Justine Price, assistant professor of art history, will speak at the next Ignatian Scholars Coloquium Thursday (March 31) at 4 p.m. in Lyons Hall Room 303 (corrected location).
Abstract: In the early 1940s, three painters turned—consciously, collectively—to the subject of myth and created a series of paintings based on their explorations both of classical mythologies and of creation myths from outside the Western tradition. These are the so-called mythological works of Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), and Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974). By the 1950s, each artist would be a prominent member of the Abstract Expressionist movement (a label each artist contested). This paper attempts to see these so-called mythological paintings not as a mere transitional moment on long march towards the ‘triumph’ of Abstract Expressionism but as a significant moment of discovery in the history of avant-garde painting in America. This paper frames these works anew with an inquiry into the reading habits of the painters, especially on the subject of philosophy.
Submitted by: John Zeis, PhD, professor, philosophy
