1948 - Art

Art

Jackson Pollock pioneers abstract expressionism with Composition No. 1 (tachisma), combining splashes and splotches of multihued paints on canvas to help launch a new school of "action painting" that will radically alter the direction of American art. Now 36, Pollock says his splashes are controlled by personal moods and unconscious forces.

Christina's World by Chads Ford, Pa.-born painter Andrew (Nelson) Wyeth, 31, captures the youthful vigor and anguish of Cushing, Me., cripple Christina Olsen, 55, in a work that will be widely reproduced. Son of the late illustrator N. C. Wyeth, Andrew illustrated the Brandywine edition of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood at age 12 and has been working largely in tempera since 1946.

Other paintings: Natura Morta by Giorgio Morandi; Woman and Mailbox by Willem de Kooning; Elegy to the Spanish Republic by Aberdeen, Wash.-born abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, 33; Peinture (Silver over black, white, yellow, and red) by Jackson Pollock; The Curiosity Shop by Norman Rockwell (cover illustration, Saturday Evening Post, April 3). Dadaist collagist-poet Kurt Schwitters dies at Little Langdale, Westmorland, January 8 at age 60 (he moved to Norway in 1937 after the Nazi government declared his art decadent and escaped to England 3 years later); Arshile Gorky hangs himself at New York July 3 at age 47, having had a colostomy for rectal cancer, had his neck broken and his painting arm paralyzed in an auto accident, lost many of his paintings in a studio fire, and found his 27-year-old socialite wife cheating on him with Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta Echaurren, who has been a close family friend.

Sculpture: Teilhard de Chardin (bust) by Malvina Hoffman portrays the French Jesuit theologian, paleontologist, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, now 67; The Angel of the City by Marino Marini.