Description
Jack Tworkov emigrated with his family from Biala, Poland, to the United States in 1913. After attending Columbia University in 1923, at the age of twenty-three, he began taking classes at the National Academy of Design. While spending summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Tworkov developed a close connection with the painter Karl Knaths. He then attended the Art Students League in New York City from 1925 to 1926. His paintings in this early period were portraits, landscapes, and still lifes that showed the influence of French painting, especially that of Czanne. From 1934 to 1941 Tworkov worked for the Work Projects Administration's Federal Art Project in the easel division. During these years he became friendly with Willem de Kooning and developed an interest in automatism, a Surrealist technique that attempted to investigate chance and the subconscious processes of the mind through spontaneous procedures of drawing, painting, and writing. Tworkov stopped painting from 1942 to 1945 to participate in the war effort as a tool designer.
It was after the war that Tworkov developed into a mature artist. From that time until his death in 1982, his work developed in two distinct stages. Tworkov's paintings from the late forties until the late fifties are Abstract Expressionist, executed in a loose, gestural style with bright colors and textured surfaces. Influenced by the idea of automatism, Tworkov investigated the spontaneous, automatic gesture of the artist in response to a blank canvas. In the late fifties, however, Tworkov became dissatisfied with "the automatic aspect of Abstract Expressionist painting of the gestural variety," finding its forms "predictable and automatically repetitive."(1) By the late sixties, paralleling the more general direction in abstract painting of the time, he began composing his paintings on geometric systems carefully worked out in preparatory drawings. Wedding Flags of 1965 is a transitional painting. It exhibits neither the vigorous brushstroke characteristic of Tworkov's Abstract Expressionist style nor the geometric structure of his later work. Nonetheless, aspects of both these styles are present.
Details
- Work Date:
- 1965
- Location:
- North Concourse
- Dimensions:
- 3 panels (left to right): 8'-1/2" x 7'-9 7/8" overall, 8'-1/2" x 32 3/4", 8'-1/2" x 18 1/8", 8'-1/2" x 43"
- Medium:
- Oil on canvas