From the archive: Jack Tworkov in "The New York School," 1972

Michael Blackwood’s 1972 film “The New York School” explores the genesis of Abstract Expressionism through artist interviews and archival footage. In the clip featured below, Tworkov discusses the critical decade of the late 1940s to late 1950s when the ethos and aesthetics of the movement coalesced in a cohesive new vision of American painting divorced from the European tradition. Tworkov is captured here working in his Provincetown studio in the early 1970s, by which time his work had evolved a language of calligraphic strokes applied within planned geometric compositions. 

The film also features interviews with artists Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Al Held, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, and narration/commentary by Barbara Rose.