Cuban-born, multi-racial, internationalist artist Wifredo Lam fused the spirit of his native land with Western modern art. The son of a Chinese father and Cuban mother of African and European descent, he trained as an artist in Havana before leaving for Europe in 1923. In Madrid, he continued his studies while also becoming widely acquainted with both Old Master painting and modern developments. After fighting with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, he moved to Paris in 1938. There he befriended Pablo Picasso and other leading artists, as well as André Breton and his surrealist circle. As World War II threatened Paris, in 1940 he decamped to the relative safety of Marseille. From there, the following year he sailed to Martinique, along with Breton, André Masson, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others before continuing on to Cuba. There, newly in contact with Afro-Cuban traditions and the Santería religion, his work flowered as he fused surrealism with the island’s spiritual vitality and visual fecundity. His best-known painting, The Jungle (1943; New York, Museum of Modern Art) teems with semi-figurative, abstracted imagery. Human forms merge with botanical elements and African masks in a colorful tapestry that bears comparison with Jackson Pollock’s contemporaneous paintings and other early advances toward abstract expressionism. In the mid-1940s, encounters with voodoo in Haiti enlarged his exposure to Caribbean mysticism. Around the same time, he began frequent visits to New York, where he became acquainted with burgeoning abstract expressionists. In 1952, he returned permanently to Paris, but he continued to visit Cuba. The more spacious paintings of subsequent years feature fantastic hybrids, abstracted human forms morphing into animal or vegetal elements. After 1960, Lam worked much of the time at his studio in Italy, near Genoa. In later years, he enlarged his creative range by making sculpture and prints.
American abstract expressionist sculptor Ibram Lassaw remains best known for intricate metal works featuring vertical and horizontal linear elements interwoven in space, often within roughly boxy profiles. Reflecting his Zen Buddhist–influenced belief that “man is part of nature’s organic whole,” they form a rough counterpart to Mark Tobey’s similarly motivated “white line” paintings. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Russian parents, in 1921 he settled with his family in New York, where he trained as an artist. In the early 1930s, while working mostly with biomorphic plaster forms, he numbered among the first American sculptors to abandon representation. He soon helped to found the American Abstract Artists and later served as the organization’s president. Friendly with Arshile Gorky in the 1930s and then with other abstract expressionist innovators, he shared their interests in conveying meaningful psychic and philosophical content in forms that broke with past art. After learning welding techniques while serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he extended constructivist precedents by fusing metal rods into lattice-like structures, reaching his mature style by about 1950. He gave varied colors to his irregular, textured surfaces by treating them with chemicals or combining different alloys. Beginning in the 1960s, he also created monumental sculptures from intersecting sheet-metal shapes. In addition, he experimented with plastics and other unconventional materials, produced paintings, and, especially in later years, made colorful abstract prints that often recapitulate the rhythms of the webbed sculptures. After summering during the 1950s in the Springs section of East Hampton, Long Island, he moved there permanently in 1962. See also .
Sometimes less precisely known as Hispanic American art, Latino American art has played an increasingly prominent role in the United States since people of Central and South American descent, along with Puerto Ricans and others from the Caribbean, have grown in numbers during the late 20th century. For much of the Southwest and West, of course, the Spanish-speaking presence is nothing new. It long pre-dates the establishment of the United States, and these territories were incorporated into the nation only in the mid-19th century. Puerto Rico became an American territory in 1898. However, these areas’ rich culture, based on Spanish precedents, received little attention in mainstream considerations of American art.
Latino art played almost no part in the national art dialogue until after World War II, and it was not until the 1960s and 1970s, when racial, ethnic, and gender identity became subjects of widespread interest, that Latino artists asserted their place within the American art community. Posters and other forms of graphic art have played an important role in expressing Latino culture, along with its ideals and demands, while Latinos have more generally contributed importantly to the rise of a multicultural point of view in American art. As was also the case with some African American and women artists, certain Latino artists have preferred to participate in mainstream currents with little reference to their Latino identity, but numerous others have asserted the legitimacy of their heritage.
Among those in the first group, which includes Félix González-Torres, Ana Mendieta, and Manuel Neri, displaced Cuban Rafael Soriano (1920–2015), who trained in Havana, created semi-abstract, light-filled, vaguely surrealistic paintings. He lived in Miami after leaving Cuba in 1962. An earlier Cuban immigrant, who specializes in geometric abstractions, Carmen Herrera (1915–) has lived in New York since 1939, except for a few years in Paris after World War II. Little known until the 1990s, she has since received considerable critical attention.
Other Latino artists, such as Judy Baca, Rafael Ferrer, and Pepón Osorio, remain intentionally connected to their lineage. Also in this group, Luis Jimenez (1940–2006), born in El Paso, Texas, to a family of Mexican origin, specialized in flamboyant, monumental, polychromed fiberglass sculptures usually depicting Southwestern, American Indian, or Latino themes, including cowboys, dancers, and laborers. A 1964 graduate of the University of Texas, he responded to the Mexican muralists’ spirit and objectives, as well as to American popular culture. Many of his works are sited in public venues.
Also of Mexican parentage, artist, cultural critic and activist, writer, and curator Amalia Mesa-Bains (1943–) was born in Santa Clara, California. She graduated in 1966 from San Jose State University with a major in painting before earning an MA in interdisciplinary education from San Francisco State University and, finally, in 1983, a PhD in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. Since 1975, she has created altar-like installations that reverberate with Mexican Day of the Dead commemorations and intertwine spirituality with politics.
Devoting his career primarily to public murals—he is credited with more than 100—activist artist and educator Victor Oachoa (1948–) has been a leader in San Diego’s Latino art community since the early 1970s. Born in Los Angeles, at seven he moved to Tijuana when his Mexican family was deported by federal immigration officials. After returning to California as a teenager, he graduated from San Diego State University in 1974. While still a student, he played an instrumental role in the 1970 founding of San Diego’s Chicano Park, today reputed to harbor the largest array of outdoor murals in the country. Soon after, he co-founded Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego’s Balboa Park. His murals center on the history of Mexican culture from the pre-Columbian period onward in an attempt to raise public consciousness of this heritage.
Although he also creates more delicate abstract paintings, Californian Rupert García (1941–) has become best known for posters and prints characteristically pointing to issues or events of particular interest to Latinos. His eye-catching graphic style draws on modern poster tradition, the example of the Mexican muralists, and pop art. His distinctive works employ brightly colored flat shapes to delineate simple, strong, two-dimensional designs. Born just outside of Stockton to a family of Mexican origin, in 1968 he earned a BA in painting and, two years later, a master’s degree in printmaking from San Francisco State University. In 1981, he completed a second master’s degree, in art history, at the University of California, Berkeley.
The first African American artist to achieve widespread acceptance in the predominantly white art community and the first to find gallery representation in New York, painter and printmaker Jacob Lawrence made his reputation with works that portray his people and their heritage. While acutely aware of injustice and social exclusion, he nevertheless maintained a tone of sympathy rather than anger. At the same time, motivated by broadly humanitarian goals, he also addressed issues that transcend racial politics.
Born to a New Jersey family that struggled with poverty and prejudice, he also lived in Philadelphia before moving to New York in 1930. Worried about her son’s wayward behavior, his mother enrolled him in art classes at a settlement house. There he encountered Charles Alston, who quickly recognized the youngster’s talent and encouraged his development. At 16, Lawrence dropped out of school to help support his mother and siblings, but he continued to take classes at the Harlem Community Center while also educating himself in the art of Old Masters and leading modernists. Through Alston, he met Aaron Douglas, as well as other important Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. By the mid-1930s, he had put together the rudiments of his personal representational style, a jazzy combination of cubist-derived formal analysis and Henri Matisse’s color. He preferred to work in tempera, which suited his poster-like style of simplified and flattened, angular forms, along with brilliant hues. A born storyteller, he soon began a 60-panel narrative picturing “The Migration of the Negro” (1940–41; Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection, and New York, Museum of Modern Art). Tracing the epic story of African Americans relocating from the rural South to northern urban centers, the series brought acclaim and set the foundation for his subsequent career. With time, his style became richer and more subtle, but he continued to work primarily in series. These include a sequence on the abolitionist John Brown (1942), a recollection of soldiers’ participation in World War II (1946–47), and an investigation of the American struggle for freedom (1955). A notable series from the civil rights era pictures blacks and whites working together on construction projects (1968), metaphorically suggesting the building of an interracial society. A longtime teacher, in 1971 Lawrence moved permanently to Seattle to serve as a professor at the University of Washington. In 1941, Lawrence married Barbados-born still life and portrait painter Gwendolyn Knight (1913–2005). See also ; .
American painter and muralist Rico Lebrun numbers among relatively few prominent mid-20th-century artists to couch deeply felt humanistic impulses within a style related to the day’s most sophisticated tendencies. Thematically, his art generally dwells on questions of evil, atrocity, and man’s inhumanity to man. Although his use of specific symbols and narratives separates his work from abstract expressionism, his gestural brushwork acknowledges its lure, perhaps most importantly the abstracted figuration of Willem de Kooning. Born in Naples to French and Spanish parents, in his youth Lebrun soaked up the traditions of Old Master painting but had relatively little formal instruction as an artist. He came to the United States in 1924 to work as a stained-glass artist in Springfield, Illinois, but the following year relocated to New York, where he became a successful commercial artist. Abroad, reacquainted with his European heritage during the early 1930s, he found his fine art ambitions rekindled. Besides the example of Renaissance murals, the work of Francisco Goya and Pablo Picasso, among others, affected his evolving sensibility as he increasingly pondered man’s tragic plight. In 1938, he settled permanently in Southern California, where he became a leading artist and teacher. During the 1940s, his style tended toward increasing abstraction as he meditated more deeply on painful subjects, culminating in a 1947–50 Crucifixion cycle. In the mid-1950s, Holocaust themes pervaded his work. His Genesis mural at Pomona College (1961; Claremont, California) proved his last major commission. Despite somber concerns, Lebrun did not lose sight of the human condition’s potential for grandeur. A superb and prolific draftsman, Lebrun provided illustrations for a number of books. He also worked during the final two years of his life as a sculptor. See also .
Among important African American artists of his generation, Hughie Lee-Smith perhaps most savored the spirit of surrealism. Born in Florida, he grew up in Atlanta and Cleveland. He graduated in 1938 from the Cleveland School (now Institute) of Art, served as a U.S. Navy artist during World War II, and in 1953 earned a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1958, he moved to New York, but he relocated 15 years later to small-town New Jersey. Technically conservative, he used his mastery of detailed realism to create haunting scenes of mystery, loneliness, or foreboding. From the 1970s, increasing use of brighter colors, discontinuous spaces, and dramatic tonal contrasts stripped away the melancholy, offering a greater sense of urgency and an even more unsettling apprehension of the world. Over the years, his subjects tended to drift away from the immediate concerns of African Americans and toward a more general consideration of the human condition. He also fulfilled many portrait commissions. See also .
Among artists who participated in the early 20th-century’s engagement with abstraction, French painter Fernand Léger harbored from the beginning an attraction to the mechanical forms that betokened the era’s industrial character. After World War II, his work offered a rare example of a socially responsible but forward-looking art. Classicism and Marxism (he joined the Communist Party) may mix a little uneasily, but his brightly hued and even decorative images nevertheless monumentalize common people and affirm their dignity. Léger worked also in a range of other media, including book illustration, theater design, and sculpture. Born in Normandy, he trained as an architect before moving to Paris in 1900. About 25 before he started working seriously as an artist, he mastered a late impressionist style preceding the personal variant of cubism he developed around 1909. Using the fractured forms associated with that movement, he invented energetic and colorful compositions, piling up plastic forms in combination with flatter shapes. During World War I military service, which nearly cost him his life in 1916, he found himself moved by technology’s clean lines but also by the courage of fellow soldiers. Rethinking his purposes somewhat, he spent subsequent years devising dynamic arrangements suggesting urban or household life. Léger spent the World War II years in the United States. Returning to France in 1945, while also serving as an important teacher for many younger artists, he soon embarked on paeans to ordinary people, including construction workers and circus performers. In their poster-like design and unsentimental, cool demeanor, these paintings anticipate the pop art that emerged not long after the artist’s death. See also ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; .
Known mostly as a painter, American Alfred Leslie has also produced notable drawings, prints, sculptures, and films. Born and trained as an artist in New York, he first became known in the 1950s as a second-generation abstract expressionist. His large, roughly executed paintings pushed that movement’s esthetic to an exceptional level of crudity and violence. In the same decade, he numbered among the first sculptors to construct works from burly non-art components. As well, his first efforts as a filmmaker dated to this period. In 1959, he and photographer Robert Frank made a short film, Pull My Daisy—today something of a cult classic—narrated by beat writer Jack Kerouac and starring their free-spirited friends, including Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, and poet Allen Ginsberg. Ever a renegade, in the early 1960s, Leslie turned to large-scale grisaille figurative paintings that flew in the face of the era’s preference for abstraction and anticipated aspects of superrealism. After most of these confrontational works succumbed in a 1996 fire, he resumed this approach, now in color, while expanding his subjects from portraits to figurative groups that suggest narrative situations.
A spirited social critic, American painter and printmaker Jack Levine skewered venality, hypocrisy, and corruption in expressionistic images of modern life. He also treated—with greater respect—Old Testament subjects and scenes of Jewish life. Levine came of age with the abstract expressionists but loathed their art, finding it meaningless in the face of human suffering and folly. Although representational art fell out of critical favor in the 1950s and 1960s, he persevered undaunted, finding renewed respect when a younger generation became more interested in art with an overt ethical bent and in painterly techniques. Born in Boston, along with his friend Hyman Bloom, he found encouragement from art theorist, collector, and Harvard professor Denman Ross. While working for a federal art project, Levine came to public attention in 1937 with a scathing image of backroom dealing, The Feast of Pure Reason (New York, Museum of Modern Art), satirically presenting a policeman, a businessman, and a politician as contemptible representatives of the established order. Its vigorous style displays respect for the work of Honoré Daumier, Francisco Goya, and Rembrandt, as well as the art of such contemporary expressionists as George Grosz (1893–1959), Oskar Kokoschka, and Chaim Soutine. This signature approach stressed bold brushwork, rich coloration, and lively drawing in the service of somewhat exaggerated figuration. In 1946, he married painter and printmaker Ruth Gikow (1915–82). Born in the Russian Ukraine, as a small child she arrived with her family in New York, where she trained as an artist. During the 1930s, she created socially conscious murals and prints for a federal art project. Later, having developed a fluid, soft-hued style, she continued to pursue morally informed but poetic depictions of marginal, disadvantaged, and young people, while also satirizing the well-to-do. Antiwar and civil rights themes pervaded her work of the 1960s.
The paintings of Norman Lewis represent his African American generation’s most thoroughgoing engagement with abstraction, although racial issues offer a thematic subtext to his career. A lifelong Harlem resident, he found early encouragement from Augusta Savage at the area’s community art center. In the 1930s and early 1940s, like the period’s social realists more widely, he centered most of his work on themes of struggle and privation. While Lewis remained a stalwart supporter of African American causes, by the late 1940s, having already experimented in some works with more purely formal analysis, he numbered among few African Americans to embrace abstract expressionism. As he turned away from representation, he explained, “The goal of the artist must be aesthetic development, and in a universal sense, to make in his own way some contribution to culture.” In certain works he included a residue of content, through abstracted representational elements. If only in their titles, some refer to black experience. See also .
American Sol LeWitt brought to minimalism a stringent and uncompromising investigation of order and rationality. Yet his later work revealed an unexpected sensitivity to color and to its decorative effects. Because in his practice the fully realized idea preceded its physical embodiment, his approach also contributed importantly to the development of conceptual art. In addition, LeWitt’s clear and logical writings contributed to the wider understanding of minimalist and, more particularly, conceptualist sensibilities. Importantly, in 1967, he set the tone for the burgeoning conceptual art movement with “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” published in Artforum. In it, he explained that “the idea becomes the machine that makes the art. This kind of art . . . is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless.”
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, LeWitt received a BFA degree from Syracuse University in 1949. After traveling in Europe and serving in the U.S. military during the Korean War, he settled in New York in 1953. There he studied at the School of Visual Arts, worked as a graphic designer, and became acquainted with other young artists. In the early 1960s, he settled on the cube as the basic element in his “structures” (a term he preferred to sculpture). Soon, he simplified these to cubes or other rectangular volumes defined only by their edges, thus delineating empty spaces. He combined these skeletal elements into serial groupings, painted white, their austerity emphasized by his increasing preference for mechanical fabrication in place of the wood that had been his original material. In the 1970s, he complicated his arrangements and sometimes used other humdrum materials, such as concrete blocks. LeWitt spent most of the 1980s in Italy, returning with a new appreciation for color. In later years, he became widely known for vibrant, richly chromatic, mural-size wall drawings (the term he preferred, although acrylic paint prevails), executed by assistants to his directions, a process he had first employed in 1968. By the 1990s, some of these included curved elements. Although conceptual in the sense that they were pre-planned and the effect foreordained, the final result generally had some quotient of the unexpected, since his directions allowed some degree of personal interpretation. Usually painted directly on the wall, those prepared for exhibitions normally did not outlast the event, but other commissions remain as more permanent installations. See also ; .
An originator of pop art, Roy Lichtenstein drew subjects from popular culture but gave greater attention to formal qualities than any other major figure in that group. He first came to notice in 1962 with paintings that appeared to replicate comic strip panels, but that was not quite the case. Because they were hand-made, they contain minor deviations from the mechanically printed originals. Moreover, as he later explained, he made slight adjustments to favor unified esthetic experiences. With increasing richness and complexity, he subsequently relied on similarly flat colors and patterned design to picture a wide variety of sources, including mirror reflections, art deco interiors, classical architectural monuments, reworked modernist masterpieces, and the painter’s brushstroke itself. Through it all, evincing a mischievous good humor, he wrestled with the relationship of representation to its sources. Preferring to take as his starting point pre-established styles and images, he only rarely attempted to translate visual reality directly into art.
Born in New York, Lichtenstein enrolled to study art at Ohio State University in 1940 but was drafted early in 1943. Following military service, he returned to complete a BFA in 1946 and an MFA three years later. He stayed on to teach until 1951, then lived in Cleveland. During visits to New York, he familiarized himself with recent art, and by the late 1950s he had adopted a form of abstract expressionism laced with irony. In 1957, he moved east, first to teach at the State University of New York at Oswego and then at New Jersey’s Rutgers University. There he met Allan Kaprow and other artists who became leaders of the pop and fluxus movements. For several years after about 1960, Lichtenstein focused mainly on comic book images so enlarged that the now visible dots of the printing process became important design elements. Tellingly, many of the panels, isolated from their original contexts, resonate with contemporary concerns such as gratuitous violence or the psychological inauthenticity of mass culture. Drowning Girl (1963; New York, Museum of Modern Art), depicting only the impeccably coiffed head and one hand of a tearful young woman amid swirling waters, suggests in its stylization Japanese prints as much as comic books. A dialogue bubble transcribes the victim’s thoughts: “I don’t care! I’d rather sink—than call Brad for help.” On the one hand amusing, on the other this sentimental melodrama offers a darker reading of the potential for tragedy in stereotypical human feelings. As Lichtenstein went on to other source materials for his paintings, he also turned his attention to sculpture. Later in his career, he fulfilled commissions for enormous murals, produced numerous public sculptures for outdoor sites, and continued a prodigious output of prints. See also .
Related to minimalism, op art, and aspects of pop art, but distinct from all of them, Southern California’s light and space movement of the late 1960s and 1970s embodied a regional ethos inflected by a sun-drenched climate, a hedonistic appreciation for sensory experience, an easygoing and non-prescriptive way of life, and the aerospace industry’s optimistic vision of human advancement through science and technology. Never organized as a group and not much given to self-expression or theorizing, the light and space artists shared above all an interest in visual perception. Mostly interested in three-dimensional works and installations, some so dematerialized their art that almost nothing remained, save pure illumination. Others made use of such newly developed materials as acrylics and resins that aided their interests in reflective, transparent, or perfectly smooth surfaces.
The paths of the movement’s two principal artists, Robert Irwin (1928–) and James Turrell (1943–), intersected as they initiated their distinctive accomplishments. Born in Long Beach, California, Irwin trained at art schools in Los Angeles. Originally a painter, in the 1960s he moved deliberately toward a minimalist art increasingly devoted to perceptual questions. Following line paintings and dot paintings that inched toward invisibility, in 1968 he turned to aluminum or clear acrylic disks, precisely illuminated in such a way that their shadows became the focus of attention. Around 1970, he for the most part abandoned objects as such to investigate purely perceptual questions. At this time, he and Turrell worked together with a scientist specializing in the physiology and psychology of vision. To examine the process of seeing, Irwin devised numerous installations, often utilizing translucent scrims. Eventually, he turned attention to an enlarged form of environmental art, landscape design, perhaps most notably in the gardens (1992–97) surrounding the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
A Los Angeles native, Turrell graduated from Pomona College in 1965, studied with John McCracken at the University of California, Irvine, and in 1974 earned a master’s degree from Claremont Graduate College. During the late 1960s, he specialized in light projections. After working alongside Irwin with the vision specialist, he engaged in varied experimental forms of art, including skywriting and interior environments created by allowing only carefully calibrated amounts of light to enter. In the 1970s, he initiated a series of “skyspaces,” which accommodate small groups within darkened spaces open to the sky; as daylight progresses, viewers slowly perceive changing hues and intensities. Turrell’s signature installations, set within darkened interiors and limited to illuminated, window-like openings in opaque barriers, confront the viewer with a glow of indeterminate origin. Lack of perspective clues confound perception of depth, compounding mysterious visual effects that encourage the viewer to examine the process of seeing itself. The Quaker beliefs that underscore his interest in silent contemplation and his experience of expansive space accrued through flying his own aircraft come together at Turrell’s most ambitious and well-known project, the epic Roden Crater, in progress since the mid-1970s. Here, within an extinct northern Arizona volcano, he continues to excavate a giant observatory of tunnels and chambers that will give visitors unprecedented views of the cosmos as seen by the unaided eye. Gallery and museum installations meanwhile offer a reduced version of his expansive intentions. Aten Reign (2013) transformed the otherwise empty central rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum into a void articulated by slowly shifting colored light sifting along the layered rings of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp; to experience its full effect over time, visitors were encouraged to lie on the floor, the better to gaze upward toward the central oculus.
The lesser-known perfectionist Doug Wheeler (1939–) has also devoted his career to installations that rely solely on perceptual effects of light and color. An Arizona native, he trained in Los Angeles and numbered among the earliest artists to experiment with ethereal possibilities available to the eye. Since the early 1980s, he has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but today he also works in Los Angeles. Maria Nordman (1943–) also contributed to the interest in light-filled installations. Born in Germany, she grew up in the United States. Although based in Los Angeles, she has maintained an active practice in Europe. Her evocative but unpretentious spaces offer respite from the tumult of the world.
Among other light and space contributors, Larry Bell (1939–) became principally known for three-dimensional works fashioned from glass coated in a high-tech procedure with vaporized metal alloys. His signature minimal cubes mounted at eye-level on transparent pedestals, as well as his more complex installations, pose to the viewer unsettling questions related to reflection and transparency. Born in Chicago, he trained in Los Angeles with Robert Irwin and Emerson Woelffer, among others. He began as a painter but from the early 1960s specialized in glass works. In recent years, his work has become more visually complex, as he layers paper, film, and paint to continue his investigation of vision and illusion. He works in Taos, New Mexico, but also maintains a studio in Los Angeles. Craig Kauffman (1932–2010) specialized in molded plastic relief sculptures spray-painted with acrylic lacquer. In his best-known works, perfectly smooth, vacuum-formed surfaces and streamlined, bulging forms combine a subliminal eroticism with reminiscences of industrially fabricated consumer products. Born in Los Angeles, he studied architecture at the University of Southern California for two years before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1955 and 1956. He traveled widely, lived at times in New York and San Francisco, and from 1994 lived part-time in the Philippines. Other notable artists associated with the light and space movement include Billy Al Bengston (1934–), Ron Davis (1937–), Eric Orr (1939–98), and De Wain Valentine (1936–). See also .
American architect, landscape artist, and sculptor Maya Lin remains best known for her precedent-shattering first major work, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Its minimalist design and emphasis on personal loss rather than patriotic heroics transformed public commemorative sculpture and has since become a model for such projects everywhere. Born in Athens, Ohio, she graduated from Yale University in 1981 and earned a master’s degree in architecture there five years later. Still an undergraduate at the time of the design competition for the Vietnam monument, she found inspiration in minimalist sculpture, particularly Richard Serra’s work, as she conceived her well-known black granite wall set into the earth and inscribed with the names of the more than 58,000 Americans who died in the war. In addition to subsequent architectural projects, in landscape pieces she has often extended the Vietnam monument’s stress on man’s relation to the earth, increasingly concerning herself with the fragility of biodiversity. She also has created public sculptures in urban settings and occasional large-scale museum installations.
A sculptor whose career bridged pre–World War II Europe and postwar United States, Jacques Lipchitz participated in the early 20th-century cubist movement in Paris, but later, during the American years, he became known for monumental expressionist works devoted to humanistic themes. Born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, he studied engineering before moving to Paris in 1909. There he trained as an artist and became acquainted in avant-garde circles with such artists as Alexander Archipenko, Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso. Within a few years he numbered among the earliest sculptors to adapt the conventions of cubist painting to three dimensions. As remained true throughout his career, these works generally centered on the human figure. After the mid-1920s, he moved away from the rigors of cubism to create varied and more emotionally engaged work including “transparent” bronzes featuring interactions of solid and void, bronze animals and figures, portraits, and eventually interpretations of mythological or religious themes. After fleeing wartime Paris in 1941, he subsequently lived primarily in the New York area. In his new home, the sense of struggle and anguish that pervaded much of his late 1930s work gave way to an optimistic embrace of human potential. Drawing on such pre-modern precedents as Antoine-Louis Barye’s vibrant animal sculptures and Auguste Rodin’s sensuous, animated figures, he specialized in vigorously composed, heroic—some might say bombastic—figural bronzes (or less often, carved stone works). Lofty romantic or abstract themes prevail, as seen in The Spirit of Enterprise (1960; Philadelphia, Fairmount Park), Belerophon Taming Pegasus (commissioned 1966, posthumously installed 1977; New York, Columbia University Law School plaza), and Government of the People (commissioned 1967, posthumously installed 1976; Philadelphia, Municipal Services Building plaza). Although the swelling forms of these works remained tethered to representation, Lipchitz’s baroque sensibility finds echoes in the work of such abstract expressionist sculptors as Herbert Ferber and Seymour Lipton. During the final decade of his life, he spent part of each year in Europe. In the course of one such visit, he died on the Italian island of Capri.
A key American art critic, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, Lucy Lippard served as an articulate voice for cutting-edge trends including postminimalism, conceptual art, and feminist art. An activist on behalf of new art forms, she also participated in organizations that supported artists’ efforts, such as the Art Workers Coalition, a lobbying organization that advocated for artists’ rights and protested the Vietnam War, and the women’s feminist collective Heresies, which published a journal of that name from 1977 until 1992. With Sol LeWitt, in 1976 she founded Printed Matter, a non-profit that specializes in artists’ books, publications, and, indeed, all manner of printed matter including posters and other ephemera, in addition to offering educational activities, exhibitions, research assistance, and a historical archive. Her personal involvement with the New York art community (she was married to Robert Ryman from 1961 until the mid-1970s) enhanced her keen understanding of their art. Always grounding her writing in political and ethical concerns, she later turned her attention to such topics as prehistoric art, activist art, and multiculturalism.
Born in New York, Lippard grew up in New Orleans and Charlottesville, Virginia. She graduated from Smith College and earned an art history master’s degree in 1962 from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. “Eccentric Abstraction,” which she organized in 1966, remains widely considered the first exhibition to showcase postminimal artists, including Eva Hesse, the subject of a later book (first printed in 1976). Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (1973) remains a cornerstone of conceptual art scholarship. The book itself exhibits a minimalist sensibility; more documentary than analytical, it reflects the movement’s just-the-facts mentality. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (1976) details women’s attempts to establish a gender-specific form of art during the previous several years. Other notable books include Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (1983), Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (1984), Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (1990), The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (1997), On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place (1999), and Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West (2014). The titles alone reverberate with her ever lively interest in the relationship between art and culture on the one hand, and on the other, the intellectual and material circumstances of the moment. She has lived for some years in Galisteo, New Mexico.
American sculptor Richard Lippold specialized in shimmering, visually weightless webs of thin wires radiating through space. Some incorporate dangling metal rods or other geometric elements. Logical and precise, they nevertheless effect a buoyant, golden or silvery lyricism. “Born into a place and an age in which space and time are our principal companions,” he stated, “I feel it inevitable to love them more than the solid materials with which my ancestors were involved.” He contrived most of his major works for specific spaces, usually on commission, because they lack rigid structure and must be tethered to architectural elements. Formally and aspirationally, they reflect earlier achievements of constructivists, notably Naum Gabo, while also contributing to the origins of 1960s–70s installation and environmental art. Sometimes shown in darkened rooms or against deep-toned backgrounds, they nearly always rely on lighting as an integral consideration. Born in Milwaukee, Lippold studied at the University of Chicago and at the Art Institute of Chicago, then remained in the Midwest to work as an industrial designer. Abandoning this profession in 1941, he soon began making constructions. His earliest hanging sculptures date to 1947, three years after he moved to New York. His work soon appeared in galleries and museum exhibitions alongside abstract expressionist work. In 1955, he moved permanently to Lattingtown, New York, on Long Island. His important public commissions include works for the lobby of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher (now David Geffen) Hall in New York (1961), for the lobby of New York’s Pan Am (now MetLife) Building (1963), and a freestanding, 115-foot monument (1976) for a plaza at Washington, D.C.’s Air and Space Museum. Among his most dazzling achievements, requiring three years of labor, Variation within a Sphere, No. 10 (The Sun) (1953–56; New York, Metropolitan Museum), deploys nearly two miles of gold wire through a space that measures 22 feet wide by some 9 feet high and 5-and-a-half feet deep. See also .
An American sculptor allied with abstract expressionism, Seymour Lipton combined organic shapes of welded metal to summon notions of struggle, anguish, and transformation. His abstract forms allude to mysteries of the human psyche as revealed in myth, psychology, and philosophy. A New York native, he earned his DDS degree from Columbia University in 1927 and continued to practice as a dentist for many years. Self-taught as an artist, in 1932 he began to carve expressionistic wood sculptures that reflected the social anxieties of the Depression years. In the early 1940s, he drew on surrealist and constructivist precedents in welding large-scale metal pieces, and by 1945 they had become almost completely abstract. In the early 1950s, he turned to sheet metal, soon making innovative use of Monel metal, a tough, corrosion-resistant alloy rarely before seen in an art context. Coated with bronze or shiny nickel–silver for vibrant effect, the shimmer of these lightly textured forms lightens their visual weight. Adopted simultaneously, grandly conceived concave and convex elements suggest biological universals of growth and transience. These works, somewhat more lyrical in tone than the aggressive earlier ones, nevertheless remain powerful evocations of deeply considered emotional states. Toward the end of the 1950s, Lipton again sometimes introduced forms suggestive of the human figure. See also .
English artist Richard Long combines aspects of earth art and conceptual art in a distinctive practice based on extended rambles through the landscape. He reports on these excursions in gallery displays that document his activity with photographs, texts, and maps. He also exhibits fragments of nature, such as rocks, driftwood, or mud, generally arranged in simple geometric configurations that bring to mind the tension between disorderly nature and the human impulse to impose rational patterns. He has also installed similar projects in public places outdoors. Born in Bristol, where he resides today, he studied at the local art college and then for two years in London at St. Martin’s School of Art. Inspired by minimalism, he at first intervened modestly in the landscape. To create A Line Made by Walking (1967), he treaded back and forth across a field to produce a temporarily visible line, which he then photographed. Soon, he embarked on longer treks around Britain and, later, abroad. Many of these trace straight lines, while others involve more complicated itineraries. He commonly leaves insignificant traces of his passage, such as leaves brushed aside or small piles of rocks at regular intervals. As he has noted, he ritualizes the universal experience of walking, creating an art that remains subservient to his aim to “touch the earth lightly.” See also .
A leading figure in the Washington Color School and a major inspiration for color field painters, in the mid-1950s Morris Louis developed a secret technique, to this day never replicated, of enlisting gravity as his assistant. Pouring thinned acrylic paints onto unprimed canvas, he allowed it to flow freely, creating depthless effects at once controlled and fortuitous. Born and trained as an artist in Baltimore, in the mid-1930s he relocated to New York for several years. There, he worked for federal art projects and attended David Alfaro Siqueiros’s experimental workshop. He returned once again to Baltimore before moving to the nearby Washington, D.C., area. There he participated in more sophisticated art circles than he had found in his native city. After their meeting in 1952, Kenneth Noland remained a particularly close friend. In 1953, at his urging, Louis accompanied Noland to New York, where he met Clement Greenberg and, more significantly, saw Helen Frankenthaler’s recently completed Mountains and Sea (1952; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, on long-term loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation). This canvas, which led the transition from abstract expressionism to color field painting had the force of a revelation to Louis. Drawing also on the examples of recent work by such established figures as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Clyfford Still, he almost immediately embarked on developing the signature style that emerged in the mid-1950s, sustained his interest throughout the few years left to him, and made his reputation as a major figure. His first important accomplishment, a series called Veils, offers diaphanous washes that cover most of each canvas. Later, he moved toward more limited areas of brilliant hue—eventually limited to narrow rivulets of color—played off against plain canvas, in sequences known as Florals, Unfurleds, and Stripes.