Lyrical Abstraction
リリカル・アブストラクション / 1947–1970s / Style / Gestural Abstraction
Abstraction that leans neither on geometric discipline nor on violent gesture, assembling a lyric out of flowing strokes and bleeding colour. The name was born in Paris and was later applied in America to thinly painted, stained canvases. A reference point whenever softness and lightness have to be designed.
Flowing brushwork / Layers of bleed and overlap / Light, transparent colour / Composition without a centre
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Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Covers and backgrounds where the mark must feel made by hand and weightless at once, as in poetry, chamber music or wellness · Large washes for packaging and interiors that need to avoid both the corporate mesh gradient and the heavy painterly cliche
- Type
- A light-weight seriffed face set small at one corner, never crossing the centre of the wash.
- Composition
- An all-over, centreless field running past all four edges, offering the eye no anchor and no focal incident.
- Material
- Thinned colour on an absorbent ground, so the pigment spreads and the edge is decided by the substrate rather than by the hand.
- Caution
- Placing one confident stroke in the middle: a centred gesture turns the field into a logo and destroys the drift the style is made of.
- Further study
- The difference between the Paris usage and the American one / The staining technique / The exhibitions around 1970