Hard edge
Hard Edge (German "hard edge") is a form and style of painting in the visual arts that got its name from 1958 by the American art critic Jules Langsner (1911-1967). Langsner used the term in connection with an exhibition he organized in the Los Angeles County Museum in the summer of 1959 to denote the special non-figurative (abstract) representation. The title of the exhibition was: Four Abstract Classicists . The four exhibiting artists were: Lorser Feitelson , John McLaughlin , Frederick Hammersley and Karl Benjamin . Due to its great success, the exhibition was also shown in London in 1960 . It was there that the English art critic Lawrence Alloway coined the term West Coast Hard Edge . This established the connection to artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland .
Hard Edge describes painting that is not representational and does not make use of any composition theory that is visible at first glance . It is often a stencil-like, flat, geometric form of painting with hard edges and sharply delimited paint applications. Hard Edge has large color fields in common with Colourfield Painting . It is (apparently) emotionless and rationally controlled, the artists deliberately do not leave any individual brush marks on the surface of the picture, the colors are rather cold . As a rule, hard-edge images have little more than two or three different colors. The painting is characterized by the large-scale and sharply delimited application of "cold" colors in geometric or organic forms.
In general, Hard Edge is seen as a "counter-movement" to Abstract Expressionism , in which the images reflect the artist's experience. However, in contrast to the flowing transitions in colorfield painting, in hard edge the color fields are hard and sharply delimited from one another, which is also what the designation of this form of painting as hard edge refers to.
Hard Edge painting experienced an extreme intensification by Frank Stella , who further developed this mystical-contemplative direction of Abstract Expressionism from the mid-1960s through his versatile canvases into Shaped Canvas painting.
Representatives of this direction in America include Josef Albers , Robyn Denny , Al Held , Robert Indiana , Ellsworth Kelly , Alexander Liberman , Morris Louis , Barnett Newman , Kenneth Noland , Miriam Schapiro , Leon Polk Smith , Ad Reinhardt , Mark Rothko and Frank Stella . The representatives in Germany are Günter Fruhtrunk , Georg Karl Pfahler and Christian Roeckenschuss , from 1963 Winfred Gaul , from 1964 to 1978 Günther C. Kirchberger and u. a. Bernd Damke and Frank R. Werner . Many of these painters are also assigned to color field painting .
Individual evidence
- ^ Sandro Bocola: Timelines. Modern art 1870–2000. Taschen, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-1357-5 , pp. 92–99.
- ↑ a b c "Hard Edge" In: Masterpieces of Art. Painting from A – Z. isis Verlag, Chur 1994; P. 309.
- ^ André Lindhorst: A forgotten artist of hard-edge painting: Christian Roeckenschuss , in: kulturexpress.info, 2016.