A flashy surrealist, Salvador Dalí invented wildly imaginative, unsettling, and sometimes sensational images. Their shock value attracted a popular audience, while his eccentric behavior and self-dramatizing personality drew additional attention. Among his best-known works, the tiny Persistence of Memory (1931; New York, Museum of Modern Art) remains a widely recognized icon of 20th-century art. Its highly detailed and veristic treatment of melting pocket watches, swarming ants, a limp and fleshy creature (some say its profile resembles Dalí’s), and other disturbing elements suggest instability and decay in a world where nothing conforms to the commonsense laws of nature, where time itself is fluid, and where the Freudian unconscious prevails.
Born in Spanish Catalonia, Dalí trained as an artist in Madrid before heading to Paris in the mid-1920s. There, much taken with the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and Yves Tanguy, he developed an eclectic, personal vision, and in 1929 he was officially accepted into the surrealist group. Within the next decade, he became an international celebrity. Dalí arrived in New York shortly after World War II began, and like fellow émigrés, he helped to release the energies that soon led to the birth of abstract expressionism. In 1948, Dalí returned permanently to Spain. No longer in the forefront of the avant-garde, he nevertheless continued a produce a stream of varied art works, including sculptures, film, graphic works, and theater and fashion designs, as well as some memorable paintings, many on religious themes. In a perspective tour de force, his large, symbolic Crucifixion (1954; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) melds interests in science, Catholic mystery, and Old Master techniques. A heroic, unmutilated Christ, pinioned abstractly to a chunky, floating cross, suggests, even at the moment of his sacrifice, the Resurrection to come. During these later years, Dalí also wrote fiction and autobiography. Frequently a newsmaker, Dalí contributed to the unprecedented postwar fascination with art in general. His example survives even today, especially in some artists’ no-holds-barred lust for publicity and in the commercialized aura that emerged in tandem with pop art.
A leading New York modernist early in his career, painter and draftsman Andrew Dasburg later numbered among the foremost interpreters of the New Mexico landscape. (He also painted still lifes and portraits.) A consummate draftsman and great admirer of Paul Cézanne, Dasburg offered analytical views of the spacious and clean-edged Western environment. Carefully organized to mediate between two- and three-dimensional representation, delicately delineated forms hover between contingency and essential structure. Born in Paris, Dasburg arrived in New York as a small child. Following his training as an artist, in 1909 he decamped for a year in Paris. There he became acquainted with Henri Matisse and other members of the avant-garde. By 1912, Dasburg ranked among New York’s most adventurous artists in devising new forms of abstraction. Drawing on cubism, futurism, and the American form of color abstraction known as synchromism, he produced powerful non-representational images. During this period, he resided mostly in the artists’ colony of Woodstock, New York. Around the time of his first visit to Taos in 1918, he began to move away from his experimental modernism toward greater classical restraint and balance. Although remaining always in tension with abstract form, representation reasserted itself as he worked toward the personal form of expression that absorbed his attention for nearly another 60 years. During the abstract expressionist heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, Dasburg’s deft markings sometimes rivaled that movement’s unconstrained vigor. Following several sojourns in New Mexico during the 1920s, in 1930, Dasburg relocated permanently to Taos.
Scots-born painter and printmaker Alan Davie numbers among the first British artists to respond to abstract expressionism. Always interested in symbolic forms, however, through the 1950s he worked in a manner that also recalls interests of his Cobra counterparts on the Continent. In later work, vigorous brushwork gradually became more restrained, while more clearly drawn allusionistic elements prevailed. When he began spending much of his time on the island of St. Lucia in the early 1970s, he added Caribbean influences to his previous repertoire of personally interpreted mythic and tribal imagery from Africa and Asia. Born in Grangemouth, he trained not far away at the Edinburgh College of Art. Also a musician, as a young man he played with jazz bands, as he did more occasionally in later years. After traveling in Europe and working as a jeweler in London for several years, he turned to painting the energetic abstractions that made his reputation in the 1950s. Among the best-known British artists of that decade and the next, he followed a solitary—but accomplished—path through later years, not responding to subsequent enthusiasms for pop art, minimalism, or postmodern irony, preferring instead to pursue his interest in the Jungian unconscious.
Distinctively American in spirit, Stuart Davis’s bright, jazzy, upbeat abstractions evolved from a sophisticated engagement with cubism and other forms of European modernism. Among the first painters anywhere to incorporate commercial imagery into fine art, he introduced a sensibility that found full expression in pop art decades later. Born in Philadelphia, Davis studied in New York with Ashcan realist Robert Henri. Among the youngest exhibitors in New York’s 1913 Armory Show, Davis responded enthusiastically to this grand display of modern art, but it did not extinguish a lifelong desire to interpret American life. For the next few years, he worked as an illustrator while also experimenting with new ideas. In the early 1920s, cubist collage informed flatly patterned but witty still lifes. Several incorporate imagery and typography from cigarette packages, giving fresh energy to the commonplace as a fit subject for art. Somewhat dissatisfied with his progress as an artist, in the Eggbeater series started in 1927, Davis directed his gaze almost exclusively to an eggbeater, an electric fan, and a rubber glove. These intensely concentrated, analytical works distilled his understanding of abstract form. In 1928, Davis headed to Paris, where, somewhat surprisingly, his art detoured toward more overtly representational cityscapes. Yet, once more, the experience of rethinking his purposes facilitated his progress toward the highly individual mature style that coalesced in the 1930s. Claiming that “I paint the American scene,” he took for his subject the mid-20th-century visual environment: urban, business oriented, fast paced, and matter of fact. In Report from Rockport (1940; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), energetic patterns in brightly contrasting colors suggest a town view. Although many forms serve only to enhance the composition, larger color areas suggest architecture, a road, sky, and sea. Words, numbers, and an ordinary gas pump anchor the work within the contemporary vernacular. This painting also anticipates many more sporting titles as perky as his style: Owh! In San Paõ (1951; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art), Rapt at Rappaports (1952; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), and Colonial Cubism (1954; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center). Esteemed among artists who became abstract expressionists, Davis shared with them ambitious intentions, pursuit of an identifiable signature style, and respect for the flat canvas. Nevertheless, his paintings’ crisp forms and insouciant attitude set him apart. Abstract expressionists’ inquiries into the workings of the unconscious and their existential pursuit of universal values remained quite foreign to his taste. On the other hand, Davis’s achievement resonates with subsequent forms of hard-edge abstraction and with the imagery of pop art. See also .
Few artists remain so closely identified with a single work of art as is Jay De Feo with her monumental painting The Rose (1958–66; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art). However, her career spans a range of accomplishments that belies this narrow reputation. Born in New Hampshire, she grew up mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950 and earned a master’s degree there the following year. After traveling in Europe, she settled in San Francisco in 1953. At this time, she used a wide range of materials to explore various modes of art making while also absorbing contemporary beat culture. Along with her husband, Wally Hedrick (1928–2003) (they were married from 1954 until 1969), she soon numbered among originators of the funk art movement. As she commenced work on The Rose in 1958, she relinquished other goals to concentrate on this enormous starburst composition, piling on paint until the work became as much sculpture as painting. (Bruce Conner documented its creation in a short film.) More than 10 feet high, nearly 8 feet wide, and about 8 inches thick, it weighed a ton and had to be removed by mechanical means through the window of her second-floor studio. Delicate, nearly monochrome coloration and sparkling mica flakes relieve its effect of crusty-surfaced heft. Although she remained in the Bay Area, she then left the city and during the next four years took a break from her art career. Subsequently, she again worked in several media, now also including collage and photography, as well as painting and drawing. Throughout, her work displays great sensitivity to both observed and abstract form, which often seem to interchange seamlessly in mysterious works of imperturbable elegance.
Leading abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning arrived in the United States as a 22-year-old illegal alien. A stowaway on a transatlantic voyage, he disembarked in Newport News, Virginia, then made his way to New Jersey and, about a year later, finally to New York, his destination. There he worked as a commercial artist and handyman to support painting in his spare time. Meanwhile, he became widely acquainted among New York artists and gradually assimilated the lessons of modern art. In 1936, he determined to pursue an art career full time. Yet it was another 12 years before his first New York gallery show opened, just as he was turning 44. The abstract paintings he exhibited at this turning point launched one of the most important art careers of the second half of the 20th century. Yet, despite his prominent position among abstract expressionists, de Kooning never relinquished ties to representation. Figural references particularly, but also landscape elements, continued to enrich his paintings. His oft-cited quote, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented,” suggests how intertwined were his feelings for human tissue and voluptuous oil paint.
Born in Rotterdam, de Kooning left school at 12 to begin an apprenticeship with a decorating and commercial art firm. For the following eight years, he attended evening classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts. Later, he worked at commercial jobs in his hometown, as well as in Brussels and Antwerp. Once domiciled in New York, as he visited galleries and studios, he soon befriended such artists as Stuart Davis, John Graham, David Smith, and, most importantly, Arshile Gorky, who did much to develop de Kooning’s understanding of cubism and surrealism, as well as the work of Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. In the early 1940s, he became integrated into the circle of nascent abstract expressionists, including Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock. De Kooning’s first show, in 1948, introduced the mostly black-and-white abstractions that dominated his work of the mid- to late 1940s. Soon color reemerged. Among his earliest masterworks, Excavation (1950; Art Institute of Chicago) incorporates patches of several hues within a vigorous composition of interlocking, spatially ambiguous, angular and organic forms defined by fast-moving black lines. Along with other impressive works of the time, this painting signaled his full maturity as an abstract expressionist.
No sooner had de Kooning established his position within abstract expressionism than he once again embraced representation, but with controversial consequences. In 1950, he began Woman I (1950–52; New York, Museum of Modern Art), an image that even today retains its shock value. Over life-size, the painting’s widely ranging overtones indicate the artist’s assimilation of visual precedents from Neolithic goddesses through Peter Paul Rubens’s fleshy nudes to movie posters. This conglomeration of flesh and paint, with its wild eyes, snarling mouth, huge breasts, and disfiguring paint surface, recapitulates the long-held concept of woman as both temptress and menace. When Woman I and a series of related works appeared in his 1953 show, de Kooning was attacked from two directions. While some detected a regressive breach of faith with pure abstraction, others expressed outrage at the misogynistic imagery.
De Kooning remained an experimental artist throughout his career. Sometimes fully abstract, sometimes not, his paintings respond visually and emotionally to personal experience. In the mid- to late 1950s, he created a group of large, vigorous abstractions that suggest the energy of modern life. The bright hues and varied brushwork of Gotham News (1955; Buffalo, N.Y., Albright-Knox-Gundlach Art Gallery) recall the architectonics and abrupt transitions of urban life, while also accommodating bodily reminiscences. It also incorporates traces of newsprint, the main medium of mass communication in that period but also a reminder of street trash. (De Kooning sometimes covered his paintings with newspaper overnight—in order to prevent the surface from drying too quickly—then left the resulting imprint when the effect pleased him.)
Around 1960, de Kooning began to withdraw from an increasingly frenetic life as a successful New York artist, and in 1963 he moved permanently to Springs, an East Hampton enclave popular among artists, on Long Island. There he continued another series, begun about two years earlier, devoted to female nudes, and he also responded anew to the open air in landscape-based paintings. His lusciously painted 1960s nudes, sometimes abstracted nearly to the point of dissolution, display a more relaxed tone than those of 10 years earlier. The artist seems to be enjoying himself. The landscapes, too, incorporate a new breadth of feeling in their large-scale expansive forms. From 1969 until the mid-1970s, de Kooning devoted much time to sculpture, casting bronzes of roughly modeled figures. In the 1980s, a new serenity infused abstractions featuring elegant linear traces, often in pastel hues, across mostly light-toned canvases. Critical reaction to these works hesitated to endorse their quality. Because the artist had developed symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, some claimed they were frauds, executed by studio assistants. No doubt he had help with the physical effort required to produce these large paintings. Yet opinion today generally concurs that these sonorous works authentically digest into pure delight a lifetime of painterly experience remaining in his fingertips. Around 1990, he ceased working.
The wide-ranging nature of de Kooning’s form and expression, his melding of abstraction and representation, his command of traditional and modern styles, his fearless embrace of both tastelessness and beauty, and his faultless transmutation of emotion into painterly materiality left younger artists with plenty to think about. His charismatic and articulate personality (and romantic good looks) added a glamorous gloss, while commitment to his craft during years of obscurity inspired those who would be art stars. Arguably the most influential of abstract expressionists, his precedents resonated in succeeding years as other styles replaced abstract expressionism. Somewhat ironically, in 1998, the Rotterdam art school he had attended part time as a teenager rechristened itself the Willem de Kooning Academy. See also ; ; ; ; .
Late in the 1930s, de Kooning became romantically involved with a student, and they married in 1943. Elaine de Kooning (1918–89) subsequently enjoyed a substantial painting career, mainly devoted to expressionistic figurative works. Perhaps even more notably, as an art critic she numbered during the late 1940s and 1950s among the most important interpreters of the new art. Although they separated in 1956, the de Koonings reconciled about 20 years later when she moved to a house in East Hampton not far from his.
Among the most versatile African American artists of his generation, Beauford Delaney, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, received some early training in his hometown before moving in 1923 to Boston to further his studies. There, he first established his unusual knack for moving fluidly between black and white communities. After moving to New York in 1929, he participated in African American activities in Harlem but, attracted by its bohemian society, chose to live in Greenwich Village. During the 1930s Depression years, he specialized in brightly patterned, loosely drawn, spatially compressed scenes of life among the disenfranchised, often as they congregated in parks or other outdoor spaces. Despite a generally laudatory reception for his work, in 1953 Delaney decamped permanently for Paris. There he continued a recent experimental intensification of his expressionist style into pure abstraction. In addition to abstract expressionist works, however, he continued a long-standing interest in portraiture. His many depictions of distinguished Paris acquaintances include his close friend James Baldwin, the writer who later noted of Delaney that he was “the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist.” Mental illness ended his career as an artist around 1970. Painter Joseph Delaney (1904–91), his brother, also grew up in Knoxville. After moving to New York in 1930 to study at the Art Students League, he remained in the city until 1986, when he returned to Knoxville to take up a position as artist-in-residence at the University of Tennessee. He, too, favored vivaciously rendered, though stylistically less sophisticated, populist scenes and portraits. See also .
Among the earliest painters of abstractions, Sonia Delaunay-Terk became particularly well known in later years for her adaptations of abstract form to other media and, ultimately, to all sorts of decorative and utilitarian objects. In this, she contributed during her last two decades to renewed interest among young artists—especially feminists—in extending their art to non-traditional media. Sarah Ilinitchna Stern, born in the Ukrainian area of the Russian Empire, later took the name of Terk from an uncle who brought her up in St. Petersburg. At 18, she began her artistic training in Karlsruhe, Germany. After moving to Paris in 1905, she continued her studies but also became acquainted with recent post-impressionist, fauve, and then cubist work. In 1910, she married French artist Robert Delaunay and soon participated with him in founding orphism, which offered a colorful and abstract variant of cubism. In a highly original book design of 1913, she integrated her abstractions with the text of a Blaise Cendrars poem in an accordion-style format. She also designed bindings and endpapers for several other avant-garde books. During World War I and its aftermath, the Delaunays lived mostly in Spain and Portugal but returned permanently to Paris in 1921. Needing to develop sources of income, she turned to fashion and theater design, incorporating previous experience with abstract color. After her husband died in 1941, Delaunay-Terk continued to supplement her fine art practice by expanding her design repertoire to include fabrics, furniture, tapestries, and wall coverings. As a widow—and one whose interests continued to adapt to the times—she escaped her husband’s shadow and achieved international recognition.
Born near Paris, André Derain trained there as an artist before teaming up with Henri Matisse in 1905 to originate fauvism. During the following three years, he made his name with energetic landscapes and figure studies in bright, often unnaturalistic hues. He then left this mode behind as he joined Pablo Picasso’s circle of artists and writers in the Montmartre area of Paris. Soon, he concentrated on austere, analytical works, mostly still lifes that reflect cubist interests but do not fracture representational forms. Woodcut illustrations for Guillaume Apollinaire’s L’Enchanteur pourrissant (1909) established his standing as a graphic artist with bold, black-and-white designs that suggest connections with German expressionist prints. Among the first European artists to admire African sculpture, he occasionally made direct carvings in stone, and after World War I, he often created ballet and theater sets. In the 1920s, Derain found respect as a leading representative of the return to classical order widespread across Europe and the United States. His later figure studies, still lifes, and landscapes reveal his increasing respect for Paul Cézanne’s concentrated attention, although his broad acquaintance with the history of painting also remains apparent. No longer an avant-gardist after World War II, he nevertheless remained admired among many artists for his serious dedication to reinterpreting the history of European painting in terms that accommodated a modern outlook.
The principal figure in the 1950s Bay Area figurative movement, Richard Diebenkorn turned in the mid-1960s to a painterly form of geometricized abstraction unparalleled in American art of that time. Mostly belonging to his Ocean Park series of more than 140 works, these later paintings, characteristically playing off blues against warm tones, suggest expanses of sea, sky, and beach, perhaps as observed through an architectural framework. Much indebted to the work of Henri Matisse in both their structural configurations and masterful deployment of hue, they capture a sun-drenched Southern California atmosphere of warmth and pleasure.
Born in Portland, Oregon, Diebenkorn grew up in San Francisco. In 1940, he entered Stanford University but left to enlist as an officer in the U.S. Marines. While stationed in Virginia, he often visited the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. There he perused its discerning collection of European and American modern art, finding Matisse’s work particularly rewarding. Discharged in 1945, he returned to San Francisco to study and then teach at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) with David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and visiting New Yorkers Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. His early work reveals an admiration for the work of Edward Hopper, but by the end of the 1940s, he specialized in large abstract expressionist works. After completing his degree at Stanford in 1949, the following year he relocated to Albuquerque, where he earned a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico in 1952. Subsequently, he lived briefly in New York before settling in Berkeley in 1953. Soon, along with Park and Bischoff, he adapted his gestural brushwork to figures, still lifes, and landscapes. An appointment in 1966 to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles, proved a turning point in his artistic development. Before long, with his studio in the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica, near the Pacific, he abandoned representation altogether. His classically ordered new work featured flat planes of sonorous, subtly modulated hues, their sensuous appeal suggesting something of the relaxed and hedonistic lifestyle associated with the Los Angeles area. These works also connect to aspects of color field painting popular in New York at the time. Already in failing health that slowed his ability to work, in 1988 Diebenkorn returned permanently to Northern California and died in Berkeley. A superb draftsman as well as colorist, he also produced a large body of prints in several media.
Abstract artist Burgoyne Diller numbered among few Americans whose work provides continuity between European pre–World War II constructivist and neo-plastic tendencies and postwar American hard-edge and minimal art. In addition, as a federal art project administrator, he played an instrumental role in finding public mural commissions for other abstract artists during the difficult years of the late 1930s. Ilya Bolotowsky, Stuart Davis, and Arshile Gorky, among others, benefited from his efforts. Born in New York, Diller grew up in Michigan and attended Michigan State University before moving to New York to train as an artist. His teachers included Hans Hofmann and Jan Matulka. Before long, he had begun to devote his full attention to abstraction, soon becoming particularly attracted to the work of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. Perhaps the first American to admire such art, by the mid-1930s he had adopted a purely geometric formal vocabulary, usually executed in bright, primary hues. Some of Diller’s most original and dynamic compositions date to the mid-1930s, when he participated in founding the American Abstract Artists. Later, he often deployed a particularly austere strategy featuring individually separated rectangles held in tension against single-hued backgrounds. He also translated his method into a number of sculptures.
Among the most accomplished and influential American sculptors of his generation, Mark di Suvero pioneered the construction of monumental assemblages, often featuring non-art materials favored by junk artists. For the early works that made his reputation, he generally chose to work with timbers, barrels, chains, tires, and other industrial or cast-off materials. In the mid-1960s, he turned more often to durable metal components, whether found or fabricated. His dramatic works often feature intricately balanced elements, which frequently jut into space independently, suspended by means not always immediately apparent. The open quality of most of his works borders on the methods of installation art. Viewers can often walk under or through them. Many works include kinetic components, as parts may swing or rotate. A leader in challenging the structural logic of constructivist as well as traditional sculpture, di Suvero offered subsequent sculptors new avenues of approach to their craft and its meanings.
Born in Shanghai to Italian parents (who, perhaps with some foresight, christened him Marco Polo), di Suvero moved with his family to San Francisco in 1941. After earning a BA in philosophy in 1956 at the University of California, Berkeley, he moved to New York. To support his interest in sculpture, he worked in construction—a choice appropriate to the sensibility that found fruition in the muscular sculpture he first devised in 1959. Badly injured in a 1960 workplace accident and told he would never walk again, he nevertheless persevered, even learning welding during his two years in a wheelchair. Not yet completely recovered, in 1963 he began to design work on an enormous scale, soon becoming the first artist to use a construction crane in pursuit of esthetic ends. Rooted in abstract expressionism, his gestural expressionism recalls particularly Franz Kline’s off-balance forcefulness. David Smith’s sculpture provided important precedents in manipulating three dimensions. Di Suvero has painted much of his metal sculpture in bright colors that recall Alexander Calder’s similar practice of giving monumental sculptural form a distinctive unity within urban or pastoral settings. Although he also continues to work on a smaller scale suitable for indoor display, scores of his works enhance outdoor locations across the country and abroad, giving his art, as he intended, a role in public life. Since 1975, di Suvero has maintained a studio in Petaluma, California, and, since 1980, another in Queens. An unusually public-spirited artist committed to peace and social justice, di Suvero designed for Los Angeles the 1966 Peace Tower, a 59-foot construction that displayed nearly 400 works by artists who opposed the Vietnam War. In the early 1970s, in further protest against U.S. military policy, he lived abroad in self-imposed exile. In France, he established a river barge studio that he maintained through the 1980s. Later, he established a foundation to assist other artists, and in 1986, he transformed a trash-strewn lot along the East River, adjacent to his studio, into the open-air Socrates Sculpture Park.
American painter Lois Dodd paints intimate glimpses of her world. The subjects tell no stories, but in their tender, slightly generalized, deliberate renderings, they validate the importance of personal relationships with what lies close at hand. Mostly rather thinly painted and generally modestly scaled, her emotionally responsive but unsentimental paintings do not dramatize. Carefully composed abstract structures provide a classical tranquility to what are often spatially complex configurations. If deceptively old fashioned, her paintings nevertheless reflect a contemporary sensibility in their attention to form and pursuit of an authentic, independent vision. An admirer of Paul Cézanne, Edward Hopper, Piet Mondrian, and 19th-century American landscapists, Dodd alternates between urban images that reflect her life in New York and more pastoral observations drawn from rural Maine, where she has summered regularly for more than 60 years, or from the vicinity of her Delaware River Valley retreat in Blairstown, New Jersey. In either case, a domestic tone of home and garden prevails. Outdoor views generally treat meadows or woodland interiors. People rarely appear. Born in New Jersey, Dodd graduated in 1948 from Cooper Union.
Scots-born painter Peter Doig numbers among the most purely visual artists of the early 21st century. Little interested in conceptualism and virtually untouched by irony, his commanding, large-scale landscapes adhere to modernist precepts, with richly worked surfaces ratifying the flatness of the picture plane. Demonstrating an abiding concern with man’s relationship to the environment, the scenes often include figures or evidence of human presence (such as houses or canoes). Offering a lush romanticism that nevertheless avoids sentimentality, these works’ attention to painterly values distances emotion and suggests the inaccessibility of entering fully into the beauty Doig locates in nature. Born in Edinburgh, he lived as a small child in Trinidad but spent his school years in Canada. In 1979, he moved to London to earn a degree at St. Martin’s School of Art (now Central St. Martin’s). He lived Canada for a few years in the mid-1980s, but it was only after returning to London (where he earned an MA at the Chelsea School of Art in 1990) that he abandoned a pop art orientation to urban subjects and turned instead to landscape, continuing the lineage of such admired painters as Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri Matisse. He moved permanently to Trinidad in 2002.
A principal participant in the Harlem Renaissance, sometimes identified as “the father of African American art,” painter Aaron Douglas spearheaded the movement to express racial pride through overtly African American subjects. Following Alain Locke’s lead, he encouraged artists to represent their African heritage in the up-to-date language of Euro-American modernism. Born in Topeka, Kansas, Douglas earned a BFA from the University of Nebraska in 1922 and a BA from the University of Kansas the following year. Upon his arrival in New York in 1924, he quickly befriended Locke and other figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Soon, he became the movement’s most important graphic artist. In addition to African American periodicals, he illustrated numerous books by important writers, including Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay, as well as Locke’s seminal volume, The New Negro (1927). Douglas interpreted African American themes with a richly patterned, flat style that resonates not only with African, Egyptian, ancient Greek, and cubist precedents but also with the art deco sensibility of the period. During the 1930s, Douglas turned his attention principally to mural painting. A year in Paris at the outset of the decade enriched his approach to art, while a subsequent engagement with leftist politics spurred his understanding of the African American situation in terms of class. For murals, he developed a fluid but jazzy style using a limited palette to describe silhouetted figures, often in motion. Intersecting planes of color cut across representational elements to unify compositions with circular rhythms, while also suggesting a mythic, even spiritual mood. His best-known mural cycle, the four-part Aspects of Negro Life (1934) installed in the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture (a branch of the New York Public Library), offers an ambitious consideration of the African American people, from their origins in Africa to their contemporary position within the industrialized present. Douglas’s easel paintings—mostly portraits, scenes of African American life, and landscapes—generally follow a less stylized and more straightforwardly realistic approach. From 1940 until his retirement in 1966, he was involved with Nashville’s Fiske University, where he organized the art department while earning his master’s degree from Columbia University in 1944 and then served as department head. See also .
The first American artist to exhibit abstract work, in a 1912 one-person show at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, Arthur Garfield Dove remained among the most adventurous artists of his generation and the only one to work abstractly—albeit on an intermittent basis—from that period into the abstract expressionist era. Mostly during the mid-1920s, he also created virtually unprecedented assemblages. In the later 1920s and the 1930s, he adapted a surrealist sensibility to works that mediate between natural and abstract forms. As the 1940s opened, Dove returned with renewed vigor to pure abstraction. Although relatively small, his works of these years often parallel nascent abstract expressionist experiments with biomorphic form, while others, more geometric, seem prescient of 1960s color field paintings. Such younger painters as Theodoros Stamos admired Dove’s work, but he did not live long enough to engage in meaningful dialogue with the artists who emerged in the immediate post–World War II era.
Born in upstate New York, Dove graduated from Cornell University in 1903. After working as an illustrator in New York for about five years, he departed for France. During his year abroad, he admired the work of Henri Matisse and other fauve painters. Subsequently, he preferred to live in rural surroundings, in touch with nature’s inspiration. At the same time, his advanced art had little market value, and he disdained the magazine illustration that might have earned him a comfortable living. Instead, he endured difficult and often penurious conditions. After trying farming in Connecticut and life aboard a sailboat on Long Island Sound, he lived rent free as the caretaker at an unpretentious Long Island yacht club. In 1933, he returned to his hometown of Geneva, hoping to ride out the Depression by managing inherited family properties. Finally, as financial conditions improved and his work began to sell, in 1938 he moved permanently to a tiny waterfront house in Centerport on Long Island. His wife, Helen Torr (1886–1967), was also a talented artist who pursued an approach similar to Dove’s, but usually with greater attention to representation. However, her output remained too small to sustain a major reputation. During their hardscrabble years together, the tasks of ordinary life limited her time, and she tended to put his career first. Although she outlived Dove by more than two decades, without his encouragement she abandoned her art.
The most influential French artist of the immediate post–World War II period, Jean Dubuffet legitimized for high art the evocative powers of materials and the expressive powers of tastelessness. From the mid-1940s, his raw and powerful faux-naif work introduced a tone of raw experience embedded in images that did away with stylistic niceties. Much of his work from the late 1940s and 1950s remains shocking even today. Nevertheless, at heart an intellectual and an ironist, Dubuffet proceeded into this territory with clear-eyed if disruptive intent. His somewhat dadaist project proceeded into a world stunned and devastated by war and unsure of its values, or even the source of them.
Born in Le Havre, he studied art in Paris for only a few months but developed a wide interest in the arts and in languages. While working as a businessman, he painted intermittently but did not devote himself completely to art until 1942, when he was nearly 40. He then embarked on graffiti-like paintings that drew on Paul Klee’s innocent-eyed example, but Dubuffet employed a much less polished technique. Celebrating the commonplace, his calculatedly naive stick figures inhabit situations of everyday life, sometimes with startling effect. In the diagrammatic and graphic Childbirth (1944; New York, Museum of Modern Art), a nude woman and her newborn lie exposed on a hospital bed, flanked by a man and a woman in street clothes; they look as stunned as Dubuffet’s original audience must have been. After seeing Jean Fautrier’s 1945 Paris exhibition of heavily encrusted, nearly abstract Hostages, Dubuffet began to employ not only thickened oil paint but also sand or other non-art materials, creating works that emphasize the reality of material itself. Around the same time, he took up the study of art brut (raw art), as he called it, work of the sort now usually known as outsider art in English. In the art of untrained “primitives,” the mentally ill, and others estranged from normal social relations—“people uncontaminated by artistic culture,” as he put it—he identified an authenticity missing in more knowledgeable work. As this work influenced his own, he began amassing what eventually became an enormous personal collection. In the late 1940s, extended visits to the Sahara further deepened Dubuffet’s fascination with direct and unmediated human experience as an indicator of the essential unity of man and nature. The esthetic possibilities of humble materials, such as the sand beneath his feet, soon found their way into his art.
In the 1950s, Dubuffet’s paintings (and a group of collages) moved toward greater abstraction, as materiality became its own subject, signaling an existential preoccupation with the evanescence of life. During the early 1960s, he reoriented his work toward large-scale paintings, along with painted sculptures constructed of flat planes. Interlocking, black-outlined patterns predominate. Striped shapes play in visual counterpoint against unadorned ones. Often completely abstract, at other times the patterns coalesce into figures. Generally limited to primary colors, along with black and white, these jazzy works, known as the Hourloupe series (1962–74), signal a continuing interest in what the artist called an “undifferentiated universe.” However, they no longer offer a subversive vision. From the mid-1970s onward, the works became more variously colored, sometimes amalgamating art brut imagery within their abstract patterns. As he moved from rebel to international art star, Dubuffet’s career illustrates as clearly as any the potential for the artist of the late 20th century to be absorbed into the market. Yet his personal courage and anti-esthetic rummaging resonated strongly throughout subsequent interests in assemblage, junk art, pop art, and beyond. See also ; .
French-born painter, sculptor, and gadfly Marcel Duchamp provoked artists across Europe and North America to examine the nature of art and its relationship to life. Although he created a handful of the 20th century’s iconic art works, the ideas they incorporated proved more influential. Because Duchamp lived for long periods of time in New York, he stimulated much interest there. Duchamp most strongly affected the art of his time during two separate periods, the first during the 1910s and the second several decades later. He made his name during New York’s 1913 Armory Show of international modern art, where he exhibited one of the century’s best-known works, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912; Philadelphia Museum of Art). Outrage and hilarity ensued, especially in the popular press, but the painting remains an emblem of early modern intentions. After his arrival in person in New York in 1915, he spurred the development of a dada movement. When he tried to exhibit as sculpture Fountain (1917; original lost; several later replicas), an ordinary porcelain urinal, upended and “signed” R. Mutt, the show’s organizers declined to agree that it was “art,” thus precipitating a hullabaloo that only brought the work broader attention. A second period of influence crested in the 1960s and 1970s, when artists seized on his example in turning to conceptualism, minimalism, and pop art. Aspects of his work continue to reverberate in postmodernism.
A Normandy native, as a young man he became acquainted with avant-garde artists in Paris and, after experimenting with various post-impressionist styles, adopted a cubist technique around 1911. In Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and similar works, by showing successive moments in the motion of a fragmented figure, Duchamp made literal the cubist premise of simultaneity. Despite success as a painter, he soon almost entirely abandoned easel painting, and “retinal” art in general—although he retained an interest in optics—to pursue projects intended to appeal to the mind. In New York, he turned his attention largely to absurdist dada gestures, most notably in a series of only slightly altered found objects. (Fountain remains the best known.) The “readymade” as an esthetic category was born. At the same time, he continued the laborious effort involved in putting together La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), also known as The Large Glass (1915–23; Philadelphia Museum of Art). Following a complex—in fact, almost inscrutable—iconographic program, this work turns its human content, an erotic encounter, into mechanical forms applied in earthy tones to two large panes of glass framed one above the other. (The total height measures nearly seven feet.) When damaged during transport in the mid-1920s, the artist made repairs but announced that the cracks in the glass now were to be preserved as an integral feature of the work of art.
For decades, it was believed that The Large Glass represented Duchamp’s last major work of art. Living mostly in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, he remained peripherally involved with the art world, giving advice, designing exhibitions, and unofficially collaborating with surrealists, but he claimed that playing chess was his only true interest. He relocated to New York in 1942. Toward the end of the 1950s, Duchamp’s example sparked new interest, as adventurous young artists including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg saw in his approach alternatives to recent abstract expressionism and color field painting. After Duchamp’s death during a visit to France, nearly everyone was surprised to learn that he had snatched the last word by working in his Greenwich Village studio for some 20 years on the mixed-media assemblage Étants donnés (1946–66; Philadelphia Museum of Art). (Its French title means “given,” as in a mathematical proposition.) A richly visual tableau—perhaps the artist’s most “retinal” work—it features a female nude holding aloft a gas lamp as she provocatively splays her body in a lush landscape that includes a shimmering, distant waterfall. Designed to be viewed only through peepholes in an antique wooden door, it once again perplexes. Johns, who should know, described it as “the strangest work of art in any museum.” See also ; ; ; .