An internationally renowned abstract sculptor, Naum Gabo focused on space, light, and movement rather than the traditional sculptural concerns of plasticity, mass, and permanence. Born Naum Neemia Pevsner in what is now Belarus, he grew up in Russia. He later changed his name to avoid confusion with an older brother, Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962), also a Belarus-born artist. In Munich, Gabo studied science and engineering, as well as some philosophy and art history, but he remained untrained as an artist. He first encountered the modernism of such artists as Alexander Archipenko, Georges Braque, and Pablo Picasso in Paris during 1912–13 visits to his brother, then a painter who had trained in Kiev and, more briefly, in St. Petersburg. Gabo and Pevsner spent the World War I years in Oslo before moving to Moscow in 1917. Inspired by the Russian Revolution as a liberating event foreshadowing a new world no longer in thrall to past customs, in 1920 Gabo drew up the Realist Manifesto (also signed by his brother). Anything but a call to realism in the usual sense of the word, it was an idealistic, even messianic document. It does not prescribe style or materials but rather promotes abstract art that speaks to the potential of individual and social fulfillment. “The realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art,” it avers. Already, however, he was fighting a losing battle in Russia, where a more utilitarian view of art was gaining favor. The brothers moved on, Gabo to Berlin and Pevsner to Paris. While lecturing occasionally at the Bauhaus, Gabo in these years experimented audaciously with kinetic sculpture and with modern materials, particularly transparent plastics. In the early 1930s, Gabo relocated to Paris and then, a few years later, moved to England, where he found a warm reception among such artists as Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. In 1946, he arrived in New York and soon settled permanently in Connecticut. Pevsner, whose painting had become abstract by about 1920, switched to sculpture soon after returning in 1923 to Paris, where he remained permanently. Adopting, as had his brother, such modern materials as plastic and metal, in the 1930s he became an influential force in the promotion of constructivism in Paris. His work often features energetically spiraling forms, emblematic of the more spiritual intentions he brought to his art.
During the postwar years in the United States, Gabo employed nylon filaments and transparent or, less often, colored plastic to continue a series of lyrical and visually weightless Linear Constructions in Space, which he had started a few years earlier. Taut threads stretch in intricate, rhythmic arrangements through voids, calling attention to emptiness while only barely disrupting it. Light assumes a leading role in the works’ expressive meaning, no less than in their visibility. He also completed several major commissions for public places, including the 85-foot-tall Construction (1954–57), sited in front of Rotterdam’s new Bijenkorf Department Store. In the 1950s, he also took up wood engraving. Gabo’s wholehearted embrace of new materials, his interests in movement and transparency, and his authoritative demonstration of the esthetic power of abstraction in its purest form proved of much interest to younger sculptors who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. See also .
Powerhouse American art dealer Larry Gagosian, who owns an international string of 15 galleries, has ranked among the most important forces in the art market since the 1980s. A Los Angeles native, he graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969. He opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980 and five years later expanded to New York. He made his outsize reputation with shows of important living artists and has since mounted numerous scholarly, museum-quality exhibitions devoted to modern masters or, on occasion, reaching back into the past to examine traditions extending as far back as the Renaissance. The long list of prominent contemporary artists who have appeared under his auspices includes Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Lucio Fontana, Damien Hirst, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Andy Warhol, and Rachel Whiteread.
Indian painter V. S. Gaitonde fused an eclectic array of Eastern and Western interests into a meditative, personal form of abstraction. Subtle coloration, indistinct forms, and richly elaborated surfaces produce calm, allusive effects. Born in Nagpur, he grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai), where he trained as an artist. Among important early influences, the work of such Europeans as Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and, notably, Paul Klee combined with traditional Indian miniature painting. With time, he also responded to ancient calligraphy and to the free brushwork of abstract expressionism and art autre. By about 1960, around the time he also initiated a serious involvement with Zen Buddhist philosophy, he embarked on “pure painting,” as he said, “painting which has detached itself from the world of objects to explore its endlessly exciting possibilities.” In 1972, he relocated permanently to New Delhi.
American painter Lee Gatch often retained elements of representation within his thoughtful, abstracted nature paintings. In the characteristic Night Fishing (1956; Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection), one can make out a fisherman and his boat, but flattened, harmonious shapes give more weight to form and color than to subject. Indebted to contemporary abstract expressionism, it nevertheless demonstrates strong ties to cubism and to the work of Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. Also a collage artist, in the 1960s Gatch developed a distinctive technique, employing small pieces of stone, which—taken directly from the earth—tied into his pantheistic notions.
Born near Baltimore, Gatch trained there at the Maryland Institute of Fine Arts (now Maryland Institute, College of Art) before heading to Paris in 1924 for a year’s study. Upon his return, he settled in New York. There he worked out his poetic compromise between imagery and abstract form. In 1935, he moved permanently to the relative seclusion of Lambertville, New Jersey, on the Delaware River.
Shortly before leaving New York, Gatch married painter Elsie Driggs (1898–1992), a leading precisionist of the 1920s. Praised for her clean-edged, mechanical forms, she was at that time better known as an artist than he. An experimentalist at heart, however, in the early 1930s she had already begun to try other styles and techniques. But her productivity slackened in Lambertville, where she did not have her own studio. Her 1930 one-person show turned out to be the last for half a century. After Gatch’s death, she moved back to New York where she continued to produce inventive new work, including collages and assemblages, for nearly another quarter of a century.
A Venezuelan artist who took drawing off the planar surface into three dimensions, Gego created space-activating linear constructions that exploit the tension between order and disorder to invoke notions of a reality beyond the rational. Born in Hamburg, she earned an architectural degree from Stuttgart’s Technische Hochschule in 1938. She moved to Caracas the following year but turned to the full-time practice of art only in the mid-1950s. Incorporating aspects of kinetic art and op art, she made three-dimensional constructions suggesting familiarity with the work of such Venezuelans as Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto (who were by this time living in Paris). In these works, she used brass and steel rods to create compositions of overlapping forms that reveal different views as the spectator moves around them. From 1969, she concentrated on more distinctly linear pieces. Complex installations of filaments often admit spectators to their interiors. As she moved into her most distinctive phase during the 1980s, lacy, hanging nets took on an organic quality, as structure accommodated countless irregularities while at the same time enfolding space itself. Small formal caprices enliven their effects. The artist denied that she made sculpture, as she quite rightly insisted that her three-dimensional works entailed “drawing without paper.” Nevertheless, she never entirely abandoned paper, as she continued throughout her career to produce delicate abstract prints and drawings.
Herbert Read coined this term in describing the sensibility of eight younger English sculptors who exhibited together at the 1952 Venice Biennale. The group comprised Robert Adams (1917–84), Kenneth Armitage (1916–2002), Reg Butler (1913–81), Lynn Chadwick (1914–2003), Geoffrey Clarke (1924–2014), Bernard Meadows (1915–2005), Eduardo Paolozzi, and William Turnbull (1922–2012). Although not a participant in the exhibition, Elisabeth Frink (1930–93) is sometimes included among them. Indebted to Alberto Giacometti’s example as well as that of Henry Moore, their expressionistic, abstracted figuration gained the group a leading position in 1950s British art. Reflecting post–World War II anxieties, “these new images,” Read wrote, “belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance. . . . Here are images of flight . . . of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.”
Among the most prominent, Kenneth Armitage came to attention with humanly scaled, helpless beings whose slab-like bodies support vitiated limbs and diminutive heads. Like others in the group, he generally cast his work in bronze. Later, he worked for a time more abstractly than others in the group and sometimes experimented with other media. An architect before he turned, without professional training, to sculpture, Reg Butler often made use of his experience as a blacksmith during World War II (he was a conscientious objector) to fabricate work in iron. Although the project never came to fruition, he became widely recognized in 1953 when he won an international competition to design a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner (final version of working model 1955–56; London, Tate), beating out better-known entrants including Alexander Calder, Naum Gabo, and Barbara Hepworth. Models for the piece show figures constrained by towering surrealistic architecture. Other work centered largely on nude female figures, ranging from early surrealistic inventions through more classically realized creations and, eventually, to disturbingly contorted and erotically charged, lifelike women in painted bronze with real hair and glass eyes. Lynn Chadwick, too, started out in architecture, working as a draftsman before he began to make sculpture without additional training. His first work, dating to the late 1940s, centered on hanging mobiles. He, too, entered the competition for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner and was awarded an honorable mention. In the early 1950s, he welded abstract surrealistic forms into fearsome compositions intimating danger or catastrophe. Also soon appearing in the 1950s, his most distinctive pieces allude rather generally to human figures, supported on splayed, spindly legs. Later, allusive sculptures devised from angular arrangements of planes fulfilled numerous commissions for public spaces, and brightly colored, abstract lithographs enlarged his practice.
Among the most consistent and thoughtful British sculptors of the 20th century, William Turnbull worked in several media and responded to shifts in the period’s esthetic climate. Overall, however, he remained attuned to the power of abstract, organic form, often recalling the simplified icons of prehistoric and ethnographic art. Acquainted in late 1940s Paris with Constantin Brancusi and Giacometti, he drew inspiration from both. His early work included linear, welded pieces but by the early 1950s he preferred the plasticity of three-dimensional form. During the same years, he also participated in activities of the Independent Group, along with his friend and fellow Scotsman, Eduardo Paolozzi, a central figure in that group. From the late 1950s, Turnbull supplemented his sculptural practice with large abstract paintings related to color field work. In the mid-1960s, he began to use welded steel for sleek, geometric sculptures painted in bright colors, but he later returned primarily to more organic forms, now treated with spare elegance.
The most important surrealist sculptor of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti also ranks among the most significant form givers of the post–World War II years. Paintings, drawings, and prints from this later period amplify the distinctive vision of his more widely known sculpture. His attenuated, angst-ridden figures, rooted in existential philosophy, offered a definitive image of the human condition of that era. Rivaled only by Henry Moore among prominent sculptors of the 1950s and early 1960s, he offered a striking riposte to Moore’s affirmative humanism.
Son of well-known post-impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti, he was born in Borgonovo, near the Italian border. He began his art studies in Geneva, then spent a year in Italy before moving in 1922 to Paris to study with Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. There he soon met André Masson, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and others who encouraged his early development of highly abstracted and simplified figural works, such as the small plaster Gazing Head (1928–29; New York, Museum of Modern Art), a thin, barely articulated slab that uncannily suggests human presence. The mixed-media constructions he began in 1930 prompted André Breton to invite him into the official surrealist group. During the next five years, Giacometti’s talent exploded as he created some of his most important works, which delve into disquieting themes of sexuality, violence, and desire. Endowing the art object with powers of a tribal fetish, the phallic Disagreeable Object (1931; New York, Museum of Modern Art), a seductive polished wood object intended to be handled by the observer, undercuts its proffered pleasure with “disagreeable” pointed protrusions. Sexual assault and voyeurism seem to mingle in the bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932; New York, Museum of Modern Art), which reduces a horrifying sight to a painfully mangled conglomeration of biomorphic shapes. Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) (1934; New York, Museum of Modern Art) concluded Giacometti’s surrealist phase. This highly stylized female nude, whose hands encircle empty space as she stares in bewildered incomprehension into the unknowable, returned the artist to figural endeavors. Now expelled from the surrealist movement, he translated the problem of loss into the philosophical dilemma of being and nothingness.
For most of a decade, in Paris and during the wartime years in Geneva, Giacometti struggled to find appropriate form for his new interests. In figural sculptures, he whittled away at the physical body until it sometimes collapsed in dust. He also reengaged his interest in two-dimensional media, working toward a personal vision of immobilized figures engulfed in anxious linear swirls. His efforts quickly came to fruition after he returned in Paris in 1945. Invigorated by its creative milieu and a friendship with existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, he soon initiated the work that quickly established an international recognition and determined his subsequent practice. Disquieting bronze figures, singly or in groups, remain rigid or move hesitantly, their roughly worked surfaces suggesting physical and psychological ravages. Much more massive bases than would seem necessary often weigh them down, as if limiting autonomous action. Man Pointing (1947; London, Tate) implies the difficulty of even so simple an action. In The Chariot (1950; New York, Museum of Modern Art), a thread-thin woman balances precariously on a two-wheeled vehicle, melding classical allusion, surrealist mystery, and existential unease. With time, Giacometti’s practice became even more intense. During his final decade, he sculpted harrowing portrait heads, while paintings became claustrophobic in their grayed, almost unreadable atmospheres. See also .
His brother Diego Giacometti (1902–85), a sculptor of surrealist objects as well, also served as his brother’s assistant. Later, he became known for inventive, custom-made, metalwork furnishings and decorative items.
An enthusiast for the work of Piet Mondrian, Fritz Glarner modified his hero’s strict adherence to the vertical and horizontal and to primary colors by employing slanted lines and grayed hues. This framework of “relational painting” offered the freedom to produce lively, intricate compositions, often presented within circular formats. Glarner was born in Switzerland and died there, but he lived most of his life abroad. He spent much of his early life in Naples before relocating in 1923 to Paris, where he soon made the acquaintance of Mondrian and other advanced painters. He did not immediately abandon representation but slowly modified his approach toward abstraction. In the mid-1930s, he moved to New York, where he exhibited with the American Abstract Artists. Like a relatively few other artists, such as Burgoyne Diller and Carl Holty, he kept alive an enthusiasm for geometric abstraction that resurfaced in the work of hard-edge and minimal artists. He remained in the New York area for some three decades but returned to Switzerland in the years before his death.
Among the art community’s most powerful social critics of the post–World War II period, American painter Leon Golub frequently drew subjects from contemporaneous atrocities, torture, oppression, and terrorism. Sidestepping propaganda, he drew attention to evil as an ineradicable and tragic human failing. Born in Chicago, in 1942 he received a BA in art history from the University of Chicago. Following military service, he studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a BFA in 1949 and an MFA the following year. There, he met painter Nancy Spero (1926–2009), a Cleveland native who shared his worldview and devised her own forceful responses to its injustices, particularly with respect to the role of women. They married in 1951.
As the leading figure in the Monster Roster group of Chicago Imagist artists, who held the view that art must engage the realities of experience, in the 1950s Golub drew on tribal and classical art for inspiration. His heavily encrusted, battered figural images suggested not only physical ravages, but also psychological and spiritual pain. From 1959 until 1964, Golub and Spero lived mostly in Europe, hoping to find a more receptive audience for their difficult art. While there, Golub began working with acrylic paints and on a larger scale, facilitating his 1960s development of monumental works that accommodate a flatter and more linear structure than he had previously employed. Unsparing drawing eventually underscored the intimate character of the heinous events he depicted. After relocating to New York, he frequently addressed Vietnam War subjects. Subsequently, Mercenaries (begun in 1975) and Interrogations (begun in 1981) dealt in general terms with political, racial, and social forms of cruelty, coercion, and domination. These often suggest that persecutors act in thrall to forces beyond their control. In the 1990s, Golub retreated somewhat from the tumult of events to instead adopt a more contemplative point of view, couched in a more symbolic language than he had previously employed, but no less existentially resonant.
After graduating from the Art Institute in 1949, Spero studied for a year in Paris before returning to Chicago. During the years abroad with her husband, she produced a series of so-called black paintings that initiated her long examination of women’s experience in a male-dominated world. Then, more or less relinquishing painting as such, she turned to drawing to create critical responses to the Vietnam War. Becoming a leader in initiating feminist art in New York, she achieved an authoritative realization of her subsequent interests in the Codex Artaud (1971–73) series of collaged and painted scrolls that underscored her position as a woman and as a left-leaning political activist. Texts from the writings of outcast French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud accompany images related to sexual and political oppression. Her later work mostly continued this format, as she created scrolls, or sometimes non-linear arrangements, that adroitly mingle texts, symbols, and historical allusions within technically unconventional combinations of collage, hand stamps, and painted representations. These achieve powerful energy in their active forms, discontinuous compositions, and unexpected juxtapositions. From the late 1980s, she often worked directly on the wall, creating a number of permanent murals. With time, she increasingly lost interest in women as victims, instead stressing physical, erotic, and transcendental powers.
Born in Cuba, Félix González-Torres grew up there and in Puerto Rico and studied at the University of Puerto Rico before moving to New York in 1979. In 1983, he received a BFA in photography from the Pratt Institute and, four years later, an MFA, also in photography, from a joint program of the International Center of Photography and New York University. Photography remained an important part of his practice, but he became especially known for installations that entwine restrained and formal beauty with the ephemeral nature of existence, the passage of time, and the pain of loss. As a gay man, his bittersweet sensibility owed much to the AIDS epidemic that all too soon took his own life. Questioning even the permanence of art, as well as commonly held notions of value and ownership, his best-known installations feature take-away components, often candies in brightly colored wrappings or stacks of printed paper. In the 1990s, he designed “sculptures” fashioned from suspended strings of electric light bulbs, which he allowed to burn out during the course of an exhibition. His most striking and widely known work, a 1991 billboard, presents his greatly enlarged black-and-white photograph of a messy, unmade bed. Two adjacent pillows retain the impress of its recent occupants’ heads. Conceived in response to the death of his longtime partner, the poignant picture nevertheless stands as a more general metaphor for sorrow and loneliness. See also ; .
Among leading abstract expressionists, Arshile Gorky remained the most firmly tied to surrealist precedents. The biomorphic forms he adapted to new expressive ends convey intense personal experiences ranging from anguish to joy. Nearly all of his work is suffused with possibility, as pictorial elements, weaving ambiguously in space and across the picture plane, suggest more than they define. An elegantly accomplished draftsman, Gorky also ranked as a colorist of the first order. No other abstract expressionist outdid his ability to jolt the viewer’s eye with rich and sometimes startling hues.
Gorky’s signal achievements were crowded into the space of only about four years, and he did not live to see his reputation securely established among the most important artists of his day. Born Vosdanig Adoian in conflict-ridden Armenia, in his mid-twenties he changed his name, adopting the Armenian form of Achilles followed by a surname paying homage to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. He spent much of his childhood in conditions of deprivation and displacement. Nevertheless, early visual memories—of gardens and church art, particularly—tugged at him and often found their way into his most vivid paintings. At 16, he made his way to the United States and a couple of years later embarked on the formal study of art in Boston. His early work—starting with impressionist paintings—initiated a process of recapitulating modern art’s trajectory, as all the while he worked toward an individual style. After he relocated to New York in the mid-1920s, he modeled his work on Paul Cézanne’s example and then moved on to cubism. As Gorky became acquainted with New York artists, by the end of the 1920s Stuart Davis and John Graham numbered among those particularly important to him. In the 1930s, Gorky riffed derivatively on Pablo Picasso’s still lifes but also appreciated the work of André Masson, Joan Miró, and other surrealists, some of whom he came to know personally during World War II when many fled Paris for New York. The interest of these artists he had so long emulated buoyed his confidence as he moved forward into unexplored territory. Not long after striking up a close friendship with Roberto Matta in 1940, Gorky blended memory and formal innovation in his Garden of Sochi series (c. 1940–43), still grounded in surrealist biomorphism but heralding something new. In these, mysterious rounded and sometimes attenuated shapes in black or bright hues variously float, collide, or overlap against backgrounds of a single color. Abstract structure harkening back to cubism converges with surrealist freedom. His early masterwork, the enigmatically titled The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944; Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox-Gundlach Art Gallery) reveals Gorky’s full mastery of a style that imbues surrealist biomorphism with the emotional intensity of abstract expressionism. A large and spatially complex composition, its cascade of colorful organic forms, some undeniably sexual, crowd the canvas in an intricate mélange. Line and color operate independently to create visual metaphors evoking psychic states. During the following years, Gorky further refined and distilled this approach in paintings of great originality and visual distinction. Often abstracting directly from nature, he also completed hundreds of drawings in this period, demonstrating a linear acumen unequaled among abstract expressionists.
After his first solo show in 1945, Gorky’s talent was widely recognized, and sales of his work began to alleviate the financial insecurity he had long endured. That year, he moved to a farm in Sherman, Connecticut. Despite what looked like a promising future, misfortune undermined his career. Early in 1946, his studio burned, destroying much recent work, along with his books. The next month he underwent colon cancer surgery. A long recuperation ensued. His psychic distress during this period resonates heartbreakingly in Agony (1947; New York, Museum of Modern Art), with its painfully extruded forms, hot colors, and passionate intensity. In June 1948, an automobile accident broke Gorky’s neck, and he temporarily lost the use of his painting hand. As his woes exacerbated domestic tensions that had already flared, less than three weeks later his wife left, taking along their two children. Lonely and ill, a few days later Gorky hanged himself, leaving behind a cri de coeur, “Goodbye, My Loveds,” scrawled in chalk on a picture crate. See also .
An American abstract expressionist, Adolph Gottlieb is known best for large, vertical “burst” paintings that counterpose forms suggestive of hovering celestial bodies and the earth. These had been preceded by two other important series, Pictographs and Imaginary Landscapes. Unified by Gottlieb’s search for symbolic forms commensurate with modern experience, the three series, along with other works, reveal Gottlieb’s interest in the unconscious as a generator of meaning.
Born in New York, Gottlieb was more thoroughly trained as an artist than most of his fellow abstract expressionists. He studied at several New York art schools, as well as in Paris. His figurative, expressionist early work yielded in the 1930s to a style affected by Milton Avery’s example. During a 1937–38 sojourn in the desert Southwest, he began painting more surrealist works that often reflect his appreciation of the region’s vastness and dry clarity. Constituting his first distinctly original work, the Pictographs begun in 1941 offer compartmentalized fields containing allusive abstract and pictorial elements. Like other nascent abstract expressionists, Gottlieb sought to formulate a fresh and universally legible symbolic visual language. He nevertheless drew on classical and archaic precedents, as well as recent work by such artists as Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and the biomorphic surrealists. The grid-like structure finds precedents in the work of Piet Mondrian and his followers, while the addition to this format of symbolic elements recalls Joaquín Torres-García’s 1930s inventions. Gottlieb signaled his ambitions in a 1943 statement—co-signed by Mark Rothko and published to the New York Times—calling for a “timeless and tragic” art.
In the early 1950s, Gottlieb embarked on the Imaginary Landscapes. Usually horizontal in format, these generally feature a freely brushed “earth” below a rough “horizon,” then one or more orb-like shapes floating in the “sky.” The succeeding Bursts, begun in 1957, push these landscape reminiscences toward greater simplification and abstraction. Often two vaguely defined shapes hover in a tense standoff that betokens irreconcilable dualities in moral and spiritual life. Within each series, by allowing himself wide latitude, Gottlieb avoided monotony in the formal resolution and emotional tenor of the paintings. Early and late in his career, Gottlieb also made prints, and in the 1960s he produced a number of painted sheet-metal sculptures. In addition, he designed stained-glass windows and other interior decoration for synagogues. See also .
Since antiquity, graffiti, or markings in public locations, have testified to a human desire to register presence through slogans, initials, drawings, or other inscriptions. Often anonymous, or merely signed with initials, they provide a running commentary on social and personal responses to place and context. In the late 1970s, graffiti art—or, more precisely, art that resembled current styles of public graffiti—came to be recognized in some circles, particularly among the East Village artists, as a legitimate form of esthetic expression.
An explosion of urban graffiti appeared shortly after paint became widely available in aerosol spray cans. Cartoonish versions—at this point produced almost entirely by young men who did not consider themselves fine artists—appeared widely along streets and on public transport, especially subway and train cars. Whether this work constituted public art or vandalism remains a contested subject. Nevertheless, galleries began to show art by artists who had practiced forms of public graffiti art or were influenced by it. Among them, Jean-Michel Basquiat ranks as the most important. Graffiti art ran its course before the end of the 1980s as it devolved into a matter of convention rather than commitment. Subsequently, public graffiti of this nature gradually receded in American cities, but in much of Europe it has remained a more durable practice.
Although not an abstract expressionist, painter John D. Graham contributed significantly as a theorist and writer to the origins of the movement. Numbering such young painters as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Jackson Pollock among his friends, he prodded New Yorkers to consider the advanced styles and ideas that he encountered on frequent journeys to Europe. His 1937 book, System and Dialectics of Art, remained widely influential for some years. Filled with offbeat notions, it stresses the importance of the unconscious in art and champions the esthetic value of prehistoric and tribal arts, which were then thought to be primarily of anthropological or archeological value. A vivid personality and born networker, he also fostered the growth of community among New York’s progressive artists. Additionally, married in the early 1940s to the mother of Ileana Sonnabend, Leo Castelli’s wife, he played a role in directing Castelli’s interests toward the innovative art he later championed.
Born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski (or Dombrovsky) in Kiev, Ukraine (then Russia), his early life remains obscure, at least partly because of his own autobiographical unreliability. (He officially changed his name in 1927 after he had taken up residence in New York.) As a young man, he apparently served in the Russian military. Evidently familiar with Russian avant-gardists of the early 20th century, he may also have pursued art training abroad. At the Art Students League in New York in the early 1920s, he worked with realist painter John Sloan. Through his first two decades in the United States, in his painting Graham experimented eclectically with modern styles. His most original work emerged in the 1940s as he was distancing himself from modernism. Mainly portraits, mostly of women and many imaginary, these often haunting images update the classical tradition with disorienting distortions, exposing psychological unease. In subsequent years, Graham faded from importance as he buried himself in occult philosophies. He lived abroad during his final years and died in London. See also
Known mainly as a figurative painter, during the 1950s, Colombian Enrique Grau also created distinguished abstractions indebted to abstract expressionism. A versatile figure who also worked as a sculptor, printmaker, theatrical set designer, and filmmaker, he is remembered primarily for interpretations of indigenous themes. He was born in Panama City to parents from Cartagena, where he grew up. He remained largely self-taught as an artist but worked in New York at the Art Students League during the early 1940s and subsequently in Italy. Although he died in Bogotá, during most of his career Cartagena remained his home. His well-known three-part Triptico de Cartagena de Indias (1997–98; Cartagena, Museo de Arte Moderna), an affectionate tribute to his hometown, incorporates recognizable landmarks into a charming panorama enlivened with touches of fantasy.
Grau numbered prominently among a cohort of five artists who introduced a modern spirit into Colombian art during the 1950s. Although born in Barcelona, painter Alejandro Obregón (1920–92) spent most of his life in Colombia. He lived there (but also in England) as a child. After studying art for a year in Boston, he lived intermittently in Spain and France but returned permanently to Colombia in the mid-1950s and made his home in Cartagena for more than two decades before his death. His paintings make use of symbolic and allusive elements, often related to distinctively Colombian life and geography, within a context of luminous, often dramatic color harmonies.
Edgar Negret (1920–2012) and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar (1922–2004) made their reputations as abstract sculptors. A native of Popayán, Negret trained as an artist in Cali and spent much of his time between the late 1940s and early 1960s in New York and Europe. From 1963, he made his home in Bogotá. During the 1950s, he abandoned his formative stone work, recalling precedents by Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and Henry Moore, in favor of a constructivist approach in welded metal. These works make use of varied shapes—geometric and organic, volumetric and flat—unified and enlivened with bright hues.
Ramírez Villamizar also specialized in constructivist sculptures, largely welded metal but in a wide range of other materials, and frequently colored their surfaces. He often worked on a monumental scale. His generally angular works, with planes and linear elements jutting sharply through space, create rigorous and highly energetic effects. Admiration for timeless spiritual values embedded in the forms of pre-Columbian art and architecture inspired much of his vocabulary. Born in Pamplona, he studied architecture at the national university in Bogotá before taking up painting in the early 1940s. While continuing to paint, from the late 1950s he made relief sculptures before turning during the following decade to the techniques of his mature career. He intermittently resided for periods of time in New York and Europe from 1950 until returning permanently to Bogotá in the mid-1970s.
Younger than his four colleagues, with whom he shared reciprocal interests, Fernando Botero (1932–) stands today as Colombia’s internationally best-known artist. His pudgy figural paintings and sculptures for the most part offer a cheerful tongue-in-cheek commentary on modern life, although he sometimes addresses more serious and politically charged topics, notably including an extensive series (2005) of paintings and drawings dealing with offenses at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War. He trained in Madrid and in Florence and has subsequently lived during most of his career in Europe, primarily in Paris. However, he has kept in touch with Colombian art during frequent sojourns in Bogotá and continues to visit his hometown of Medellín on a regular basis. Early work offered dark existential and psychological content, sometimes embedded within quotations from Old Master paintings, and rendered with painterly, expressionist brushwork. While living in New York during the 1960s, Botero adopted a more insouciant tone as he applied to his taste for inflated figural types the smoothly painted technique of his mature career.
Second in reputation only to his friend Mark Tobey among artists of the Northwest School, self-taught American painter Morris Graves developed a distinctive form of nature-based imagery, usually featuring small and vulnerable creatures, particularly birds. Born in Oregon, he grew up in Seattle. While working as a seaman during young adulthood, he visited Asia, whetting an interest in mystic spirituality. After returning to the Seattle area, he lived for substantial periods of time in near isolation along the wooded coast. Soon after he began to paint in the mid-1930s, he met Tobey and John Cage, who encouraged his efforts, provided direction, and spurred Graves’s interest in Zen Buddhism. Toward the end of the decade, he assembled the basic components of his visionary approach. Like the nascent abstract expressionists of the period, Graves was interested in surrealist-derived expression of the unconscious and in universal symbols. However, although some works verge on total abstraction, he preferred generalized, nature-based imagery presented within abstract fields. His frequent use of water-based paints on paper reinforced an ethereal sensibility. A 1942 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art brought national recognition. Graves traveled widely during the post–World War II years and lived for extended periods in Ireland. In 1964, he moved permanently to a large property in the redwood forest of Northern California. There, he devoted much of his attention to gardening, while also painting ornamental still lifes. During the early 1960s, he produced small sculptures assembled primarily from metal, stone, and glass elements.
A New York art critic who championed abstract expressionist, then color field and hard-edge painting, he offered a notable theoretical framework to justify his advocacy. Believing that progress in modern art demonstrated a gradual evolution toward the essence of each medium, he concluded that flatness above all characterized painting. As he came to disparage not only representation but also any interruption of the pictorial surface, he provided an important impetus for the transition from the disorder of abstract expressionism to the purity of color field and hard-edge painting. Although a powerful force in the American art world for more than two decades, he came to be sharply criticized, even reviled, for his reductionist views. A New York native, Greenberg graduated in 1930 from Syracuse University with a degree in literature. During the subsequent Depression years, he worked for a family business and then for federal government agencies. In the late 1930s, he began writing cultural criticism from a leftist point of view. His most important early essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) provides a spirited defense of high art as a bulwark against the vulgarity of mass culture. While editing or writing for several publications and then embarking on a teaching career, he wrote copiously and persuasively about the artists he approved. During the 1940s, he focused on abstract expressionists, particularly Jackson Pollock. However, within a few years, he came to value formal criteria alone, seeing all other aspects of art as detrimental to esthetic success. Consequently, in the 1950s he promoted color field and hard-edge painting (which he conflated in 1964 under the rubric of post-painterly abstraction), as seen in the work of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and a particular favorite, Helen Frankenthaler, his partner of several years during the 1950s. Greenberg’s critical dominance began to erode in the 1960s as pop art, conceptualism, and other new tendencies more attuned to art’s social and psychological possibilities changed the conversation. His dogmatic pronouncements came to seem irrelevant, although the subtlety of his argumentation usually was lost. See also ; ; ; .
In high-spirited, often hilarious “sculpto-pictoramas” (as he has dubbed them), pop artist Red Grooms combines painted and sculptured elements to comment on the wonders and absurdities of contemporary urban life. The best-known example, Ruckus Manhattan (1975–76, with later additions; disassembled), presents an enormous conglomeration of New York landmarks. (The World Trade Center stands 30 feet tall.) As is common in his work, these expressionistically distorted features crowd together at odd angles. The city’s pulsing vitality, its oddities, and its grandeur come together in Grooms’s distinctively zany vision, conditioned by his affection for circuses, carnivals, and Hollywood extravaganzas. As for its inhabitants, with the eye of a great cartoonist, he skewers all social types, although as individuals they generally receive his sympathy. Born in Nashville, Grooms studied art there, in Chicago, and in New York before working briefly in Provincetown with Hans Hofmann (whose teaching he found uncongenial). In the late 1950s, he participated eagerly in happenings staged in New York, and in the early 1960s he also took up filmmaking. Throughout his career, he has maintained a prolific output of prints. Mimi Gross, then his wife, collaborated on the constructions and films of the 1960s and 1970s.
Known particularly for blocky wood sculptures representing one or more twisting figures in motion—dancers, acrobats, and children numbered among his favorite themes—Chaim Gross ranks as the principal exponent of direct carving in William Zorach’s wake. Gross, too, particularly admired African sculpture, which he collected, as well as other forms of “primitivism,” cubism, and the work of Constantin Brancusi. Originally from Galicia, the border region between Poland and Ukraine but then under the jurisdiction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he began his training in Vienna and, more briefly, Budapest before resettling in New York in 1921. As he continued his studies, he worked for a short time with Robert Laurent. By the late 1920s, he had formulated a distinctive approach that remained constant for another quarter of a century. Generally lighthearted in tone, his generalized figures form tight compositions, usually arranged in a roughly columnar form. In the 1950s, he also began casting work in bronze. Reflecting the inherent properties of this medium, these works often feature figures in arrangements as open as the others are closed, although some extend the esthetic of his carved sculptures. In most, impressionistic surfaces contrast with the more polished ones common to the wood sculptures. He executed a number of the bronzes as commissions for public places. Also a painter in his early years, Gross continued to work as a printmaker, draftsman, and watercolorist throughout his career. Sculptor Mimi Gross (1940–) is his daughter. See also .
Founded in New York in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls organization protests art world inequities, especially the under-representation of women artists in museums and exhibitions. When appearing in public, its members wear gorilla masks to leaven their serious purpose with an element of ridiculous humor and to draw more attention to their cause. The masks serve also to shield individual identity in order to protect them from retaliation and to emphasize that they are interested in issues, not individual careers and personalities. The group originally came together to protest the Museum of Modern Art’s near exclusion of women from an international exhibition of recent painting and sculpture. Besides demonstrating, the Girls advance their agenda with posters, handbills, magazine advertisements, and billboards. Produced in 1989, the best-known poster, directed at the Metropolitan Museum, reproduces a painting from its collection, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s languid and sensual nude, La Grande Odalisque (1814), the woman’s head replaced by a fearsome gorilla mask. A caption sarcastically asks, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” Over the years, the group has broadened its concerns to address racism and other injustices, some outside the art world, and occasionally political issues. It has also expanded across the United States and internationally.
A madcap American heiress devoted to modern art, during the 1940s at her New York gallery she provided exposure to important European surrealists and abstract artists, while also introducing many young American artists. These included leading abstract expressionists, such as Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Later, she lived in Venice, where she transformed her home on the Grand Canal into a museum for her collection. When opened to the public in 1951, it offered the finest ensemble of modern art to be seen in Europe at that time.
When she came of age, the New York–born Marguerite Guggenheim inherited considerable, but not unlimited, wealth from the estate of her father, whose life had been lost in the sinking of the Titanic. Her uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, founder of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, anticipated her interests in collecting modern art. Guggenheim lived mostly abroad during the 1920s, a period during which she made the acquaintance of leading avant-garde figures in Paris and London. In 1938, she opened a London Gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, where she exhibited the work of Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henry Moore, among others. Barely six weeks before the outbreak of World War II, she closed her financially unprofitable gallery. Soon, she headed to Paris to purchase art for a projected museum. Instead, when the conflict began, to aid her friends, she bought their art in bulk. In 1941, she fled to New York with her collection. Ernst accompanied her, and they married a few months later. (Guggenheim’s third—and last—marriage, this one lasted only a couple of years.)
In 1942, she opened Art of This Century, for the next five years the most important modern art gallery in New York. In addition to functioning as a commercial outlet, her large space also comprised rooms devoted to permanent exposure of abstract and surrealist artists. Its interior, designed by the visionary architect and sculptor Frederick Kiesler, numbered among the most original spaces of its day. When it closed, she left for Venice and continued to enlarge her collection. Before her death, she donated her home and collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which continues to administer the villa as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Displaying her legacy as well as subsequent acquisitions and temporary exhibitions, it remains among important European venues for modern and contemporary art.
American painter Philip Guston, a leading figure in three successive art movements, started his career as an accomplished figurative painter. He then numbered among the central participants in abstract expressionism. Finally, and most influentially, he adopted a crude style that foreshadowed a general mid-1970s renewal of interest in representation and, in particular, the emergence of “Bad” painting, New Image art, and neo-expressionism.
Born in Montreal, he grew up in Los Angeles, where he befriended Jackson Pollock during high school. Although Guston had drawn assiduously since early adolescence, he found art school uncongenial and remained more or less self-taught as a painter. By introducing him to modern and Renaissance painting, Lorser Feitelson provided his real education as an artist. After visiting Mexico, where he admired the achievements of the Mexican muralists, Guston began painting murals for a federal art program, at first in California but soon in New York. He, too, addressed themes of social justice, as he interpreted their example in the light of Renaissance grandeur and order, as well as modern simplification and patterning. Through most of the 1940s, he taught in the Midwest, while refining his figuration in easel paintings that reflected a turn toward more private themes. Before returning to New York in 1950, he had begun to shift to an abstract expressionist approach. His characteristic shimmering canvases, featuring brushstrokes generally coalescing near the center, number among the movement’s most lyrical. Their mood and delicate coloring foreshadow aspects of color field painting. However, as the 1950s drew to a close, his hues darkened, stifling the amiable character of his work with a sense of disillusion and foreboding, while in some works his brushstrokes cling together in rudimentary representational forms.
As he then turned his back on the financial and critical success he had achieved, first as a figurative painter and then as an abstract expressionist, he moved permanently to Woodstock, New York, in 1967. Adopting cartoonish representation, he dwelled on a bleak assessment of current social and, eventually, personal conditions. His first show of this work, in 1970, stunned an uncomprehending art community, which deemed this tasteless approach a betrayal of esthetic values and idealistic goals. The artist, however, believed that his prior concentration on personal expression through abstract means had become no longer viable in the face of the Vietnam War, civil rights issues, and other social and political concerns. In response, he developed a highly distinctive and disturbing iconography. Many of these paintings remain unsettling after half a century. During the initial phase, his imagery concentrated on common subjects of daily life—shoes, light bulbs, and detritus—along with ghostly, triangularly headed Ku Klux Klan emblems. In some, stacks of body parts resonate with photographs of Nazi death camp horrors. Soon, he introduced an autobiographical element, as a disembodied lima-bean shape came to represent his tormented and brooding persona, beset by anxiety, illness, notions of evil, and fear of death. Throughout this third phase, Guston’s meanings remain ambiguous but haunting, speaking to the viewer’s inner consciousness with a voice that eludes rationality. However much his work may have interested the next generation, it defied imitation. Only Peter Saul, who independently developed his own brand of visceral social criticism, rivaled Guston’s alarming punch.
In the end, Guston’s career exhibited more continuity than seemed immediately apparent. Throughout, his art confronted the woes of the individual’s plight in the world, while also upholding the formal, structural, and painterly principles that have sustained painting since the Renaissance. However crude his late works appear, they maintain the artist’s foundational commitments to large scale, painterly brushwork, and an air of high seriousness. See also .
An avant-garde Japanese group, Gutai overlapped with and in some cases anticipated such post–World War II Western interests as abstract expressionism, art autre, conceptual art, fluxus, happenings, installation art, performance art, and Zero. Its eponymous journal served as an instrument of international exchange for disruptive esthetics and the elimination of borders between art and life. Gutai’s leading participant, painter Jiro Yoshihara (1905–72), who responded to Western abstract and surrealist art before the war, reacted afterward against Japan’s conservative and constrained situation. In a small town near Osaka, he spearheaded formation of the Gutai art association in 1954 and, two years later, produced a manifesto. A businessman as well as an artist, his wealth supported and sustained much of the group’s activity, which generally favored ephemeral events over saleable objects. Nevertheless, he continued to paint simplified abstractions inspired by Japanese calligraphy and Zen Buddhist practices. After his death, the movement dwindled, and many of its 59 adherents gave renewed attention to forms of painting. Gutai means “embodiment,” but its artists showed less interest in physical objects than in embodiment of spirit. As the manifesto put it, “The human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other.” In this pursuit, they engaged in outlandish escapades, often focusing on the body as a means of expression, intended to shock complacent viewers into new perceptions of reality. Other important participants in the movement include Akira Kanayma (1924–2006) and his wife Atsuko Tanaka (1932–2005), Takesada Matsutani (1937–), Sadamasa Motonaga (1922–2011), Saburo Murakami (1925–96), Shozo Shimamoto (1928–2013), and Kazuo Shiraga (1924–2008).
A southerner with a social conscience, painter and printmaker Robert Gwathmey ranks as the first important white artist to describe, with sympathetic attention, the social situation of African Americans. In a clear, descriptive style making use of modernist formal innovations, he offered dignity and substance to rural field hands and urban laborers alike. Considering himself above all an observer of contemporary experience, he also rendered other subjects, including Caucasian Americans—not infrequently seen from satirical perspectives—and, later, still lifes. Born near Richmond, Virginia, Gwathmey studied from 1926 until 1930 at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He then taught for a few years in Philadelphia and in Pittsburgh before moving to New York. In 1938, dissatisfied with his progress, he destroyed nearly all earlier work and embarked on his extended treatment of black life. While drawn to the work of such artists as Honoré Daumier, Jean-François Millet, and the Mexican muralists, who treated the lives of the downtrodden, stylistically he made use of 20th-century esthetic predilections, such as flat patterning and expressive color. In the late 1930s and 1940s, he sometimes adopted images from documentary photographs taken by his wife, Rosalie Gwathmey (1908–2001). (In the politically repressive 1950s, she abandoned photography for textile design.) A member of radical groups since his student days, Gwathmey remained alert to evolving politics, later supporting the civil rights and antiwar movements. As suited his democratic instincts, he also pioneered in the use of a print technique, known as serigraphy (a form of silk screen), in order to make works of art available at relatively low cost. During his final years, he resided on eastern Long Island, in the Hamptons, in an acclaimed house designed by his son Charles Gwathmey (1938–2009), who numbered among the foremost architects of his generation.