From brushstrokes to drips and palette knives to spray cans, this lecture explores the role of the artist’s mark in several iconic paintings from the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s 20th- and 21st-century collection. While abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose bold, energetic, and seemingly messy applications of paint are best known, a wider range of artists experimented with similar techniques. From European avant-garde artists experimenting with brutal brushstrokes of German expressionism and the loose, automatist lines of French surrealism, to African American artist Norman Lewis’ explorations of black and gray tones, the marks of all these artists register an array of varied responses that run the gamut from playful to political.
