The University of Kansas

Larry Rivers

United States,1923-2002
Drummer, 1960
Oil on canvas
Gift of the Friends of the Art Museum and the National Endowment for the Arts, 78.129

Artists have always been concerned with the most effective way to compose and visually organize their works, that is with the formal properties of art. In the 20th century many artists have found the formal elements of art – line, shape, color, texture, space, and form – worthy of investigation and valid as ends in themselves. Rather than depicting the world in their art, they have involved themselves with the characteristics of art itself, sometimes as a means to express their own feelings and ideas and sometimes as its own subject. This is a rationale for abstract or non-objective art.

During the late 1940s and 1950s a group of artists called abstract expressionists focused on formal concerns in making art with no recognizable subject that was, nonetheless, emotionally charged, highly personal, and visually spontaneous. These artists self-consciously concentrated on the physical act of painting, and evidence of the process of painting is readily visible in their works.