Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Gottlieb, Dorothy Dehner: Our Pictographic and Skeuomorphic Era

Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur joins us from Yale University for our second talk in the spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins.

Painters such as Norman Lewis, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Dorothy Dehner looked to notational stand-ins for meaning. The stick figures and simplified marks were graphic interfaces developed to be capable pictorial descriptors of more complex language systems. Interested in the research of anthropologists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead and post-structuralist anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, artists paired these ideas with instinctive line-making. For them this pairing of rational and id-based notation systems were places of universal sympathetic convergence. As explored in the writings of Francis O’Connor, Anne Gibson, and I revisit here, the pictograph also evolved alongside an interest in technology, and systems theory in the 1930-1950s. This paper explores abstract expressionist artists less seduced by unintelligibility and less inspired by surrealist chimeric marginalia while moving to a future of emotional immediacy in the field of pictorial skeuomorphic understanding.

This event will take place in Washington Hall 201. Register to receive a parking pass by email. Street parking is also available along Richmond Road.