A French painter, printmaker, and sculptor associated with art autre, Jean Fautrier numbers among its most original contributors, remembered chiefly for a Hostage series of 1943–45. In their deformations and roughly applied paint, these thickly painted, nearly abstract heads (or, occasionally, figures) reverberate with World War II horrors. Born in Paris, Fautrier lived as a teenager in London, where he trained as an artist and haunted the Tate Gallery. There, J. M. W. Turner’s richly painted late works provided an important precedent for his own later interest in pushing representation to the boundary of abstraction. After military service during World War I, Fautrier returned to Paris, where he became widely acquainted among artists and intellectuals while also moving from a controlled form of realism toward a more expressionistic approach. During the Depression years of the 1930s, forced to find other employment in various locations, he completed little work. After World War II broke out, he returned to Paris but was arrested in 1943 by the Nazis for his connections with the French Resistance. After a brief imprisonment, he lived in seclusion just outside Paris, within earshot of German torture victims and executions. The Hostage series meditates on these experiences of human suffering. Brutal, seemingly mutilated surfaces fortify a despairing mood. A few sculptures—including his last, a lumpy bronze reminiscent of a battered head—supplemented the paintings in this series. In later years, Fautrier continued to work with a form of free abstraction, generally combining gestural marks with heavily worked surfaces. See also .
An American painter and printmaker who studied and then worked abroad for half a century, Lyonel Feininger created a distinctive, poetic form of abstracted representation. A New York native, in 1887 he departed for Europe to study music, but he soon abandoned that endeavor in favor of visual arts training, mostly in Berlin. Before he turned 20, his cartoons and caricatures appeared in German, French, and American publications, soon securing his reputation among the foremost illustrators of the 20th century’s early years. In 1906, Feininger moved to Paris, where he began to devote more time to painting, elaborating on his illustrational talents to develop a distinctive and colorful figurative style, at once whimsical and unsettling. Upon his return to Berlin after two years, he contributed to the expressionist milieu around Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). During a visit to Paris in 1911, he first encountered cubism, which drew his attention to the possibilities of fractured form. In the wake of this discovery, he combined the dynamism of expressionism with cubism’s structural analysis. Featuring intersecting planes and luminous color, his radiant images suggest both analytical and spiritual effects. Architectural and marine subjects predominated.
When he founded the Bauhaus in 1919, architect Walter Gropius invited Feininger to participate. Feininger remained associated (first as a teacher, then as artist-in-residence) with the school until the Nazis closed it in 1933—the only Bauhaus staffer to remain with the institution throughout its history. In 1924, he joined with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Alexei von Jawlensky to form Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four), an association that promoted their experimental work jointly, especially abroad. After taking up photography in 1928, Feininger produced many accomplished images in this medium over the following decade, but he never exhibited them publicly. Another private pursuit, constructing diminutive wood figures and architectural models (as toys, first for his children, later for friends), has in recent years become more widely known and, like the photography, appreciated for an unforced and imaginative graphic power. In 1937, as the political landscape darkened in Germany, Feininger—now nearly 66—settled permanently in New York. His later work became more delicate and suggestive. Feininger’s long immersion in European culture offered an authoritative example to American artists of the 1940s and 1950s. Particularly after a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1944, he was widely regarded among the important modernists of his time. See also .
His son, painter and photographer Theodore Lux Feininger (1910–2011), born in Berlin, studied at the Bauhaus. He worked primarily as a photographer before relocating to the United States in 1936. Later he painted varied subjects, but he specialized particularly in trains, ships, and other modes of transportation. Andreas Feininger (1906–99), his brother, was a prominent photographer.
Early in his career, Lorser Feitelson combined interests in modern art and classicism to formulate a distinctive mode of painting related to surrealism. After World War II, he played a leading role in developing hard-edge painting. Born in Georgia but raised in New York, and committed to art since childhood, he was impressed by the modern art he saw in the 1913 Armory Show. However, by the time he traveled to Europe after World War I, renewed interest in classical form among leading artists there caught his attention. In 1927, during a period of experimentation with forms and subjects, he moved permanently to Los Angeles. There, as a longtime teacher and, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, a federal art project administrator and muralist, he played a major role in the evolution of West Coast art. In 1934, with Helen Lundeberg, he founded a movement called subjective classicism, soon better known as post-surrealist art. He and his partner created surrealistic fantasies but abjured automatism and other forms of access to the unconscious. Instead, they relied on rational processes to generate mysterious scenes incorporating what they intended as universal symbols. In the late 1940s, Feitelson abandoned this approach to investigate abstract color and form. During the next decade, he spearheaded development of hard-edge painting. Subsequently, he responded to minimalist currents with spare compositions featuring sinuous lines deployed across grandly scaled, flat grounds. See also ; .
Born in Chicago, Lundeberg (1908–99) grew up in the Los Angeles area. In the early 1930s, she studied with Feitelson, her most influential teacher, and they later married. During this decade, she created particularly imaginative and poetic post-surrealist works, such as the well-known Double Portrait of the Artist in Time (1935; Washington, D.C., Smithsonian American Art Museum), which combines a childhood image with a self-portrait. Like her husband, she painted murals for a federal art project and, in the 1950s, moved toward abstract arrangements of clearly defined forms. Later, her masterful compositions generally display vestiges of representation, usually taken from nature. Sharply defined and subtly hued, flat, biomorphic forms gracefully inhabit large, classically serene canvases.
Women’s art that deliberately, often provocatively, foregrounds gender-specific issues, feminist art, in its general sense, may refer to art from any time. As a movement, however, feminist art gathered strength around 1970 as artists joined the more general, countercultural call for “women’s liberation.” During that decade, feminist art contributed vitally to rethinking the nature and purposes of art in ways that continue to resonate today. Along with the pattern and decoration movement, feminist art broadened usable sources and media. In addition, it strengthened interest in content over formal or stylistic concerns. Although the movement affected artists internationally, the United States hosted its most forceful and successful manifestation. As was true also of pattern and decoration art, feminist art in the United States developed in two principal centers, Southern California and New York. Galleries, publications, and exhibitions quickly arose to provide institutional support for the movement.
The initial phase of feminist art saw much support for essentialism, the view that a woman’s inherent nature is biologically and psychologically determined and that therefore women’s art could—and should—express a reality different from art made by men. During the 1970s, Judy Chicago and many other artists expressed this essentialism with “central core” imagery: rounded, womb-like forms as an alternative to male phallicism. An opposing point of view held that women’s experience found its roots in patriarchal social constructions, which could be revealed and analyzed. By the 1980s, this had become the more prevalent position. As artists, scholars, and others turned attention to under-known women artists of the past, the recuperation and revaluation of historical precedents contributed, by grounding women’s art within a longer narrative, to the power and success of the feminist art movement. Most notably, a thought-provoking 1971 Art News essay by art historian Linda Nochlin (1931–), “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” answered the question in terms of opportunities denied, a revelation that energized the movement.
In New York, Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, both founded in 1970, followed an activist course, particularly in protesting women’s meagre representation in museum collections and exhibitions. At the same time in Los Angeles, a women’s group drew attention to the near absence of women’s work at the Los Angeles County Museum. Also in 1970, at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno), Chicago taught the first feminist art course. The following year, she and Miriam Schapiro teamed up to inaugurate the nation’s first feminist art program, at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In 1972, they, their students, and invited artists created the iconic Womanhouse in an uninhabited Hollywood mansion, transforming its rooms into a sequence of aggressively female installations. Such was the impact of feminist art that in October 1980, a tongue-in-cheek Art News cover picturing 20 well-known women artists asked “Where Are the Great Men Artists?” See also ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; .
American abstract expressionist sculptor Herbert Ferber later expanded his open-work constructions into room-sized works anticipating the 1960s enthusiasm for environmental art. A native New Yorker, he studied art while earning his DDS degree from Columbia University. Subsequently, he practiced dentistry for many years while pursuing an artistic career. Drawn to African and pre-Columbian art, with the encouragement of William Zorach he began to sculpt in wood, starting with heavy figures related to those of French sculptor Aristide Maillol. Before long, as he came to admire the work of Ernst Barlach and other Germans of the early modern period, he adopted a more expressionistic approach. Some of the resulting works reflect the social consciousness of the 1930s, but by the early 1940s many verged on abstraction. Attracted to surrealism and to the interaction of space and volume in the work of such artists as Henry Moore and the Spaniard Julio González, in the mid-1940s he adopted the latter’s pioneering welding techniques as he abandoned representation altogether. Variously combining biomorphic forms, strips, and rods, he fashioned metal works that feature the interpenetration of solids and voids in tension-filled symbolic relationships. “Roofs” or “boxes” often define visual limits, emphasizing the conflict of forms within. He also numbered among the earliest sculptors to manipulate molten metal to produce textural surfaces. In several commissions completed during the 1950s, he eliminated the sculptural base by attaching his work to walls or suspending it from ceilings. At the Whitney Museum in 1961, he used fiberglass to fashion his first environmental sculpture. Welcoming viewers to its interior space, it ranked as both a logical extension of his previous practice and a rethinking of the nature of sculpture itself. During the 1970s, he often created large-scale outdoor works, including some in painted steel. In later years, he devoted much of his time to painting, sometimes combining color with relief-like dimensions, and to printmaking. See also .
Puerto Rico–born Rafael Ferrer has straddled the interests of mainstream tendencies and his Latino roots, although he has shown little interest in identity art as an issue. Educated at Syracuse University and the University of Puerto Rico, in Paris during the early 1950s he also made important contacts with the surrealist group, including André Breton, and with Wifredo Lam. He later worked primarily as a musician while also developing his visual art. In the late 1960s, he became recognized for installations drawing on conceptual and process tendencies. Subsequently, his work took on a more narrative tone, and during the 1980s he retreated from the dematerialized esthetic of his early work. Paintings of tropical subjects, often imbued with dark undertones, reflect his Caribbean origins. His imaginative side has also found quirky expression in an extensive series of brightly hued drawings on paper bags, mostly exploring human faces. In addition, he has undertaken commissions for large public sculptures, including the 25-foot, colorfully painted steel Puerto Rican Sun (1979), located at the entrance to a Bronx park and offering a decorative fantasy recalling his sun-filled homeland. See also .
Textile arts exhibit a continuous history from prehistoric times to the present. Over time, woven cloth came to be supplemented by carpets, tapestries, knitting, crochet work, and other techniques. Prominent artists of the early 20th century, including Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, designed tapestries, as did Sonia Delaunay-Terk, who also applied her considerable skills to cloth and wall coverings. The Bauhaus played an important role in textile development within its quest to provide artistic solutions for every aspect of daily life. After Anni Albers, who trained and taught there, emigrated to the United States in 1933, over several decades she contributed an important precedent for the appreciation of handwoven textiles. However, fiber art as a form of non-utilitarian creative expression grew into a distinct field only after World War II, within a more general reevaluation of crafts as valid art media. Noting its traditional associations with women’s handicrafts, feminists of the 1970s played a particularly important role in validating fiber as a creative medium, and, indeed, the term itself dates to that decade. Most prominent contemporary fiber artists have continued to be women, even as the idea of fiber art has grown to encompass all manner of two- and three-dimensional approaches to the uses of thread, yarn, and other natural and synthetic filaments.
Besides Lenore Tawney, two other fiber artists achieved highly original results. Claire Zeisler (1903–91) gained renown for monumental sculptures featuring, most distinctively, great masses of falling, flowing fibers supported entirely by a knotted inner core. Born in Cincinnati, she took an early interest in art but did not commit herself to creative work until she reached her forties. After moving permanently as a young woman to Chicago, she amassed a distinguished collection of modern and tribal art, including textiles and baskets. In the 1940s, she trained at the Institute of Design with Alexander Archipenko and László Moholy-Nagy. Her long-standing interest in textiles soon also led to studies with a local weaver. Zeisler continued to work on a conventional loom while also experimenting on a small scale with other techniques until the early 1960s, when her noteworthy fiber sculptures first appeared.
A generation younger than Tawney and Zeisler, Sheila Hicks (1934–) nevertheless emerged as a significant fiber artist around the same time they did in the 1960s. Over the years, she has worked with all manner of fibers and textiles, on large and small scales, and sometimes incorporating other materials (often found objects), making her work as a whole difficult to characterize. Her inventive career encompasses tiny studies (which she calls minimes), large hanging or wall-mounted pieces, enormous constructions for public spaces, and temporary installations. Born in Hastings, Nebraska, she studied at Syracuse University before continuing her undergraduate and graduate education at Yale University, where Anni Albers helped spark her interest in textiles. On a Fulbright grant to South America, Hicks devoted particular study to Peruvian weavings. After receiving her MFA in 1959, she lived for several years in Mexico before heading to Paris, subsequently her permanent home. There, surrealist artists further invigorated her thinking as she embarked on a career with few constraints, while also traveling often and widely to investigate other cultures and their arts and frequently interacting with local artists.
American painter Eric Fischl is known principally for large and unsettling figural paintings that imply enigmatic narratives. As a sculptor and printmaker, he produces related pieces that usually overlap thematically with the paintings. Fischl first came to attention in the early 1980s, along with neo-expressionists of his generation. However, from the outset, his work remained aloof from his peers’ overheated rhetoric, emphasizing instead psychological (not infrequently sexual) tensions as they are revealed though the body. The 1980s work usually turned on the American suburban experience, often with reference to dark or repressed underlying realities. Since then, he has engaged a range of subjects, frequently reflecting in some way the experience of tourism as it embodies the raw edges of unanticipated or ironic encounters between cultures. In an obliquely related series begun in 2012, he casts his gimlet eye at the contemporary international art fair phenomenon. He also paints portraits of individuals or small groups. Fischl works from photographs but combines individual figures from separate photographs into painted compositions. Over the years, he has developed an increasingly painterly technique that resonates with the work of traditional artists as well as his contemporaries. Fischl is married to landscape painter April Gornick (1953–), who also composes with photographic techniques. Her concentrated, unmistakably contemporary images—mostly landscapes—offer rich emotional overtones. Besides paintings, many quite large, she is known also for evocative charcoal drawings, which often emphasize the play of natural light.
Allied with minimalism, American Dan Flavin created singular works from commercially available, colored neon tubing. Using the simplest of means—straight, steadily glowing rods in spare arrangements—he achieved a completely distinctive modern esthetic synthesizing aspects of painting, sculpture, and technology. The effectiveness of these works rests largely on their ability to transform ambient space with colored light. From the late 1960s, he undertook increasingly complex projects that involved lighting for entire room interiors or other architectural spaces.
A native New Yorker, he attended Catholic schools and as a young man embarked on training for the priesthood. Despite this religious background, he resisted any attempt to read the transcendental effects of his art in spiritual terms. Following five years in a seminary, he served in the U.S. military, receiving training as a meteorological technician. Upon his return to New York in 1956, he studied art history but remained almost entirely self-taught as an artist. His early abstract expressionist work gave way in the late 1950s to junk sculpture, followed in 1961 by boxes lit with fluorescent and incandescent fixtures. Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) (1963; New York, Dia Art Foundation), a single, eight-foot, wall-mounted, golden fluorescent tube set at a 45-degree angle to the floor, announced a breakthrough and heralded his subsequent development. Although Flavin dedicated this work to Constantin Brancusi (in homage to the earlier artist’s Endless Column), its off-the-shelf commercial origins owe more to the example of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Flavin’s work quickly evolved to more complex arrangements that testify to the artist’s extraordinary sensitivity to effects of light and color in the articulation and activation of space. Flavin’s ability to center the esthetic experience in atmosphere rather than object carried important implications for the further development of installation and environmental art. See also ; ; ; .
A loosely defined international tendency emphasizing freedom, spontaneity, impermanence, and individualism, fluxus put forth a constellation of ideas and strategies that continue to resonate to the present day. However, the movement peaked during the decade or so after its founding in 1962. Drawing on dadaism for its irreverent attitude toward art and esthetics, it overlapped in part with the vogue for happenings, while also learning from Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Anti-commercial and multimedia at heart, to a greater degree than much art of the time, it espoused countercultural political and social ideals. Much fluxus activity sought to integrate everyday life into its art, and the movement actively sought audience participation in the events it sponsored, such as festivals, performances, and concerts.
In 1962, George Maciunas (1931–78) organized the initial fluxus event, 14 “fluxconcerts” of experimental music and performance, in Wiesbaden, Germany. He derived the name from the Latin “to flow.” The movement caught on quickly, as many similar events occurred in Europe and New York before the end of the following year. An idea man driven by visionary humanistic impulses, Maciunas was born in Lithuania, arrived in the United States in 1948, and spent more than a decade studying art, graphic design, architecture, and art history, as well as attending, at the New School for Social Research (now New School), Cage’s experimental music course.
Nam June Paik and German painter, printmaker, collage artist, and sculptor Wolf Vostell (1932–98) collaborated with Maciunas in organizing the 1962 presentations. Among the first Europeans to organize happenings, Vostell pioneered, along with Paik, in the use of televisions in art. Much of his art builds around themes of violence and destruction, often with a political slant. Yoko Ono (1933–), performance artist, sculptor, musician, and filmmaker, who numbered among early participants in fluxus-style activities, played an important role in transmitting its ethos between her native Tokyo and New York and in expanding its audience through collaborations with Beatles star John Lennon after they met in 1966. (They married in 1969.) As early as 1960, Ono hosted performance events in her downtown loft, attracting not only artists later associated with fluxus but also such avant-gardists as musicians Cage and La Monte Young, dancers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, and artists Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Rauschenberg. Her 1961 “instruction paintings”—not paintings at all, but typewritten directions for making art works—anticipated conceptual art techniques and exemplified the piquant, whimsical, and idealistic nature that has motivated her subsequent career.
Many other artists of considerable stature contributed at some point to fluxus. Besides Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, and Daniel Spoerri, they included Danish composer and visual artist Henning Christiansen (1932–2008); French filmmaker and sculptor Robert Filliou (1926–87); Japanese American artist Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), an early and accomplished video artist who incorporated some of her videos into sculptural constructions; Swiss book and installation artist Dieter Roth (also known as Diter Rot) (1930–98), who dabbled in biodegradable art, which sometimes featured rotting foodstuffs; and wide-ranging French provocateur Ben Vautier (1935–), known for text-based art, street performances, and installations. Important Americans of the movement include George Brecht (1926–2008), whose “event scores”—instructions, loosely analogous to musical scores, specifying a sequence of actions—constituted his most original contribution to fluxus; “cloudsmith” Geoffrey Hendricks (1931–), who focused attention on the sky in performances and installations; Dick Higgins (1938–98) and his wife Alison Knowles (1933–), known for literary and documentary printed materials; Ray Johnson (1927–95), who built a piquant career around the creation of mail art and other insubstantial forms of expression; musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman (1933–91); Robert Watts (1923–88), who worked with several media and numbered among the earliest enthusiasts for Maciunias’s ideas in the United States; and Emmet Williams (1925–2007), better known as a poet than a visual artist. Several activists of the original dada movement, in particular Austrian-born painter, graphic artist, and photographer Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971), but also several other éminences grises, offered their blessing to fluxus. See also ; ; ; ; .
Drawn from an early age to archeological remnants of earlier civilizations, Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca incorporated intimations of their myths and symbols into abstract arrangements of form. Born in Montevideo, during his early years he traveled as a child in Europe, where he first encountered ancient sites. He studied architecture in Montevideo from 1939 until 1941 before entering Joaquín Torres-García’s workshop, where he remained through most of the 1940s. There he worked mainly as a painter and muralist, but he also experimented with sculpture and ceramics. From Torres-García, he adopted constructive universalism, a method of integrating past and present by combining symbolic, myth-laden signs with abstract composition. During the 1940s, he also studied South America’s pre-Columbian sites. Between 1950 and 1952, he traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East and lived in Paris. After moving to New York in 1958, his career flourished internationally. Subsequently, he divided his time between New York and a studio in Italy. Fonseca’s earlier sculptures typically integrate symbolically resonant elements into planar, frontally oriented compositions, but during the 1970s, he moved toward freer forms, often evoking memories of complex and mysterious ruins steeped in ritual. These nevertheless continue the weighty portentousness of the stone medium itself, while allusive motifs extend thematic interests in universal human experiences: life versus death, the mystery of existence, and the search for meaning. Prominent among several important public commissions, the 40-foot, roughly conical, cast-concrete Tower of the Winds (1968), created for Mexico City’s Olympic Games, offers a hollow sanctuary lit by a skylight. Its uneven outline reverberates with memories of weathered antiquities.
His son Caio Fonseca (1959–), a distinguished abstract painter who grew up in New York, headed to Europe in 1978. He studied in Barcelona for five years, then lived in Italy and Paris before returning to New York in the early 1990s. (He continues to spend much of his time at a studio in Italy.) His discerningly colorful paintings and prints have characteristically deployed flat shapes combining geometric and organic elements against monochrome fields. In 2012, he first showed paintings that do away with such figure–ground relationships, substituting instead vertically oriented forms of white and a single color (often black) in stripe-like arrangements that adhere to the flatness of large canvases. Caio’s brother Bruno Fonseca (1958–94), also born in New York, a painter and sculptor who synthesized abstract and representational modes, spent his career in Barcelona. After settling there in 1976, he remained until returning to New York shortly before he died.
Argentinian-born Italian artist Lucio Fontana, a fountainhead of ideas for younger artists of arte povera, minimalism, environmental art, and other tendencies, remains best known for slit and punctured canvases. However, he also worked with metal, neon tubing, and ceramics in his pursuit of a visionary program for attaining a grand synthesis of materials, color, and space. Born in Rosario, the son of sculptor Luigi Fontana (1865–1946), he remained in Argentina during his formative years as an artist. From the late 1920s until 1940, he lived in Italy and in Paris, becoming familiar with current developments and soon numbering among the early enthusiasts for abstract art in Italy. Subsequently, in Buenos Aires, he began to formulate the theories of spazialismo (spatialism) that he espoused in five manifestos issued between 1946 and 1952. After returning to Italy in 1947 and settling in Milan the following year, he soon exhibited the first of his signature canvases, which he thereafter titled Concetto spaziale (spatial concept). The early examples, Bucchi (holes) gave way to the Tagli (slashes) in the mid-1950s. Most characteristically adhering to the simplicity of pure white surfaces, Fontana nevertheless over the years also found ways to complicate his works. Around 1960 he produced a series with heavily encrusted surfaces, while after a 1961 visit to New York, he reacted to its architectural grandeur by gouging scratches and fissures in monolithic metal pieces. A precedent-setting 1949 environment of sculptures, fluorescent paintings, and black light erected within a darkened chamber preceded a number of installations of neon tubing looping through room-sized spaces.
American color field painter and printmaker Sam Francis remains best known for brightly colored, psychologically unburdened canvases that contrast painterly markings with large areas of pure white. Even when the surface is more heavily worked, free-flowing lines, irregular shapes, and splatters predominate. A Californian, Francis turned to art during an extended hospitalization for a World War II injury. After recuperating, he studied for several years in the San Francisco area with David Park and others, while also becoming acquainted with abstract expressionism. Living during the 1950s in Paris (where he studied briefly with Fernand Léger), he learned much from the color-saturated work of Henri Matisse and Claude Monet and also became acquainted with other young painters entranced with chromatic effects. These included Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle, as well as the accomplished but under-recognized Americans Norman Bluhm (1920–99), who practiced a sophisticated painterly élan throughout the later 20th century, and Shirley Jaffe (1923–2016), who remained in Paris as she increasingly relied on flat patterning. Francis’s earliest notable works—cascades of irregular color cells—preceded the signature “open” paintings. Visits to Japan, where he admired its painting and calligraphy, stimulated his interest in the pictorial void and in asymmetrical composition. Ever peripatetic, Francis made repeated and often extended visits abroad, soaking up French modernism, Zen Buddhism, and Asian culture along the way. California remained his home base, however. Admired in the United States, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, his art over the years found more enthusiastic reception in France and Japan, contributing to the international stature of postwar American painting.
With her breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea (1952; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, on long-term loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation), American painter Helen Frankenthaler initiated the transition from abstract expressionism to color field painting. For this loosely painted abstraction, she stained an unprimed canvas with thinned oil paint, producing a delicate effect reminiscent of watercolor. Her innovation caught the attention of many artists, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and placed her among the most influential painters of the 1950s and 1960s. Clement Greenberg (her partner from 1950 to 1955) proved instrumental in broadening the young artist’s acquaintance with leading artists, including Jackson Pollock, and in establishing her reputation, which then flourished unabated for 60 years. From 1958 until 1971, she was married to Robert Motherwell, another powerful art world figure. A native New Yorker, she studied with Rufino Tamayo at an exclusive private school before going on to Bennington College, where the abstract painter Paul Feeley (1910–66)—soon widely recognized for patterned, hard-edge compositions—numbered among her teachers. She also studied in New York with Hans Hofmann and Vaclav Vytlacil. The 7' × 10' Mountains and Sea launched her professional career. Lyrical and spontaneous, her canvases generally favor color over line. With their airy and insubstantial forms, most maintain the flatness of the canvas, but some manipulate illusions of depth. Landscape seems never far away. From the early 1960s, she also remained active as a printmaker, known particularly for inventive woodcuts.
An important participant in the early New York School, painter and printmaker Jane Freilicher numbered among artists who remained tethered to representation while also pulling free of traditional painting’s expectations. Unrhetorical, fluent, and heartfelt, her distinctive, painterly landscapes, cityscapes, and floral compositions reflect a thoroughly contemporary esthetic vision, informed by abstraction and powered by individual experience. She drew her usual subjects from everyday surroundings: views from her New York dwelling and around her summer home (from the late 1950s) on eastern Long Island. (Both often feature flower arrangements in the foreground.) Close friendships with such poets as John Ashbery, especially, but also Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and others, suggest her discerning temperament. Among artists, she established a particularly warm and mutually beneficial relationship with Fairfield Porter. Others associated with her circle included Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers, as well as painter and printmaker Nell Blaine (1922–96), whose early abstract expressionist work transitioned into a colorful, representational style marked by forceful brushwork, and Rudy Burckhardt (1914–99), a Swiss-born photographer, filmmaker, and painter. Born in Brooklyn, Jane Niederhoffer eloped at 17 with Rivers’s friend Jack Freilicher, a jazz musician. (They separated a few years later.) She earned a BA degree from Brooklyn College in 1947 and the following year an MA from Columbia University, where Meyer Schapiro numbered among her teachers. She also studied with Hans Hofmann. Soon drawn to Pierre Bonnard’s work, she abandoned an early abstract expressionist approach for a more personal response to visual experience. In 1957, she married her partner of several years, Greek-born businessman, former dancer, and amateur painter Joseph Hazan (1916–2012). New York abstract painter Elizabeth Hazan (1965–) is their daughter.
British painter Lucian Freud ranks among preeminent figure painters of the post–World War II era. He seems to have maintained something of the fierce concentration on dysfunctional aspects of individual personality that so fascinated his famous grandfather, Sigmund Freud. Born in Berlin, he moved with his family to London in 1933. After completing his training at art schools there and in Dedham—where post-impressionist landscape, still life, and portrait painter Cedric Morris (1889–1982) provided important direction—he soon specialized in unsettling figural images. Although he always painted directly from models, usually friends and family members, many of his paintings are not so much portraits (often, the sitter’s identity is not revealed in his titles) as studies of what outward form may reveal about the inner life. In his early work, such as Girl with a White Dog (1950–51; London, Tate)—a study of his partially nude, pregnant young wife—a hard, meticulous approach reflects interests in Northern Renaissance painting and the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, as well as, to a lesser degree, surrealism’s unsettling tone. Affected by his friend Francis Bacon’s work in the 1950s, he loosened his brushwork to develop a more confrontational approach that lingers on uningratiating aspects of his subjects’ appearance. In the 1960s, his work often bore similarities to Philip Pearlstein’s uncompromising scrutiny of nude subjects. Later, as his technique became more fluent and his vision more subjective, he became particularly known for riveting images of repellent physiognomies, whose corpulence or other disfigurement, coupled with disengaged affect, provide a bleak assessment of human experience. The polar opposite of Alberto Giacometti’s skinny figures, the monstrous bodies nevertheless also raise existential doubts.
Among Freud’s friends, two important artists share his dedication to painting as a pathway into the truths—esthetic and otherwise—embedded in visual reality. Frank Auerbach (1931–), also born in Berlin, arrived in London in 1939. In art school days there, Freud befriended London native Leon Kossoff (1926–). In the early 1950s, together they studied with modernist painter David Bomberg (1890–1957), who had, by this time, turned his attention largely to expressionistic landscapes and figural works. Although an important mentor, Bomberg’s influence was tempered by that of Old Masters, particularly Rembrandt. Also portrait painters, both Auerbach and Kossoff adopted the urban landscape as a predominant interest. Auerbach has specialized in moody, heavily impastoed, often nearly abstract urban images, usually based on his longtime north London neighborhood, Camden Town, where he has lived in a tiny studio and painted nearly every day for 60 years. Active also since the 1950s as a printmaker, the somewhat less reclusive Kossoff has ranged more widely throughout the city, constantly drawing before his subjects. His translations of the urban fabric normally render the city in less abstracted—although no less personal—form than Auerbach’s.
Originating in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1950s, funk art rebelled against the high-minded purity of much post–World War II art. Like their New York counterparts interested in junk art and assemblage, funk artists eradicated boundaries between high and low culture and undermined the primacy of the handmade object. Rejecting the period’s optimism and consumerism, they often showed a particular fondness for the grotesque and vulgar, sometimes embracing even degenerate, gruesome, or morbid imagery. Outrageous humor and erotic innuendos also often appeared. Ranging across considerable territory, funk artists did not think of themselves as a group. Rather, to some extent influenced by aspects of dada, surrealism, and pop art, all responded to the liberated, alienated beat culture of the 1960s. “Funk,” a 1967 exhibition at the University of California’s Museum of Art in Berkeley, first drew national attention to the tendency.
The late 1950s and early 1960s work of Bruce Conner (1933–2008) perhaps epitomized the funk sensibility. His trashy yet evocative assemblages ignore good taste and formal rigor, emphasizing instead the power of juxtaposition, imaginative fancy, and subconscious instinct. Featuring his fascination with death and decay, the shocking Couch (1963; California, Pasadena Art Museum), for example, offers what appears to be a rotted human body splayed upon an equally ravaged piece of once-elegant Victorian furniture. A Kansas native, Conner earned a BFA at the University of Nebraska in 1956 before studying for a semester at the Brooklyn Museum’s art school and then at the University of Colorado. In 1957, he moved to San Francisco, where he continued to reside except for a footloose period in the early 1960s. A restless and endlessly inventive artist, Conner also produced paintings, sculptures, prints, obsessively worked abstract drawings, otherworldly photograms, collages of old illustrations, and notable experimental films.
High-spirited, confrontational ceramic artists Robert Arneson (1930–92) and Viola Frey (1933–2004) produced raucous, humorous, but also emotionally affecting representational works often loaded with political or social implications. These sculptures proved pivotal in the realignment of ceramics from its status as a craft to an expressive medium capable of contributing to cutting-edge artistic dialogue. Their rough modeling, usually glazed with unrefined colors, negated the medium’s traditional interests in function, abstract form, and surface finesse. A Bay Area native, Arneson graduated in 1954 from Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) and four years later earned an MFA from Oakland’s Mills College. During these years, Peter Voulkos’s powerful abstract ceramics sparked his interest in working with clay. Much of his early work centered on commonplace commercial imagery affiliated with pop art. During the 1960s, he embarked on his best-known project, an extensive portrait series that included many variations on his own unidealized—sometimes even distorted—features. He also cast bronze works and produced lithographs and drawings. In 1962, he began an influential teaching career at the funk-oriented University of California, Davis, where he remained until his death. Also a native Californian, Frey numbered among Arneson’s fellow students at the California College of Arts and Crafts. After graduating in 1956, she studied for a year at Tulane University in New Orleans and lived elsewhere before returning to the Bay Area. In the 1960s, she embarked on a teaching career of more than 30 years at her alma mater. During the next decade, she became noted for works that subsequently defined her reputation: gigantic, gangly figures that dwarf their maker. She often drew inspiration from popular culture, such as commercially available souvenirs, but also responded to Bay Area figurative work, especially the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Brown. During a prolific career, Frey also produced smaller relief sculptures as well as paintings and drawings.
A collage specialist, but also a painter and draftsman, Jess (1923–2004) followed a dreamier, spiritually resonant esthetic tinged with surrealism. Born Burgess Collins in Long Beach, California, he initially followed a scientific career. During World War II military service, he worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After graduating in 1948 from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena with a degree in chemistry, he continued his involvement with atomic energy at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington. Dismayed, however, by the threat of nuclear warfare, in 1949 he moved permanently to San Francisco, where he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute). His teachers there included Elmer Bischoff, David Park, and Clyfford Still. In 1951, the poet Robert Duncan became his partner, a relationship that lasted until Duncan’s death in 1988. Employing themes from alchemical and occult sources, Jess created minutely detailed, mysterious worlds reflecting a poetic temperament spiritually aligned with such predecessors as French Symbolist Gustave Moreau. Often identified as his masterwork, the large-scale, drawn and collaged Narkissos (1976–91; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) offers a meditation on the legend of Narcissus, whose lithe nude body is surrounded by other characters from the Greek myth, as well as supplementary material taken from myriad retellings of the story. His less detailed paintings offer varied approaches, ranging from the imagery of popular culture (providing an oblique link to pop art) to painterly abstractions.
The lighthearted irreverence that characterizes the work of William T. Wiley (1937–) features puns, jokes, and zany imagery. At the same time, it also incorporates an ironic, even satirical commentary on human foolishness, greed, and the political chicanery responsible for warfare, tragedy, and injustice. Born in Indiana, Wiley grew up there and in Washington State. In 1960, he graduated from the California School of Fine Arts, where he earned an MFA two years later. He soon joined the faculty at the University of California, Davis, for a decade-long stint. Early paintings, sculpture, and assemblages offered a high-spirited, deliberately rough, sometimes cartoony approach. During the 1970s, he developed the more refined and complex, skillfully drawn and composed works, executed in delicately brushed pale watercolor and/or charcoal, that have remained his specialty.
In eccentric, sardonic paintings, Roy De Forest (1930–2007) sidestepped gloomy issues to revel in what he called “nut art,” magical work featuring humor, personal symbols, and arbitrary colors. His colorful, illogical worlds typically feature animals, most often dogs, whose zestful enjoyment of life seems contagious. Born in Nebraska and brought up in Washington State, from 1950 until 1952 he attended the California School of Fine Arts, where Bischoff and Park numbered among his instructors. After military service, he continued his training at San Francisco State College (now University), where he earned a BA in 1953 and an MA in 1958. From 1965 until 1982, he, too, taught at the University of California, Davis. An early abstract expressionist orientation, even then often undercut by silliness, began to give way to his distinctive form of representation by the end of the 1950s. Other Bay Area participants in the funk movement include sculptor Robert Hudson (1938–) and ceramist David Gilhooly (1943–).
Funk also maintained a southern outpost in the Los Angeles area. Wallace Berman (1926–76), who maintained close relationships with San Francisco artists and writers, bridged the two. Born in New York, he grew up in Los Angeles and trained there as an artist. He lived in San Francisco between 1957 and 1961, when he returned permanently to Southern California. Known particularly for assemblages (although his experimental art ranged widely) and poetry, he assimilated aspects of beat culture, jazz, surrealism, dada, and Jewish mysticism. His notable Semina magazine, published in loose-leaf format between 1955 and 1964, featured work by such artists as Joan Brown, Conner, Jay De Feo, and Jess, as well as the poetry of Jean Cocteau, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. Edward Kienholz remains the best known of other allied Los Angeles artists. The period’s funk sensibility also affected artists elsewhere, perhaps most notably Paul Thek (1933–88). Born in New York and trained at art schools there, he began as a painter but by the 1960s had turned to various forms of sculpture and assemblage. Besides hyper-realistic body fragments shown in plexiglass cases, he combined ephemeral and cast-off materials in more funk-like, sometimes creepy installations. During much of his career, he lived in Italy. See also ; ; .