'Art/Work/USA: American Art in the Sixties'
Film screening
Friday 19 May 2017 6.30 - 8pm
The Reynolds Room, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly
£12, £6 concessions
America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s
Join us for an exclusive screening of the film ‘Art/Work/USA: American Art in the Sixties’, with an introduction by the director, art critic and historian Barbara Rose.
Art/Work/USA: American Art in the Sixties is a feature length documentary exploring how American artists survived the Depression. Rare archival footage provides the political, social and cultural context that brought modern art to the United States just before World War II.
Interviews with Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Harold Rosenberg, Isamu Noguchi, Stuart Davis, Ralston Crawford and others provide an intimate look into the lives of artists who would go on to become the New York School. The film also documents the confrontation between provincial American Regionalist and Social Realist artists and the abstract styles that sophisticated artists like Bolotowsky, De Kooning and Gorky were pioneering. The influence of African American and native American art on the modernists like O’Keeffe and Hartley, as well as the emergence of prominent women artists, is illustrated within the context of the photography, film, fashion and music of the period.
Barbara Rose is the author of American Art since 1900 and American Painting: The Twentieth Century, as well as many articles, books and museum exhibition catalogues including Miró in America, Pollock Painting, Rauschenberg: Express and monographs on Claes Oldenburg, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, among others. Both the Montréal Festival of Films on Art and the Centre Pompidou, Paris have held screenings of her films. Her current exhibition Painting After Postmodernism opens 4 May 2017 in Malaga, Spain.