Comparing Paul John Wonner's Figure With Flowers

Clement Greenberg declared in his essay “Modernist Painting” that art develops in an unbroken stream of progress. Each new style or movement is a continuation, a reaction, to that which came before. When the new becomes old, it becomes the impulse that drives art into the next step forward. This idea of sequential development in art styles is apparent when comparing the modes and meanings of Abstract Expressionists to the artists that came after. Each succeeding style stemming from that time period was in succinct response to the past. This essay, a comparison between Paul John Wonner’s Figure with Flowers and James Rosenquist’s 1, 2, 3 Outside will support Greenberg’s belief in the linear progression of art. The oil painting Figure with Flowers by Paul John Wonner features a centrally placed figure of a nude woman. She is gazing into a mirror with a bouquet of flowers in her left hand while the right rests upon a human skull. There is an empty chair behind her. Although facial details are faint, the woman’s pale reflection appears to be staring moodily out of the painting. This figural setting encapsulates a narrative aspect that inspires the closer examination. It prompts the viewer to question the meaning behind the figures in the painting. Figure with Flowers is heavily layered with paint, a

Greatly influenced by the New York Abstract Expressionist’s work in the 1940s and 1950s, they adopted several techniques used by the Expressionist artists, such as gestural brushwork and bold use of color, and applied it to realistic subject matter (Zilczer.) A key difference in the Figurative Group’s work was their rejection of total abstraction and acceptance of the figural and representational. They often placed their subjects in specific arrangements, more similar to a still life, than that of a realistic moment as Wonner does with the nude woman surrounded by mirror, skull, table, and