At an early date, London’s Independent Group ventured into reconsideration of visual culture in its varied manifestations—from contemporary painting to advertising, fashion, and Hollywood movies. Against the drabness of British postwar life, it championed a less inhibited, more vital and up-to-date mode of being. Although the multi-disciplinary discussion group remained in existence only from 1952 to 1955, it played a key role in reevaluating the relationship between fine art and lived experience. In this respect, it played a generative role in the development of pop art. Its members included Lawrence Alloway, architectural critic and historian Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton (1922–2011), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005), architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and William Turnbull. Centered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the group organized exhibitions and lecture series that brought a new point of view to British art. The most important of the exhibitions, “This Is Tomorrow,” opened in 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery after the group had formally disbanded. (Its members remained in contact for some years.) Featured in that show, Hamilton’s satirical collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing (1956; Tübingen, Kunsthalle), has been widely regarded as the Independent Group’s iconic work, while the artist himself is thought to have originated the term “pop art.” Embodying the artist’s proto-pop sensibility, it pictures a body builder holding a lollipop (labeled “pop”) instead of a weight-lifting bar. Nearby, a nude woman lolls seductively on a couch. Their living room setting includes a television, a reel-to-reel tape deck, a framed blow-up of the cover of a romance magazine, and other images drawn from advertising inducements to the good life, American style. Scots-born sculptor Paolozzi, who had earlier been identified with the Geometry of Fear group, provided an important spark at its outset for the Independent Group with his presentation of images from American mass media, including advertising and comic books. Among the first artists anywhere to create work that identifiably fits the notion of pop art, for a few years he concentrated on collages and prints, but by the end of the 1950s, he had turned his attention once again to sculpture. A longtime fascination with the intersection between human and machine forms finds vivid realization in his monumental 1995 Newton (London, British Library forecourt), a mechanistic being (based on a William Blake print) who subjects the world to mathematics.
A vigorous but short-lived 1940s amalgam of abstract painting and Northwest Indian motifs, Indian Space painting anticipated abstract expressionists’ interests in combining non-representational form with symbolic language. Drawing also on surrealist enthusiasm for the “primitive,” these painters strove to suggest universal meanings in colorful works that generally elide figure–ground distinctions. In contrast to the regional sensibility of the Northwest School, this movement grew entirely from New York concerns. Of the eight participants in the group’s only exhibition in 1946, Peter Busa (1914–85) remains the best known. He arrived in New York from Pittsburgh in 1933 and soon became acquainted with Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and other avant-garde figures. Through Roberto Matta, he took up the practice of automatic drawing. Like others in the Indian Space group, by the mid-1940s he worked with freely drawn, organic shapes that carry mythic overtones and often ape Northwest Indian designs. Sometimes he also created paintings in a more gestural abstract expressionist mode, and later he added geometric abstractions to his interests. From 1962, he taught at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he died, although he also maintained a residence in Provincetown on Cape Cod.
Will Barnet (1911–2012) and Steve Wheeler (1912–92) declined to take part in the exhibition, but their paintings number among the most accomplished Indian Space works. For Barnet, Indian Space painting figured only as a way station in a long and successful career devoted mostly to other interests. Born near Boston, he studied there and in New York during the 1930s. In 1936, he became head of the Art Students League’s print workshop, a position that brought him into contact with a wide range of artists and cemented printmaking in several media as an integral part of his output. During the 1940s, his early social realism gave way to abstracted representation, often suggesting the appeal of Pablo Picasso’s work. The Indian Space approach drew his participation later in the decade, and he worked mostly abstractly through the 1950s. Subsequently, adroitly manipulated pattern and color produced cool and elegant portraits, interiors, and occasional landscapes. The same formal characteristics mark a final group of abstractions, gracious organic works of his final decade as an artist. Wheeler’s artistic trajectory differed. Something of an eccentric loner with mystically tinged aspirations, he grew up near Pittsburgh and arrived in New York in 1932. While studying with Hofmann and others, he became acquainted with Busa and nascent abstract expressionists. Inspired particularly by Paul Klee, among other modernist masters, he developed a method of juxtaposing intricate, energetically disposed, brightly hued elements on a pictorial surface. In the mid-1940s, he ranked among the most admired young artists in New York, but abstract expressionism’s heroic dimensions and more painterly surfaces all but washed him from view during the 1950s. For some years, he continued to paint sparkling abstractions—now usually no longer indebted to aboriginal signs—but achieved little recognition and died in obscurity.
American pop artist Robert Indiana remains best known for his LOVE emblem—the letters arranged in a square, with the “O” on a slant. An icon around the world, it first appeared as a design for a 1965 Museum of Modern Art Christmas card. Subsequent formats, in both two and three dimensions, have ranged from monumental sculptures to a U.S. postage stamp. The benign exhortation resonated with 1960s hippie culture, but with no little irony, the bold graphic quality tied it to commercial advertising. The LOVE design exemplifies Indiana’s predominant interest of the 1960s, when similar verbal imperatives—EAT ranked as a favorite, closely followed by DIE—characterized his painting.
Born Robert Clark, in 1958 the artist changed his name to acknowledge his native state. Following three years of military service, he graduated in 1953 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, then spent an additional year studying in Edinburgh. Upon his return, he settled in New York. With the encouragement of Ellsworth Kelly, he moved to a Lower East Side enclave where neighbors included James Rosenquist, Jack Youngerman, and others intent on escaping abstract expressionism’s orbit. Before the end of the decade, he adopted a distinctive, brightly colored, hard-edged approach to incorporating American sloganeering within geometric designs. In these, Indiana also pioneered the use of language as a central element within visual art. In addition, he made assemblages and freestanding sculptures, mostly from scavenged materials, and occasionally used light bulbs to accent the verbal content of his paintings. Raising questions about American identity and values while also often addressing social, historical, and literary topics, his work suggests more ambitious intentions than commonly surfaced among pop artists. In 1978, Indiana moved permanently to his former summer residence on Vinalhaven, a Maine island accessible only by water or air. Subsequently, his achievements have included 18 paintings inspired by the work of early American modernist Marsden Hartley (the Hartley Elegies; 1989–94), an extended series of sculptures assembled from found objects, and a group of paintings mandating “PEACE.”
Ensembles that aim to engulf the viewer in a comprehensive visual environment emerged as a distinct tendency known as installation art only in the 1950s and 1960s, but precedents abound. Many architectural interiors throughout the history of art suggest similar intentions in their attention to decorative embellishment. More appositely, numerous modern artists of the early 20th century—especially those interested in assemblage—at times responded to similar motives. Futurists, constructivists, and surrealists all experimented with spatial environments, while the Merzbau works of Kurt Schwitters epitomize the tendency. In its more specific, post–World War II manifestation, installation art grew from varied impulses centered on reclaiming art’s relevance to life, as opposed to creating “pure” works of fine art. Spectator participation and investigation of relationships—both spatial and human—played important roles in this quest to devalue the object. Ephemeral by nature, installations cease to exist when a gallery mounts its next show. Often, their continued presence depends on photographic documentation. Environments cobbled together for happenings by Allan Kaprow and others offer early examples. Sculptural ensembles by Red Grooms, Edward Kienholz, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and George Segal heightened interest in taking art off the wall. The 1970s and early 1980s witnessed the heyday of installation art as a popular practice, often allied with postminimalism. Sometimes artists sold component pieces of installations, but for the most part, installation art of that period responded to an anti-commercial imperative widespread in the counterculture of the time. Although installation art lost much of its appeal during the more market-oriented later 1980s, the practice never disappeared and remains today an option for exploratory art. On the other hand, before the end of the 20th century, installation also had become a codified category within high-profile international art fairs, themselves transitory events, as a theatrical mechanism for promoting careers.
“Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight against Show.” So noted the caption for a January 1951 Life photograph of abstract expressionist painters. The name stuck. Taken by star staff photographer Nina Leen, the picture followed a public tiff between progressive artists and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In response to planning for a major exhibition titled “American Painting Today 1950,” artists who felt offended by the conservative tone of the show’s jury objected in a letter that was published on the front page of the New York Times in May 1950. Drafted largely by Adolph Gottlieb, in consultation with Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and others, the statement was signed by 18 painters. (Although not among the official signatories, 10 sculptors also endorsed the letter.) Sensing a good story in the dust-up, Life ran a picture of the dissenters, along with a report on the show. As the only formal group portrait of core abstract expressionists, the photograph has become an iconic image. Although the artists never used the name—and in fact objected even to being characterized as a group—the Life publicity helped to legitimize abstract expressionism in the public mind.
Of the original signatories, the photograph records 15: William Baziotes, James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Jimmy Ernst, Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Newman, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, Hedda Sterne (1910–2011), Clyfford Still, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Three, Fritz Bultman (1919–85), Hans Hofmann, and Weldon Kees (1914–55), were out of town. Not all the important abstract expressionist painters were represented. Philip Guston, Franz Kline, and Lee Krasner, for example, did not sign the letter or appear in the photograph. Sculptors who approved the letter included Louise Bourgeois, Herbert Ferber, David Hare, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, Theodore Roszak, and David Smith.