Black slashes/bars Symbolism

Black slashes or bars are graphic interruptions that cut across an image to block, separate, or accelerate visual information. Drawing on the languages of print layout and gestural abstraction, they read as rules, barricades, or emphatic strokes that structure attention and tempo.

Black slashes/bars in Police Gazette

In Police Gazette (1955), Willem de Kooning punctuates an acidic yellow ground with slashed blacks that behave like the rules of newsprint, interrupting and splicing the picture as headlines collide. Reworked and scraped, these bars become events of gesture, converting the city’s noise into abrupt cuts and emphatic stops that edge against half-hinted limbs and curb-like forms. Set against jolts of teal and coral, the black marks both sever and bind the field, anchoring the composition while asserting the interruptive force that defines this mid-1950s turn toward abstract urban landscapes within Abstract Expressionism.

Common Themes

The modern lens: urban life & speed Mimesis vs. abstraction (truth vs. artifice)Medium reflexivity (art about art)Power & authority Mortality & transience (memento mori)Landscape & place

Artworks Featuring This Symbol

Police Gazette

Willem de Kooning (1955)

Police Gazette converts tabloid scandal into a field of charged marks: acidic yellow grounds, slashed blacks, and jolts of teal and coral collide like headlines in motion. De Kooning’s scraped, reworked surface turns the city’s noise into gesture-as-event, where half-hinted limbs and curb-like edges surface, then dissolve. As a key mid-1950s canvas, it anchors his shift to the so-called abstract urban landscapes within Abstract Expressionism [1][2].