Also known as land art, earth art flourished primarily in the United States as certain artists, mostly trained as sculptors, sought alternatives to traditional studio-based practice during the 1960s. These artists spurned the increasingly popular practice of placing finished works in gardens or less formal natural settings, choosing instead to rework the earth itself. Those at the heart of the movement worked on a vast scale, literally “sculpting” the earth into forms that provoked an esthetic response. The drive to rethink the purposes and conditions of their art aligns earth artists with a general tendency of the period internationally. Responding to minimalism’s emphasis on simple, unified, geometric forms, these projects also reflect conceptual art’s preference for preconceived results. The widespread 1960s embrace of the natural world also fed into the movement, although its most heroic monuments depended for realization on heavy-duty construction techniques; critical observers noted that such earthworks disregarded the natural environment in a quest to impose a human imprint. Interest in newly discovered or previously little-known, large-scale prehistoric achievements, such as Peru’s Nazca Lines or the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, also inspired some of the artists. Because earthworks demanded large tracts of empty land for their realization, most are situated in remote locations. Relatively few observers could therefore experience them at first hand, and many of these projects remain known primarily through photographs and other documents suitable for gallery display. Earth art first appeared as a distinct tendency in a 1968 New York gallery show, followed the next year by “Earth Art” at Cornell University’s Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art. By the mid-1970s, interest in the movement had begun to wane.
Two very different visionaries, Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer (1944–), spurred the development of earth art. Over the four decades since Smithson’s early death, Heizer has maintained a singular obsession with an esthetic of awe. Born in Berkeley, California, the son of an archeologist, he comes from a family of Western geologists and miners. Today a curmudgeonly loner in the image of American cowboys, he never graduated from high school but took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute before moving to New York in 1966. Even before leaving minimal painting and sculpture behind, in the late 1960s he returned to the West and embarked on a series of landscape interventions. He gained widespread recognition for the dramatic Double Negative (1969–71; site later acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) located in the Nevada desert. By removing 240,000 tons of rock, he defined two trenches, each 50 feet deep and 30 feet wide, separated by an impassable natural chasm. In the same area, in 1972 he embarked on a colossal project, The City, which has absorbed most of his attention since the 1990s. Built for the ages, its abstract composition of low-slung geometric shapes, extending more than a mile, resonates with the scale and ambition of ancient sites such as Mexico’s Teotihuacan. Its concrete forms, along with those bulldozed from the earth, blend with the grand, open-sky site, creating a paean to mankind’s place in the world. “Art by its nature is spiritual,” the artist notes. Among other notable accomplishments, Effigy Tumuli (1983–85), overlooking the Illinois River, delineates abstracted animals—frog, snake, turtle, catfish, and insect—indigenous to the locale. By introducing rough-hewn rocks of imposing heft into urban sites, Heizer has also created powerful public sculptures, such as Levitating Mass installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2012. More recently, reprising forms from 1960s–1970s paintings, he has fabricated huge steel sculptures, sinuous slabs coated with sleek black or white polyurethane, to carry his themes back to the gallery.
Although he also contributed importantly to minimalism and conceptualism, Walter De Maria (1935–2013) achieved his most distinctive reputation with pieces related to earth art. Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where David Park numbered among his teachers. A year after completing his MFA in 1959, he moved to New York. Soon his work anticipated earth art in drawings and in plans for happenings. For his first realized earth art work, Mile Long Drawing (1968), he inscribed two parallel chalk lines across the flat Mojave Desert. His three best-known works date to 1977. For the slyly paradoxical New York Earth Room (Dia Foundation) in SoHo, he repeated a format he had undertaken in 1968 in Munich, filling a spacious loft with 22 inches of dirt to create an anomalous indoor earthwork. Vertical Earth Kilometer (Friedrichsplatz Park, Kassel, Germany) consists of a brass rod driven into the earth, leaving only its top flush with the ground. His single best-known piece, The Lightning Field, offers a grid of 400 upright stainless steel poles carefully calibrated to reach exactly the same height and spaced 220 feet apart. Although lightning only rarely plays its part, the regularity of the arrangement covering an area of one mile by one kilometer articulates and orders the barren New Mexico landscape.
Also hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area, Dennis Oppenheim (1938–2011) moved to New York in 1966 after graduating from Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) and earning an MFA at Stanford University. In the late 1960s, he first made his mark with conceptually based earth art, such as rings inscribed in snow or patterns cut in wheat fields. Soon he also engaged in practices related to body art. For Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970), he had himself photographed while lying in the burning sun with an open book on his chest and then after the book was removed. Subsequently, he followed wide-ranging impulses to create works in numerous media, including sculpture, photography, video, installation, and performance, but generally maintaining a conceptual basis not infrequently leavened with humor. In the early 1980s, Oppenheim was married to Alice Aycock (1946–), who had also opened her career, in the early 1970s, with work related to earth art. A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she graduated in 1968 from Douglass College of Rutgers University and earned a master’s degree three years later at the City University of New York, where Robert Morris figured as her principal teacher. Her early works, sited in and on the land, often were so integrated with specific environments that they have been degraded or destroyed as the result of natural forces, suggesting an affinity with process art. Since the late 1970s, she has specialized in more permanent, usually site-specific sculptures, many in public places. At first based loosely on architectural forms, they evolved into fanciful machines reflecting competing interests in rationality and mysticism. Industrial materials provide a counterweight to the barely controlled energy of exuberant forms.
Several other women chose to take earth art toward reconciliation with nature in works quite different in spirit from the domineering, even alienating masculinity of the movement’s principal figures. Often their work intersects with landscape design to provide settings for human activities. They include Patricia Johanson (1940–), Mary Miss (1944–), Jody Pinto (1942–), and Elyn Zimmerman (1945–). Other Americans who contributed to earth art include Charles Ross (1937–) and Alan Sonfist (1946–). Although James Turrell did not participate in the original wave of earth art, his unparalleled, ongoing Roden Crater project exemplifies the continuing power of the impulse.
Outside the United States, only British artists—inescapably steeped in their country’s Romantic landscape tradition—responded with much enthusiasm to earth art. Richard Long’s interest in walking as a conceptual basis for his art echoes in the approach of Hamish Fulton (1946–), whose perambulations result in more emotionally resonant documentations, paintings, and writings. Andy Goldsworthy (1956–) uses durable rocks, bones, and other substances for permanent sculptures and installations. He also works with ephemeral materials, such as flowers, moss, and pinecones, to create works that generally must rely on his photographs for their continued existence. See also .
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, New York’s East Village (that is, the area east of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village) hosted a short-lived but intense burst of creative activity allied with hip-hop music and club culture. Sometimes referred to as punk art or new wave art, it championed untrammeled expression over any particular style. Disrespectful of taste, bourgeois conventions, and the anti-commercial pieties of recent art, and disillusioned with much of the world as young people found it, East Village art engaged youthful energies in confrontational, even anarchic activities. Skill and originality counted little. Like the overlapping neo-expressionist movement, East Village art sought also to inject renewed vitality into art. In a distinctive aspect of the East Village’s communal scene, numerous artist-run commercial galleries sprang up to offer enthusiastic support. A collective effort, the 1980 “Times Square Show” introduced the movement to the larger art community.
Poet, art critic, and painter Rene Ricard (1946–2014) proved instrumental in defending the aims and expressive value of art associated with the East Village phenomenon, particularly graffiti art. “The Radiant Child,” a seminal 1981 essay published in Artforum, not only defined but also exemplified the East Village ethos. While reflecting its energy and ambition, Ricard’s ecstatic prose in praise of innocence, aspiration, and individuality drew attention particularly to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, soon recognized as the tendency’s leading artist.
Ricard also praised the work of Keith Haring (1958–90), whose signature logo, the cartoonish outline of a crawling baby, inspired the radiant child of Ricard’s essay. A Pennsylvania native, Haring briefly studied commercial art in Pittsburgh before moving to New York in 1978 to continue his studies at the School of Visual Arts, where Joseph Kosuth numbered among his teachers. Inspired by the graffiti he encountered, but also responding to conceptual art’s emphasis on ideas, he drew in chalk on blank advertising spaces in subway stations, introducing a personal system of graphic signs. His distinctive, easily legible approach—soon translated into paintings, prints, and sculptures—featured lively outline figures set in pulsating compositions. Filled with energy, they not only speak of life’s vitality but also confront issues such as war, sexuality, and death. In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with AIDS. Faced with imminent mortality, he forthrightly addressed illness, homosexuality, and injustice with renewed energy. Exemplifying the East Village’s nonchalant attitude toward commerce but also dedicated to producing art for the public, in 1986 Haring opened a pop shop that carried merchandise featuring his distinctive designs. The items he sold—such as T-shirts, mugs, toys, and posters—carried relatively modest prices and so remained within reach of his peers and middle-class admirers. As Haring pointed out, he could undoubtedly have earned more money by limiting his output and selling it at exorbitant prices to wealthy collectors instead of serving democratic intentions. Similarly, in his last years, reinforcing a commitment to socially available art, he accepted numerous commissions for public murals and sculptures.
Haring’s friend Kenny Scharf (1958–) evolved a very different personal style from his experience with graffiti art. Born in Los Angeles, he too studied at the School of Visual Arts, where he earned a BFA in 1980. During the following decade, he received considerable attention for paintings that mix aspects of graffiti art, the children’s television cartoons that meant so much to his early years, and the surrealism of such predecessors as Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró. These large, zany works crowded with imagery floating in space offer a distinctive nightmarish silliness.
Many others allied with East Village art followed interests other than graffiti art. Iconoclastic painter, photographer, filmmaker, and performance artist David Wojnarowicz (1954–92), a New Jersey native who grew up largely on the streets of New York, remains particularly associated with issues of gay culture and the AIDS epidemic. Rooted in a surrealistic phantasmagoria of images, his work ranges widely in style and media. In 1987, upon the death of his lover Peter Hujar—a black-and-white photographer remembered particularly for portraits of cultural luminaries of his acquaintance, such as Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, Paul Thek, and Kiki Smith—Wojnarowicz memorialized the event with affecting photographs and a video of Hujar’s body. Less than five years later, he too died of AIDS.
Tim Rollins (1955–), born in Maine and trained in New York at the School of Visual Arts and New York University, developed a highly distinctive practice in cooperation with teenagers. In 1979, Rollins numbered among founders of Group Material, an idealistic experimental workshop that—like the somewhat similar Colab (short for Collaborative Projects), also active in the East Village—dedicated its efforts to communal projects addressing social themes. While also teaching at-risk high school students in the South Bronx in the early 1980s, Rollins founded the Art and Knowledge Workshop, an extra-curricular endeavor at a community center. To spur their intellectual development, he introduced important literary and historical texts to a small group of students who worked together as Kids of Survival. They then collaboratively painted on mounted pages cut from books to create dynamic interpretive works. While sources have ranged widely, the best known relate to works by demanding writers, including Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and Shakespeare. Additional East Village art participants specialized in commodity art, neo-geo, or other means of riling establishment taste.
Along with such contemporaries as Mark di Suvero and Anthony Caro, African American Melvin Edwards contributes to the heritage of David Smith. But his welded abstract forms often delve into black experience, exemplifying the continuing power of Alain Locke’s admonition to attend to racial identity within contemporary expression. Edwards is best known for the Lynch Fragments series, ongoing since 1963, during the civil rights movement. Incorporating mementoes of black history, such as chains, locks, railroad spikes, hooks, and hammers, these relatively small, wall-mounted works speak with anger but fortitude to the history of his people’s struggles. Born in Houston, Edwards earned a BFA from the University of Southern California in 1965. While some of his sculptures function as abstract compositions, many projects more generally confront issues of violence, labor exploitation, and injustice. His permanent materials, grandly scaled forms, forceful combinations of simple shapes, and evocative subjects have, since the 1960s, drawn numerous commissions for public works of art. Widely traveled, particularly in Third World countries, since the early 1970s, he has maintained close ties with West Africa during frequent visits to work and teach. Edwards also has been active as a printmaker. See also .
A group of painters, sculptors, and critics active in Madrid between 1957 and 1960, El Paso aimed to engage the most important international currents of the time. Reflecting aspects of abstract expressionism and art autre, members strove for free forms of personal expression. Like their Catalan counterpart Antoni Tàpies, they generally favored abstracted form and material richness. The group’s most prominent participant, Madrid native Luis Feito (1929–) became acquainted with modern and contemporary trends during an extended visit to Paris in the mid-1950s. Expansive fields of amorphous forms later gave way to more defined, even geometrical shapes arrayed against monochrome backgrounds. He returned often to Paris and in 1983 moved to New York. Born in the Canary Islands and mostly self-taught as a painter, Manolo Millares (1926–72) moved permanently to Madrid in the mid-1950s. By then, his early surrealism had evolved into an abstract approach that emphasized physical substance, as he sometimes incorporated burlap or other found materials into his surfaces. Also self-taught and originally interested in surrealism, painter and printmaker Antonio Saura (1930–98) was born in Huesca but worked principally in Madrid until 1967, when he settled permanently in Paris. A mid-1950s sojourn there had stimulated his forceful style, often incorporating abstracted figuration executed in restricted hues. Many works express violent opposition to social injustice and his sympathy for human suffering. The group’s most noted sculptor, Pablo Serrano (1908–85), born in a village in northeastern Spain, studied in Barcelona. During some 15 years in Argentina and Uruguay, he came to know such artists as Joaquín Torres-García and Lucio Fontana. In 1955, he moved permanently to Madrid. His expressionistic approach embraced both abstraction and figuration. His work moved toward greater simplicity and formal refinement in the 1970s.
American-born British sculptor Jacob Epstein contributed in the early years of the 20th century to the ferment of early modernism. He remains widely acknowledged as the leading pioneer of modern British sculpture. He brought to his work an expressionist intensity; an early appreciation for the forms of ancient, non-Western, and tribal precedents; and a willingness to break with accepted esthetic and sexual norms. Always a controversial figure in the English context, he nevertheless solidified a reputation as a major artist, much respected after World War II and knighted in 1954. Born in New York, he began his training there before going abroad in 1902. He continued his studies in Paris, where he developed an appreciation for non-Western sculptural traditions, as well as for the work of Paul Gauguin and Auguste Rodin. In 1905, he settled permanently in England. During a visit to Paris in 1912, he met Constantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and other leaders of the avant-garde, while also becoming familiar with the African tribal art that soon affected the further development of his style. During a subsequent association with the short-lived vorticist movement in England, he produced what remains among his best-known works, although not a characteristic one. In its combination of a distorted figure with an actual pneumatic drill, The Rock Drill (original destroyed) has been variously interpreted as either positive or menacing in its reference to the machine age. Throughout his career, he practiced two concurrent modes: blocky monuments energetically carved from stone and more numerous bronzes, notably psychologically penetrating portraits that extend Rodin’s impressionistic approach to form. During Epstein’s final 15 years, although his work sometimes still met with public censure, he was sufficiently well regarded to be awarded important commissions that often continued a favored theme of his work, heroic struggle in the face of adversity. The bronze St. Michael and the Devil (1956–58), mounted on the facade of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, numbers among the best known.
American abstract expressionist Jimmy Ernst was born Hans-Ulrich Ernst in Cologne. As the only child of Max Ernst, even as a child he met leading European surrealists. He never pursued formal art training but worked as a typographer and printer in Hamburg before decamping to New York in 1938. As he took up art making, he became acquainted with other young artists then experimenting with surrealism but later known as abstract expressionists, including William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, and Robert Motherwell, as well as émigré Roberto Matta. His range of acquaintances further expanded after his father arrived in 1941 with Peggy Guggenheim, whose gallery the younger Ernst managed for a time. His freely conceived early paintings featured dreamlike, biomorphic forms, but during the 1950s he developed a more controlled individual style based on flat, patterned elements, often suggesting signs or symbols constrained within web-like fields. In his final years, inspired by the Florida landscape, he painted radiantly colored, slightly abstracted marsh landscapes known as the Sea of Grass series. See also ; .
An innovative painter, sculptor, collage artist, and printmaker, German-born Maximilian Ernst participated in the European dada and surrealist movements before World War II. In New York during the 1940s, he numbered among émigrés who strongly affected progressive American artists, especially abstract expressionists, with his example of visionary imagery and use of experimental techniques and materials. Although most of his work employs pictorial elements, some of it is abstract.
As a young man, Ernst studied at the University of Bonn for two years before embarking on a career as an artist. He had no formal training but found encouragement from German expressionist August Macke, while also becoming familiar with post-impressionism, as well as the work of Pablo Picasso, Italian futurists, and other modernists. In 1914, he formed an enduring friendship with Hans Arp but months later was conscripted into four years of World War I military service. Disillusioned—along with most of his generation—by the war, in 1919, together with Arp and others, Ernst participated in the nihilistic activities of a Cologne dada group bent on challenging all forms of authority and tradition. In that year, Ernst also began making highly original collages assembled from Victorian-era magazine illustrations. In 1922, Ernst moved to Paris and soon created paintings that anticipated surrealism in their bizarre juxtapositions of real and imagined elements. The enigmatically titled Two Children Are Menaced by a Nightingale (1924; New York, Museum of Modern Art) plays havoc with commonsense notions of both lived experience and artistic tradition. A red, wooden gate affixed to the surface of the work opens onto a dreamlike landscape of painted and three-dimensional elements. Two figures try to flee from unknown dangers. After linking up with André Breton’s surrealist group, Ernest responded to the movement’s emphasis on automatism as a mechanism for engaging the unconscious. He soon invented a technique known as frottage (rubbing), which encourages discovery of chance effects as the artist rubs a pencil (or other drawing medium) across paper placed on a textured surface. During the 1930s, much of his work took on an ominous tone in response to a mounting sense of political crisis throughout Europe. Interned as an enemy alien at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Ernst eventually managed to flee the country, deserting, as he did so, his romantic partner since 1937, British surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011). (Later also finding wartime refuge in the New World, she subsequently lived mostly in Mexico.) In the company of Peggy Guggenheim, Ernst arrived in New York in 1941, and they married soon after. Ernst’s grim view of a world in crisis found startling expression in the enigmatic Europe after the Rain (1940–42; Hartford, Connecticut, Wadsworth Atheneum). In this large post-apocalyptic landscape, a number of helpless figures wander among forbidding geology and decaying vegetal forms. Following a divorce, in 1946 he married Dorothea Tanning. Subsequently, while living mostly in the rocky Arizona desert, he encountered a landscape that seemingly offered a naturally surrealistic environment—or what Tanning described as “a landscape of wild fantasy.” There, among other endeavors, Ernst produced geometric abstractions and sculptures indebted to tribal and other “primitive” precedents. After he returned permanently to France in 1957, his international reputation only grew, even as he preferred generally to work in relative isolation while refining and extending his wide-ranging creativity. Painter Jimmy Ernst was his son. See also .
Idiosyncratic American painter and printmaker Philip Evergood spent his early childhood in New York, where he was born, but between 1909 and 1921, he was educated in England, mainly at the Eton preparatory school and at Cambridge University. During the following two years, he trained as an artist in London. Subsequently, he continued his art studies in New York and in Paris. Settling in New York in 1931, he embarked on a personal variant of the social realism popular during that period. Combining a passion for social justice with a taste for the bizarre recalling aspects of surrealism, he experimented with imagery that often incorporated the influences of such past kindred spirits as Pieter Brueghel, Francisco Goya, and Honoré Daumier. Unnaturally distorted forms often lent an expressionistic tone. Shortly after World War II, Evergood moved to Long Island and then, permanently, to Connecticut. His commitment to social criticism became less prominent as his mood took an introspective turn. Although sometimes satirical, his work appeared more complex and serious, reflecting his interest in understanding the human condition in symbolic and metaphorical terms. Often overlooked during the period of abstract expressionist dominance, his career received renewed attention as figurative approaches once again attracted a new generation.