Karl Benjamin

Karl Benjamin

Southern California attracted a steady stream of immigrants, whose spirit of optimism is one of the regions most functional clichés. In the post war moment ,when many Americans were still experiencing the residual fears of World War II and the specter of the atomic bomb it was during this period the angst-ridden language of New York school abstract expressionism emerged, a more utopian vision persisted in Southern California. The Calorina scene at the period of 1949 to 1965 was void of major cultural institutions or patronage gave way to the label of L.A. to be an intellectual desert.but still many artist and intellectuals made it to the pacific ocean a few of these people were Wilder, Huxley and Mann. This California style represent detachment. A chacarteristic of the second generation artist fit the California experience. This is achieved through the migration of a better future being such a young state with out much history and the invention of the moving picture and its growth in Hollywood. This made California a state in which reinvention was and still is a normal activity where reality and fantasy some times becomes blured. Where one can easily speprate oneself from reality. New York loose drippy expressive style in which emotive gesture exploded on the canvas California Precisionist who built his compositions with hard-edge chromatics. Benjamin’s response to those closed parameters has been the steadfast insistence on color and form as inseparable or ,as he has stated : “color is the subject matter of painting. Regardless of style or content, it is the material from which paintings are made.” In this we hear a recapitulation of Wassily Kandinsky’s statement that “Painting has two weapons at her disposal: 1. Colour. 2.Form.” (Nieto) Hard edge painting was one of the type of paintings that developed as a reaction against the spontaneity and painterly handling of abstract expressionism Lawrence Alloway wrote about the hard edge movement “to refer to the...

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