| Abstract | Both the Dynaton group in California and the New York School, though on opposite sides of the country, were movements rooted in common interests and ideas, ranging from Bretonian surrealism and the related notion of automatism; accessing the Jungian collective unconscious; interest in pre-Columbian and Native American art and culture; and spirituality. The post-WWII sensibility was also a crucial influence on their works. This thesis will analyze these similarities in their works as well as their writings and interviews in support of my argument that members of these groups ultimately created cosmic landscapes in their mature styles. Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Lee Mullican of the “Dynaton” movement evoke the cosmos in their paintings in different ways: Paalen’s through taches, or dashes of color, Onslow Ford’s through his “Line-Circle-Dot” theory alongside asterisks and spirals, and Mullican’s through his magnetic fields of sun rays applied with the edge of a palette knife. While more content-based, these cosmic landscapes share a sensibility with what critic Robert Rosenblum referred to as the “Abstract Sublime” in works by both Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. Gottlieb and Rothko were closely associated throughout their careers, both writing and exhibiting together. Gottlieb’s cosmic sensibility lies in his “Bursts” and “Imaginary Landscapes,” in which at least one orb lies above a Telluric tangle of lines, while Rothko’s realization of his signature stacked rectangles, preceded by his “Multiforms,” speak to the sense of a void between transcendent worlds. All of these artists ultimately progressed to creating these cosmic landscapes in order to create a universally accessible, timeless art in disparate fashions through similar means, despite geographic distance. They also drew on a certain lexicon of symbols in order to evoke the cosmos, such as rays, asterisks, orbs, parabolas, or interplanetary space. |
