective arose. The exhibition was to take place in a demolished building at 60 East 9th Street, and so the group agreed on the title "Ninth Street Show". The exhibition poster, which shows the names of all those involved, was designed by Franz Kline . The aspiring art dealer Leo Castelli took part in the exhibition.
Exhibition artist
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Significance and aftermath
Art historian Bruce Altshuler wrote: "The artists celebrated on 9th Street not only the appearance of the art dealers, collectors and museum people and the exhibition of their work, but also the creation and strength of a living community of significant size."
Despite the public interest in the exhibition, art critics were initially relatively unaffected by the show and there were only a few gallery owners who exhibited the works of the New York School. As a homage to the legendary Ninth Street Show, the New York Stable Gallery showed works by well-known Abstract Expressionists every year from 1953 to 1957. These exhibitions became known in the New York art world as the "Stable Annual". For the second Stable Annual, the art critic Clement Greenberg wrote :
“This exhibition was conceived and organized by artists; the previous event was the famous Ninth Street Show, which took place in the spring of 1951 on the ground floor of an abandoned commercial building. Like this, the exhibition was organized and its participants were named and invited by the artists themselves and a range of the most vivid tendencies in mainstream advanced painting and sculpture were presented. I don't think that the reverberations of this show have faded. "
The photographer Aaron Siskind , a representative of abstract expressionist photography and himself a member of the New York School, took numerous photographs of the show. He was also the only photographer who was involved in the exhibition.
literature
- Bruce Altshuler: Avant-Garde In Exhibition New Art in the 20th Century . Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York 1994, ISBN 0-8109-3637-2 .
- Marika Herskovic: New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists . New York School Press, New York 2000, ISBN 0-9677994-0-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Interview with Leo Castelli, conducted by Barbara Rose. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, July 1969, accessed January 4, 2009 .
- ↑ Bruce Altshuler: Avant-Garde In Exhibition New Art in the 20th Century , 1994, p. 171
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento from February 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Figure
- ↑ Marika Herskovic: New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists , 2000, pp. 20-21
- ↑ Aaron Siskind 100th Blindspot, archived from the original on December 25, 2008 ; accessed on December 31, 2008 .
