A Fine Line Between Surrealism and Expressionism - Clara Ledesma

Clara Ledesma Terrazas (5 March 1924 – 25 May 1999)was an artist from the Dominican Republic.In 1949, Ledesma had her first solo exhibition and in 1951 she opened a studio/gallery, where she displayed her works as well as those of other artists. With the proceeds from a very successful solo exhibition in 1952, Ledesma traveled to Europe to further her education. She studied painting in Barcelona and Madrid, and exhibited her works in galleries in Spain. Ledesma also traveled to Lisbon and Paris to visit important museums. She was particularly influenced by the works of Marc Chagall, Joan Miró and Paul Klee. During her stay in Europe, Ledesma met Bolivian artist Walter Terrazas, who returned to Santo Domingo with her in 1954."She studied painting at prestigious academies abroad and then returned to the country where she presented works that she had conducted in Europe under the influence of Miro, Chagall and Paul Klee, among others.In Santo Domingo, she worked closely with other important Dominican artists, including Gilberto Hernández Ortega, Josep Gausachs and Jaime Colson. In 1955, she was named vice director of the National School of Fine Arts.In 1961, Ledesma and her husband moved to New York City, New York, where she opened another gallery. She lived and worked in New York City the rest of her life.Ledesma had numerous international solo exhibitions, including events in Madrid, Mexico City and New York City, and participated in group exhibitions in Brazil, Spain, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Argentina and Puerto Rico.
Ledesma's style ranged from Expressionism and Surrealism to Abstraction. She is known for her use of brilliant colors, imaginative figures and the feeling of magic and mysticism created in her paintings and drawings. In 1955, journalist Horia Tanasescu described her work, "At times ironic, often playful, but taking great care in the production of her paintings, this artist introduces an enthusiasm for life to the national art scene that is in striking contrast to the solemnity of the majority of her fellow artists.""“Ledesma also touched on social realism in her work, with her most noted series underlining the racial inequities of the time.”"She tried to represent native paintings, with concern, but away from the drama. One of her best stage was marked by the issue of blackness."Wikipedia

Lyrical informal abstractionism Lilia Carrillo

Lilia Carrillo (1930–1974) was a Mexican painter from the Generación de la Ruptura, which broke with the Mexican School of Painting of the early 20th century. She was trained in the traditional style but her work began to evolve away from it after studying in Paris in the 1950s. While she and husband abstract artist Manuel Felguérez struggled to get their work accepted, even selling Mexican handcrafts and folk art to survive, she eventually had her canvas work exhibited large venues in Mexico City and various cities in the world. Her work was part of the inaugural exhibition of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1964. After her death in 1974, her work received honors from the Palacio de Bellas Artes and has been exhibited in various venues.

 Encouraged by Juan Soriano to explore other kinds of painting, in 1953, she received a scholarship to study in Paris, moving their with her new husband Ricardo Guerra. She enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, learning about avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism and various forms of abstract art. However, she guarded about these movements at first.
She returned to Mexico in 1956 after separating from Guerra In 1960, she married Mexican abstract artist Manuel Felguérez in Washington, DC.Both were of the new Generación de la Ruptura artist movement, which had trouble selling paintings in established venues. Carrillo and Felguérez turned to Mexican handcrafts and folk art to make money to survive. Carrillo had two children to support as well, prompting her to take on a Czechoslovakian persona of “Felisa Gross” to produce purely for commercial purposes.In 1962, she traveled to Peru with Felguérez to exhibit her work at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo. On this occasion, she met Peruvian vanguard artists such as Fernando de Szyszlo.

 While Carrillo was studying at La Esmeralda, she rejected abstract art, with her work heavily influenced by the dominant Mexican School of painting. Her very early work is figurative such as her self-portrait from 1950.After she graduated Juan Soriano encouraged her to explore other artistic trends and she went to Paris. There Here she became to experiment with Cubism, influenced by Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso, and the Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism and abstract art movements in general. When she returned to Mexico in the mid-1950s, her work was already showing influence from abstract art.
In the 1950s she became an adherent of automatism, a theory introduced to Mexico by Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen. It is based on Surrealism and posits that the artist’s hand should be guided by its own movement in order to tap the subconscious. She then moved onto her own abstract style which has been classified as “lyrical informal abstractionism” or “informal expressionism.” She never rejected the labels but always insisted that she did not have a real method for creating her works, or if she did, it changed often. Wikipedia

Arshile Gorky

"Arshile Gorky, original name Vosdanik Adoian (born April 15, 1904, Khorkom, Van, Turkish Armenia [now in Turkey]—died July 21, 1948, Sherman, Connecticut, U.S.) American painter, important as the direct link between the European Surrealist painters and the painters of the American Abstract Expressionist movement.
Gorky’s early life was disrupted when his father abandoned Turkey, his wife, and his family in order to avoid service in the Turkish army. The rest of the family soon fled to Armenia to escape Turkish persecution and were subsequently dispersed. In 1920 Gorky emigrated to the United States, where he rejoined his sister in Watertown, Mass., and assumed the pseudonym by which he became known. The name Arshile is derived from Achilles, the brooding Achaean hero of the Iliad. The name Gorky (Russian for “the bitter one”) is derived from that of the writer Maksim Gorky.

 After studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gorky enthusiastically entered into the Bohemian life of Greenwich Village in New York City, occasionally passing himself off as a successful Russian portraitist who had studied in Paris and experimented with Automatism. From 1926 to 1931 he taught at the Grand Central School of Art. Early in his career, he hit on the idea of becoming a great painter by subjecting himself to long apprenticeships, painting in the style of such artists as Paul Cézanne, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso. His aim was never merely to imitate the work of others, however, but to assimilate fully their aesthetic vision and then move beyond it.

 Gorky remained stylistically unable to move beyond the work of his mentors until about 1939, when he met the Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. The Surrealists’ idea that art is the expression of the artist’s unconscious enabled Gorky to discover his personal idiom, which he pursued the last eight years of his life. In such works as The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944) and How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life (1944), biomorphic forms that suggest plants or human viscera float over an indeterminate background of melting colours. The erotic significance of the loosely painted forms and elegant, fine black lines is often made explicit in such titles as The Diary of a Seducer (1945) and The Betrothal II (1947). The years that saw Gorky finally emerge as one of the most important painters in the United States were marked by personal tragedy, however. In early 1946 he lost many of his paintings in a studio fire, and soon after he underwent an operation for cancer. In June 1948 his neck was broken in an automobile accident, and he lost the use of his painting hand. His wife left him the following month, and shortly thereafter he hanged himself."(Encyclopædia Britannica)

 Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. His work as lyrical abstraction was a "new language. He "lit the way for two generations of American artists".The painterly spontaneity of mature works like The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944), One Year the Milkweed (1944), and The Betrothal II (1947) immediately prefigured Abstract expressionism, and leaders in the New York School have acknowledged Gorky's considerable influence.
But his oeuvre is a phenomenal achievement in its own right, synthesizing Surrealism and the sensuous color and painterliness of the School of Paris with his own highly personal formal vocabulary. His paintings and drawings hang in every major American museum including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (which maintains the Gorky Archive), and in many worldwide, including the Tate in London.Wikipedia