An international leader in pure abstraction early in the 20th century, American painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright later served as a pioneering advocate of modern art in California. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, as a child he moved with his family to California. At 17, he departed for Paris to continue the training he had begun in Los Angeles. Drawn to the use of color in impressionist painting and to the works of such modernists as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, he soon teamed up with another American, Morgan Russell (1886–1953), to invent a form of color abstraction they dubbed synchromism. While synchromist paintings resemble the orphism developed by Robert Delaunay and his associates, Macdonald-Wright and Russell proceeded from different premises. Considering the French work insufficiently analytical, they scrutinized three-dimensional form, achieving an original expression of plastic values through hue. First exhibited in Munich and Paris in 1913 and in New York the following year, their work helped to stimulate a vogue for colorful abstract painting. The principles of synchromism and a defense of its aims appeared in Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning (1915), an important book written by Macdonald-Wright’s brother, Willard Huntington Wright, while the two resided in London. Macdonald-Wright returned to New York in 1916 and during the succeeding few years created many of his most impressive works. His exuberantly colored, insubstantial forms that seem to drift in space remained unmatched in American painting until the 1960s. In 1919, he moved permanently to Los Angeles, where he became its leading spokesman for modern art. Active in the area’s art community for another half century, in addition to teaching at UCLA for many years and heading the area’s federal government art program during the Depression, he also participated as a set designer and actor in local theater and experimented with color film. Continuing as well to paint, he completed several civic mural projects. After World War II, a new absorption in Asian art led him back to a renewed engagement with color abstraction. In later years, he sojourned annually at a Zen monastery in Japan.
At once dreamy and rigorous, Loren MacIver’s paintings combine sharp visual acuity with attention to modern formalism. Straddling representation and abstraction, they derive from visual experience, which on first glance is not always apparent, so thoroughly has she subsumed it in esthetic concerns. The Window Shade (1948; Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection) anticipates Mark Rothko’s signature style, first exhibited the following year, in its luminous, superposed floating rectangles. But a cord with circular pull, which bisects the lower quarter, brings the experience back to its quotidian origins; although she here hesitates to follow formal concerns to a logical conclusion, her approach retains a lyrical regard for human perception, no less than a taste for ambiguity. “My wish is to make something permanent out of the transitory,” she once wrote. A native New Yorker, she remained mainly self-taught. Married at 20 to poet Lloyd Frankenberg, she sustained close friendships among major American poets as she embarked on a solitary course indebted to her own poetic temperament, but also to the achievements of Paul Klee and Henri Matisse. By the end of the 1930s, she had brought together the elements of a personal approach. Living in Europe during much of the 1960s only sharpened her susceptibility to effects of light that veil her canvases in a soft glow. Although gardens, landscapes, and botanical subjects might seem natural subjects, architectural and urban themes also pervade her work.
Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s meticulous images disrupt conventional thought and vision. Playing witty games with his audience, he employed words, confounding images, and improbable juxtapositions. Not much interested in the unconscious, automatism, or Freudian allusion, he represented a cooler version of surrealism that had little direct influence on the line of development that flowed from surrealism to abstract expressionism. Instead, his appeal leapfrogged a generation to inspire aspects of pop and conceptual art. His best-known work, The Treachery of Images (1928–29; Los Angeles County Museum of Art), features the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe) below an unambiguous representation of just such an object, thus posing the sort of philosophical conundrum later taken up by such artists as Jasper Johns and Edward Ruscha. Cleanly intellectual provocations of this sort characterize only a small portion of his work; more often, gentle whimsy suggests the mysterious nature of human experience. A sort of alter ego, the respectable bourgeois in a bowler hat who inhabits many of his paintings points to everyday experience as just another pathway to transcendence.
Magritte studied art in Brussels and initially experimented with abstracting tendencies. After encountering Giorgio de Chirico’s art in 1922, he almost immediately began to develop the surrealist vision that flowered in his art during the next few years. Max Ernst also provided an important guidepost. Magritte moved to Paris in 1927 to interact with the surrealist group but after three years returned permanently to Brussels. Besides his paintings, Magritte also produced prints, sculptures, and films.
During a distinguished international career, Argentinian painter, designer, and theorist Tomás Maldonado has advocated the unity of arts and design within a continuum of visual expression. Born and trained in Buenos Aires, after meeting Joaquín Torres-García in Montevideo in 1941, he participated in establishing the viability of abstract art in Buenos Aires. His geometric, constructivist paintings generally feature hard-edge forms set dynamically against white grounds. On a visit to Europe in 1948, he met similarly minded artists, notably including Max Bill, who continued to play a role in Maldonado’s professional development. At Bill’s invitation, in 1956 he moved to Ulm, Germany, to teach at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, where Bill served as director. Maldonado succeeded him. While also turning his attention to design and architectural projects, as well as to design theory, Maldonado continued to evolve as a painter, now often employing elliptical or circular shapes to lively effect. After leaving Ulm in 1967, he moved to Italy, where he taught for many years in Milan and Bologna. In influential theoretical writings, he urged designers to integrate esthetics with practical and scientific considerations to further social and environmental responsibility.
Among the 20th century’s most inventive artists, American painter, photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker Man Ray worked in an international context. A leading dadaist, he also contributed to surrealism. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, he grew up in New York. He took art classes, but these proved of little value to his eccentric development as an artist. More important were his visits to Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and to the 1913 Armory Show of international modern art. He tried his hand at abstractions, but after meeting Marcel Duchamp in 1915, he started edging toward more subversive expression. His earliest major painting, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows (1916; New York, Museum of Modern Art) combines flat, brightly colored shapes with sinuous lines and an abstract star-like stand-in for the dancer. The provocative title signals Man Ray’s prescient appreciation for dadaist nonsense. (The New York dada sensibility coalesced independently from the European movement, founded that year in Zurich.) For the next several years, he specialized in assembling found objects into spooky three-dimensional works. Constructed shortly after his 1921 arrival in Paris, the well-known Cadeau (Gift) (vanished; 1958 replica, New York, Museum of Modern Art) features an ordinary household iron fitted out with a row of sharp, menacing tacks along its surface. In Paris, he turned seriously to photography, before long becoming surrealism’s most important photographer. Among his most original photographic works, evocative photograms—which he dubbed rayographs—resulted from arranging objects directly on photographic film before exposure. As a participant in surrealism, Man Ray also employed other offbeat techniques, including solarization, in photographs reflecting that movement’s fascination with mystery and enigma. When World War II drove him back to the United States in 1940, he settled in Los Angeles. After returning permanently to Paris in 1951, he continued to work actively, in pursuit of leads that his earlier work had opened up.
An Italian sculptor who updated classical traditions for modern viewers, Giacomo Manzù remains best known for a pair of low-relief bronze doors commonly referred to as the Door of Death (commissioned in 1952 following a 1947 competition, dedicated 1964) on the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. They feature 10 panels related to the deaths of Christ, his mother, biblical figures, and ordinary souls, including—despite the artist’s atheistic leanings—his friend, Pope John XXIII. Thematically united by portrayals of dignity and strength in the face of unjust suffering and inevitable mortality, they offer powerful testimony to the links between contemporary, historical, and religious experience. Their heartfelt imagery and technical virtuosity appeal to a wide popular audience, while more discerning observers recognize Manzù’s debt to Donatello and other Renaissance sculptors, as well as to modern forms of expression.
Born Giacomo Manzoni in Bergamo, he remained mostly self-taught as an artist. Intending to study sculpture, in 1928 he arrived in Paris but soon ran out of money. Returning to Italy, he settled in Milan, which remained his home most of the time until 1964, when he moved to the vicinity of Rome. Influenced in his earliest work by Etruscan and other ancient styles, he soon turned toward impressionistic surfaces in response to the work of Auguste Rodin and Medardo Rosso. In characteristic later work, smoother treatment produces a mood of calm and contemplation. Manzù first made his reputation, in the early 1930s, with portraits. While continuing these, he also produced classically inflected figural works. In addition to the famous doors, after World War II he completed a number of other religious and commemorative commissions, giving symbolic form to universal concerns. While treating such ponderous themes, he simultaneously produced more lighthearted naturalistic bronze still life compositions that bear resemblances to aspects of pop art. He cast most of his work in bronze but also employed other media, including marble and terra-cotta. In addition, he worked as a painter, graphic artist, and stage designer.
With distinctive vigorous and textured collages, American painter and printmaker Conrad (or Corrado) Marca-Relli made a singular contribution to abstract expressionist practice. At first he used pieces of fabric but later introduced all manner of modern, technologically flavored materials, notably metal and vinyl. Born in Boston, Marca-Relli spent much of his boyhood abroad, primarily in Italy—where he nurtured a taste for classical elegance that remained central to his esthetic. Remaining mostly self-taught as an artist, in New York during the 1930s he met Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and others who would become abstract expressionists. His early work remained figural, rooted in surrealism and Giorgio de Chirico’s haunting cityscapes, but during the later 1940s he turned to gestural abstraction. In 1953, he began pasting large, painted canvas or linen shapes into roughly figural compositions, which paralleled the immediacy and energy of contemporary abstract expressionist painting. He soon dropped the representational allusions and in the 1960s extended his practice into varied, often industrial materials. Sometimes expanding into low-relief or even freestanding sculptures, these works often bring to mind the parts of an airplane or other unmistakably modern products. They also intersected with interest among such artists as John Chamberlain in employing distinctly contemporary, non-art media. During the 1970s, he returned to painting but also maintained an interest in collage. During the 1950s, Marca-Relli lived in East Hampton, near his friend Jackson Pollock. After subsequently residing in several American and European locations, in the mid-1990s he moved permanently to Parma, Italy.
Brice Marden made his name as a minimalist in the late 1960s and 1970s with sober monochrome panels, at first in uningratiating muddy tones but soon in sonorous hues, usually abutted side by side in groups of two or more. Born in Bronxville, just north of New York City, and raised in a nearby suburb, he earned a BFA from Boston University in 1961 and, two years later, an MFA from Yale University. Annual visits since the early 1970s to the Greek island of Hydra gradually enriched his colors as he responded to its intense, sunlit hues. Some of his panels, combined in post-and-lintel configurations, suggest the balance and purity of antique architecture. As he later traveled in Asia and became interested in its art, in the late 1980s he embarked on the less austere works that have since largely preoccupied him. For these works, he inscribes wandering linear forms suggestive of Eastern calligraphy on top of flatly painted backgrounds.
An American painter, recognized particularly for watercolor landscapes, Marin made his reputation as a leader of modernism’s initial phase in New York. Remaining prominent for several decades, in the early post–World War II years, he was widely regarded as the greatest living American painter. The only American artist of his generation whose work attracted wide attention as abstract expressionism emerged, he offered to younger artists an appealingly individualistic blend of spontaneity, vigorous brushwork, and nature imagery rendered in semi-abstract form. Before long, however, his work looked small, formally repetitious, and, most significantly, naively optimistic in the face of the period’s engagement with tragic themes, the Freudian unconscious, and existentialism.
As a young man, Marin studied architecture, which helped to develop the sense of underlying structure that girds nearly all his paintings, no matter how free the brushwork. He did not begin the serious study of art until he was nearly 30. A sojourn in Europe, from 1905 until early 1911, proved pivotal in his development, although he did not formulate his individual style there. Living mostly in Paris, he produced evocative Whistlerian etchings and impressionist watercolors. There, he also met Alfred Stieglitz, who presented Marin’s first one-person show at his New York gallery, 291, in 1910 and continued to champion Marin’s work for another 35 years. The following year, Marin returned permanently to the United States and quickly formulated the impulsive, emotionally engaged style that made, and sustained, his reputation. Merging cubist structure with expressionist abandon, he interpreted New York’s burgeoning dynamism in linearly charged cityscapes, their freely suggested buildings appearing to writhe with energy. In 1914, Marin first visited the Maine seacoast, which was to number among his principal subjects, as he summered there nearly every year thereafter. However, he also rendered views of numerous other landscapes, from New England to New Mexico. Over the years, Marin explored the elasticity of the style he had developed in increasingly numerous oils, as well as watercolor. Perhaps sensing a newly invigorated interest in non-representational art, Marin responded in the 1940s with an intensified emphasis on abstract form and the process of painting itself. Untheoretical to the end, he conveyed a joyous response to life, to vision, and to paint.
A leading Italian sculptor, Marino Marini remains best known for an extended series devoted to the theme of horse and rider. After World War II, these often feature an equestrian whose outstretched arms—in a Christ-like gesture of supplication and suffering—contribute to a poignant existential mood of longing and despair. At the same time, by drawing on classically ordained forms of representation, these works affirm the role of humanistic values in mankind’s fate. His other major subjects—nudes and portraits, particularly—similarly update aspects of the classic tradition to accommodate modern expression. Born in Pistoia, not far from Florence, where he studied painting, after 1929 he lived primarily in Milan. However, he made his home in Switzerland much of the time during the decade after 1936. Although he continued to work as a painter and printmaker, from the early 1920s, sculpture became his principal interest, influenced at first by ancient Etruscan work and by the modernist classicism of Arturo Martini (1889–1947). During the 1930s, he often visited Paris, where he became acquainted with leading artists and the principal modern movements. In Switzerland, he met Alberto Giacometti and French sculptor Germaine Richier (1902–59), other artists interested in examining the modern condition through the human body. In the mid-1930s, Marini embarked on his trademark exploration of equestrian imagery, working from a simplified naturalism toward increasingly stylized forms. Most of his work is cast in bronze, which he sometimes treated to produce rich surface effects, sometimes including color.
Spare yet sensuous, Agnes Martin’s distinctive paintings bridge the discrepancy between abstract expressionism and minimalism. Mirroring her meditative temperament, they offer oases of quiet. A secular response to Zen Buddhist thought provided a formative and sustaining impulse. Signature works present large-scale, subtly colored, square fields usually articulated with nearly invisible penciled grids. A fundamentally private, even reclusive person, she achieved hard-won success only in middle age. Born in Canada, Martin grew up in Vancouver but moved to the United States in 1932. After studying at what is now Western Washington University in Bellingham, she continued her education at New York’s Columbia University, where she earned a BA in 1942 and, 10 years later, an MFA. In the interval, she worked and taught at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Her early abstract work—fields of delicate, amorphous forms—grew from abstract expressionism, and to the end, she regarded her paintings within the context of that movement, despite their minimalist affinities. In 1957, she settled in lower Manhattan, where she worked within a milieu of artists—including Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman—pursuing alternatives to abstract expressionist gesturalism. There, she experimented with reductivist methods that led in the early 1960s to the format she made her own. In 1967, she abandoned New York, as well as her art, to wander through the American and Canadian West. Landing permanently in New Mexico, she devoted the next few years to writing, while also building her own house in an isolated area some 60 miles north of Albuquerque. (In 1978, she relocated to Galisteo, and in her final years, she lived in Taos.) In the mid-1970s, she resumed painting, subsequently refining and strengthening the personal approach she had defined. See also .
Among the first Americans to adopt wholeheartedly a non-representational approach, Alice Trumbull Mason displayed a refined and non-ideological creative bent. Without ever establishing a signature style, she nevertheless achieved distinguished means of expression that demonstrate a commitment to expressive forms independent of visual reality, psychic origins, or mystical intentions. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, a descendent of one of the country’s earliest accomplished painters, John Trumbull, she studied in Europe and in New York, where Arshile Gorky proved a particularly important mentor. In 1929, she turned to pure abstraction, usually deploying biomorphic forms across shallow spaces. These often recall precedents in the work of Arthur Dove, Wassily Kandinsky, and Joan Miró. Her productivity soon somewhat interrupted by the arrival of children (she turned to poetry as a creative outlet), she nevertheless numbered among founding members of the American Abstract Artists in the mid-1930s. An active member of that group for more than three decades, she served in several leadership positions, including president. Much affected by Piet Mondrian’s style after he arrived in New York in 1940, she subsequently produced numerous expertly composed geometric works, although she shunned the rigor of his approach and, in concurrent works, continued to employ organic form. Also in the 1940s, she took up printmaking at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 and subsequently remained particularly active as a printmaker. Her daughter Emily Mason (1932–) and Emily’s daughter Cecily Kahn (1959–)—whose father is Wolf Kahn—also work as abstract painters.
A leading surrealist, André Masson numbered among the most enthusiastic practitioners of automatism, even inducing hallucinatory states in order to suppress rational consciousness. His completely abstract, automatic pen-and-ink drawings helped to spark the genesis of abstract expressionism as he rode out World War II in the United States. Born in France but raised in Belgium, Masson trained in Brussels and Paris. Wounded while serving in the French military during World War I, he subsequently saw human fate to be one of pain and dissonance. Through the early 1920s, his painting fell within the orbit of cubism, to which he contributed symbolic elements that lend an unusually somber tone to his work. As a surrealist, in addition to pursuing the abstract drawing technique, Masson also experimented creatively with chance effects. For Battle of Fishes (1926; New York, Museum of Modern Art), he poured glue onto a canvas, then dusted it with sand. The resulting textured passages stimulated other representational and abstract markings to create an evocative image that defies logical analysis. While living in the South of France and in Spain from 1930 until 1937, he addressed literary and mythological themes, as well as the civil war in Spain. Most of his work from this time took a more structured approach and often included erotic elements. For a short period toward the end of the 1930s, he adopted a veristic technique, related to Salvador Dalí’s example, to express themes of violence and despair. In 1941, he escaped World War II via Martinique to the United States, where he resided in New Preston, Connecticut. Upon returning at the end of the conflict, he made his home in the South of France. There he absorbed a range of new interests, from Zen philosophy to impressionist painting. Often combining his abstract and figurative interests, his late paintings and drawings vibrate with an energetic, fast-moving touch. See also .
Among the most important artists of the 20th century, French painter Henri Matisse favored uncontroversial subjects—mainly figures, but still lifes and landscapes as well, all based on observation rather than imagination. However, his great gifts as a colorist and his talent for updating conventional compositional formulas mark him as a leading innovator of modern art. Late in life, he remained prominent among post–World War II artists as he undertook projects that contributed to the era’s intensified interest in abstract form and in the structural use of color. The artist also sustained active interests in printmaking, sculpture, and design.
Matisse earned a law degree in Paris before showing any interest in art. Subsequently, he studied painting there for much of the 1890s, developing a conservative but fluent and tender style indebted as much to 18th-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s work as to current impressionist and post-impressionist styles. After trying a colorful divisionist technique, early in the new century he began to use non-naturalistic hues to create space and volume, as well as pictorial structure. In 1905, this sort of painting brought him to the attention of the Paris art community as a leader of the fauves, whose “wild” colors offended conventional taste. Fauvism as a movement soon dwindled, but in a series of large figural compositions, Matisse forged ahead with his researches into the structural and expressive uses of color. Around the same time, he also intensified an involvement with sculpture, which offered the opportunity of detaching form from hue. In 1908–9, he completed the first of four bronze bas-reliefs depicting a nude woman from the back. Together, often considered his most significant contribution to the medium, the group (not finished for more than 20 years) traces his evolution of a motif toward increased abstraction.
Challenging the rationalized, controlled veneer of contemporary cubism, The Red Studio (1911; New York, Museum of Modern Art) summarizes the strengths of his early achievement: vivid hues, decorative flourishes, and compositional verve. This tour de force on an entirely red ground, measuring approximately six feet in each dimension, transforms the artist’s studio into an audacious visual experience. Despite lack of shadows or other three-dimensional cues, sketchily indicated but carefully placed objects (including miniatures of several of his recent works) nevertheless create a perfectly comprehensible interior. In the mid-1910s, Matisse created an unparalleled group of stripped-down figural works, the most austere productions of his career. During the 1920s, while beginning to reside most of the time on the sunlit Riviera (he moved there permanently in 1940), Matisse specialized in decorative interior scenes notable for lush coloration, intricate patterns, sensual atmospheres, and harmonious balance between the three-dimensional subjects and the flat surface of the painting. During the 1930s, he began to set himself new challenges, as forms became simpler and compositions less ingratiating.
In the wake of World War II and the simultaneous onset of health problems (he subsequently used a wheelchair most of the time and was bedridden in his last years), Matisse entered newly vigorous and original artistic territory. Among his major endeavors of this period, the Chapel of the Rosary (1948–51) at Vence, near Nice, ranks among the most notable interior ensembles of the period. Matisse designed everything: its stained-glass windows, the restrained black-line drawings on white walls, furnishings, even the priests’ vestments. In this same period, as he approached 80, because arthritic hands made painting difficult, Matisse embarked upon the most admired and influential works of his later years: paper cutouts, employing tinted shapes pasted to plain grounds in abstract or figurative patterns. Contributing to a longtime, distinguished engagement with book art, his limited-edition book, Jazz (1947), printed from stencils following such designs, offers abstracted subjects drawn largely from circus and theater. Soon he adapted this technique to large-scale, exuberant arrangements displaying to great advantage his signature talent and offering a definitive resolution of every painter’s need to mediate between line and color.
Pierre Matisse (1900–89), the artist’s son, a New York art dealer and champion of modern art, played an important part in building taste for that art in the United States. After settling in New York in the mid-1920s, in 1931 he opened his own gallery, which specialized in European surrealism—particularly the work of Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy—but also represented other leading modernists, including Balthus, Marc Chagall, and Alberto Giacometti. See also ; ; .
Chilean-born painter and draftsman Roberto Matta joined the surrealist movement in Paris, played a decisive role in the development of abstract expressionism in New York, and later worked within an international context while living mostly in Europe. His biomorphic “inscapes,” as he called them, envision the free play of psychic forces within cosmic arenas. In characteristic works from the 1940s onward, abstract but allusive hybrid forms, suggestive variously of human, animal, or vegetal origins, float through deep, mysterious spaces.
Born into a French-speaking family in Santiago, Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren studied architecture before moving to Paris in 1933. He at first joined Le Corbusier’s studio and for several years worked intermittently elsewhere in Europe for other architects. Intrigued by the work of such artists as Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, and Pablo Picasso, he began to develop his own vision in elegant drawings. In 1937, he joined André Breton’s surrealists, among whom he particularly admired Yves Tanguy. However, the summer of the following year may have proved more decisive. In Brittany, he took up painting as he and Gordon Onslow Ford investigated art’s spiritual aspirations, providing Matta a metaphysical basis for visionary achievements that depart from the Freudian underpinnings of much surrealist art. In 1939, Matta arrived in New York, where he again found himself among such colleagues as Breton, Duchamp, Max Ernst, André Masson, and Tanguy. His painting flourished, while interactions with nascent abstract expressionists Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and others did much to stimulate their interests in surrealist techniques. Matta left New York in 1948. Although at about this same time he broke away from the surrealist coterie, his style continued to evolve along lines he had already determined. Paris became his base once again, although he traveled widely and lived elsewhere for periods of time. He supplemented his paintings and drawings in later decades with sculptures and prints. Matta spent his final years in Italy. See also ; ; ; .
His son, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78), numbered among innovative young countercultural American artists of the 1970s. He is remembered particularly for site-specific architectural interventions—which he dubbed “anarchitecture”—that featured cutting and altering uninhabited houses to dramatic effect. His photographs of these works offer a permanent record of their ephemeral existence. As well, he reassembled fragments of them into abstract collages. Born in New York, Matta-Clark received his degree in architecture from Cornell University, then experienced the turbulent Paris of the 1968 student riots. During this sojourn, situationism and the writings of French deconstructionists engaged his attention. Disdaining the commodification of art, Matta-Clark participated actively in some of the earliest attempts among artists to eradicate the division between art and life. Something of a community organizer among downtown Manhattan artists, he helped to organize a cooperative gallery and in 1971 co-founded Food, an artist-based restaurant where dining verged on performance art. Pancreatic cancer led to his early death.
A versatile painter who never developed a signature style, Jan Matulka nevertheless enjoyed the admiration of fellow artists. As a teacher for many years at New York’s Art Students League and privately, he served as an important mentor for a number of prominent abstract expressionists and other younger artists. For them, he acted as an important conduit of European modernism. In his own work, he oscillated between abstract and representational modes.
Born in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), he took art classes in Prague before immigrating in 1907 to New York. There, he continued his training, but he also traveled around the United States and the Caribbean. In 1919, he headed for Paris, where he soon rented a studio to which he returned frequently until 1934. On a number of visits to his homeland, he painted the Czech landscape. Much of the work he left abroad perished during World War II. Although his last important solo exhibition took place in 1944, he continued working productively for nearly another three decades. His paintings demonstrate familiarity with predominant European styles, ranging from fauvism and expressionism through cubism and surrealist automatism. Although some paintings, especially those completed before the mid-1920s, demonstrate facility with sophisticated non-objective approaches, his more numerous works accommodate representational elements in varying degrees. See also ; ; ; .
In her most distinctive work, Cuban-born American Ana Mendieta wove together interests in feminist art, body art, performance art, process art, and earth art. Notably, she used her own body—both physically and metaphorically—as a means of connecting with the earth, as she invoked themes of displacement and alienation, identification with nature, death and regeneration, and female fecundity. Born in Havana, at 12 she arrived in the United States with the assistance of Operation Peter Pan, which airlifted and sheltered children whose parents wished them to escape the Fidel Castro regime. This experience of separation and exile marked her sensibility. After living in foster homes in Iowa, she graduated from the University of Iowa, where she also earned an MFA in a new intermedia program—despite audacious performances involving nudity and transgressive actions. During the 1970s, working in Mexico as well as Iowa, she produced an affecting series of siluetas (silhouettes), using her body or its outline to evoke yearning for connection to specific places. Memorably, as she pressed her body into the earth, or sometimes built a form from earth and clay, she marked her actions with various natural substances such as rocks, flowers, or even blood. Intense, autobiographical, and often suggesting the power of prehistoric imagery, these evanescent works remain knowable through evocative photographs by her mentor, collaborator, and partner, photography professor Hans Breder, who had established the intermedia option. In 1978, she moved to New York, and two years later, she made the first of several visits to her homeland. There, inspired by pre-Columbian Taino mythology relating to the birth of humanity, she carved life-size female figures in and around a cave in a park near Havana. During the year 1983–84 in Rome, she embarked on a monumental series of sculptures chiseled and burned from tree trunks, sometimes making forms that suggest abstracted female bodies. Beginning in the early 1970s, she also made films that extend the interests of her work in other media; although few were seen during her lifetime, a number were later recovered and exhibited. At 36, she died in a fall from the window of her New York apartment. Her husband, Carl Andre, was charged with murder but subsequently acquitted. See also .
From the 1920s through the 1950s—and to a lesser extent in subsequent decades—Mexico produced the 20th century’s most vigorous and influential form of public art. Celebrating nationalistic themes in vogue after the Mexican Revolution, artists adorned sites with monumental, dramatic, and agenda-driven paintings. Usually underscoring the dignity of common people, these generally focus on the country’s indigenous population and its history. As a rule, stylized figurative and symbolic elements prevail, but some incorporate abstracted forms as well. Although not all have appreciated the Mexican muralists’ politics, many Latin American and U.S.-based artists have found inspiration in the movement’s dramatic formal inventions, enormous scale, and humanitarian point of view.
Numerous Mexican artists—including Rufino Tamayo—took on commissions for murals, but three avowed leftists dominated the movement. Diego Rivera (1886–1957), the most accomplished, set the pace in terms of both style and content. The other two, José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974), developed turmoil-filled individual approaches that often express a more pessimistic and less romantic point of view than Rivera’s.
Rivera, born in Guanajato, trained as an artist in Mexico City. He continued his studies for two years in Madrid. Following visits to other European art centers, he returned to Mexico, but only briefly. In Paris from 1911 until 1920, he absorbed the modern movements—particularly cubism—that informed his sophisticated easel paintings. Becoming interested in politics after the Russian Revolution, in 1920 he visited Italy, mainly to investigate its unparalleled mural tradition. In 1921, he returned to Mexico and soon embarked on his most compelling works, large-scale ruminations on his country’s history and future. A visit to the Soviet Union in 1927–28 preceded the start in 1929 of Rivera’s most ambitious mural, a survey of his country’s history, in Mexico City’s National Palace. In the same year, he married Frida Kahlo. From 1930 until 1934, Rivera worked in the United States, where his series on local industry (1932–33) at the Detroit Institute of Arts remains his most important work. Another major project has a more notorious reputation, however. The politically charged Man at the Crossroads (1933), painted for the new Rockefeller Center, was destroyed in 1934. Its portrayal of Vladimir Lenin (which Rivera refused to eliminate) was a step too far, underscoring communist sympathies that did not sit well with his capitalist sponsors. For San Francisco’s 1939–40 Golden Gate International Exposition, he painted Pan-American Unity, his last U.S. commission. In his remaining years, Rivera continued to paint murals in Mexico, burnishing a lasting reputation for esthetically forceful, widely accessible, and pungent communication. See also ; ; .
Also a genre painter, lithographer, and political cartoonist, Orozco angrily excoriated injustice while also promoting a tragic view of the human condition. Born not far from Guadalajara, he grew up there and in Mexico City, where he studied architecture before turning to painting. Fleeing storms of criticism for his biting depictions of human degradation, he lived in the United States between 1917 and 1920. Upon his repatriation, he turned to the murals that eventually made his reputation. Still not much appreciated at home, from 1927 until 1934 he worked mostly in San Francisco and New York. His most notable accomplishment of these years, murals for Dartmouth College on The Return of Quetzalcoatl (1932–34), cemented his artistic stature. Returning permanently to Mexico at this point, he concentrated thereafter on murals, mostly in Mexico City and Guadalajara. By about 1940, his style had become more violent, in response to dismay at the existential problem of human suffering. A six-panel portable fresco, Dive Bomber and Tanks (1940), commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, epitomizes this outlook. Fragmented, mostly mechanistic forms, expressionistically rendered in somber tones, jumble together in a sobering warning about the horrors of warfare.
Born in Chihuahua, Siqueiros, a dedicated communist and vigilant oppositionist, trained as an artist in Mexico City. After military action on behalf of the revolution, he headed to Paris in 1919. There, he became familiar with modern styles and made Rivera’s acquaintance. After returning to Mexico in 1922 and taking up mural painting, he joined other artists in writing a manifesto for the country’s new art, explaining that their esthetic aim was to “socialize artistic expression, to destroy bourgeois individualism.” Between 1925 and 1930, he neglected his art in favor of politics. Subsequently, his activism landed him in prison or exile on several occasions. Pushed out of Mexico in 1930, he worked in Los Angeles for two years before he was deported from the United States. He headed to South America, but Uruguay also ousted him the following year. In 1936, he arrived in New York, where he ran an influential experimental workshop that promoted the adaptation of modern media to art production, along with appreciation for accidental effects. (Morris Louis and Jackson Pollock numbered among American artists who benefited.) Between 1937 and 1939, he served as an officer in the anti-Fascist campaign in Spain. In 1940, accused of involvement in a plot to assassinate Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, he again was forced into exile. He worked in Chile and Cuba before his permanent repatriation. Thereafter, he demonstrated prodigious energy in pursuing both mural and easel painting in Mexico City. His most striking accomplishment in these later years, an auditorium and cultural facility known as the Polyforum Siqueiros (completed in 1971), integrates colorful mural paintings on the theme of “The March of Humanity” with both its interior and outer architectural forms. See also ; ; ; ; ; ; .
A form of geometric abstraction stressing simplicity and clarity, minimalism also rejected metaphor, symbolism, and personal emotion. An international tendency, it achieved its purest expression in New York sculpture between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s. Rooted in early 20th-century suprematism and constructivism, inflected by the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian and other Europeans, and arising in opposition to both abstract expressionism and pop art, minimalism can also be regarded as a logical outcome of Clement Greenberg’s insistence that concentration on inherent properties of artistic media provided the only route to esthetic progress. Initially, minimalism’s literalism and radically reduced forms appeared to many as devoid not only of visual interest but also of any meaning whatsoever. Yet the movement’s combination of austerity and grandeur, along with attention to precise fabrication, soon came to be appreciated for formal strength, theoretical sophistication, and, in the end, a stern beauty in its articulation of classical order.
Immediate antecedents of minimalism can be located in the epic canvases of certain abstract expressionists, notably Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt; in the geometric designs of such painters as Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Burgoyne Diller; in Frank Stella’s stripe paintings; in monochromatic canvases by Robert Rauschenberg and Yves Klein; in much hard-edge painting; and in Tony Smith’s sculpture. Still, minimalism offered a newly stringent tone, marked by rigorous, uncompromising, often serially conceived forms; non-relational, often gridded composition, in which no single element dominates; aggressive presence within the viewer’s space; and, often, fabrication from industrial materials, such as steel, aluminum, or neon tubes.
Minimalism coalesced as an identifiable tendency in the mid-1960s, when several important exhibitions and published articles wrestled with the characteristics and meaning of the new art. Donald Judd’s 1965 essay “Specific Objects” remains a cornerstone for the understanding of minimalism. Judd here champions an art that is neither painting nor sculpture, but rather distinct from those categories in its total independence from illusion and in its pure physicality. (At that point, he actually had in mind a wider range of art than came to be identified more narrowly as minimal.) Barbara Rose’s article, “ABC Art,” of the same year represents an attempt to define the origin and meaning of the tendency, which—as her title reveals—had not yet come to be commonly known as minimalism. The following year, in “Notes on Sculpture,” Robert Morris championed the “unitary” object, while “Primary Structures” at New York’s Jewish Museum offered the first coherent overview of the movement’s three-dimensional work, and Lawrence Alloway’s “Systemic Painting” at the Guggenheim Museum treated aspects of hard-edge abstraction as manifestations of a minimalist esthetic. Reacting negatively to the new art, critic Michael Fried (1939–) added to the discussion in 1967 with “Art and Objecthood,” which argued persuasively that the new art could only be experienced within a continuum of the viewer’s experience of the world and thus lacked self-sufficiency, a point of view that nevertheless suited minimalists and their progeny; they were perfectly happy to situate their art closer to experience of the real world. Parallel minimalist tendencies appeared in music and dance particularly, but also in literature and other fields of creative endeavor. Even as minimalism came to be understood as a distinct approach, critic Lucy Lippard proposed a postminimal tendency in the 1966 gallery exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction,” which featured Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman, along with other still underappreciated artists.
Judd and Morris numbered among principal minimal artists, along with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt. However, numerous other artists contributed importantly, at least during part of their careers. Older than most prominent minimalists, Canadian-born Ronald Bladen (1918–88) studied in Vancouver and San Francisco and worked as a welder in Navy shipyards during World War II. A painter early in his career, in 1956 he left San Francisco for New York. There, as such friends as Al Held, George Sugarman, and Nicholas Krushenick reinforced his interests in hard-edge painting and then constructivism, he turned exclusively to sculpture in the early 1960s. His grandly simplified works appeared in early exhibitions of minimal art, and he subsequently received many international commissions for dynamic, even romantic geometric abstractions. Throughout his career, he favored aluminum painted black.
John McCracken (1934–2011) devoted most of his career to a single format, rectangular wood planks that lean from floor to wall. Usually taller than an average person, they possess a dignified self-sufficiency, while their highly finished, almost luminous, single-color surfaces intimate transcendental overtones in their unblemished perfection. He produced, as well, freestanding, similarly finished, box-like sculptures. His work also contributed to the light and space movement. Born in Berkeley, California, McCracken served for four years in the navy before training at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland. His early abstract expressionist painting soon gave way to simplification and then, in the early 1960s, to pop art–inflected abstract reliefs. In 1966, he devised the format that subsequently preoccupied his art, although he also created other forms of abstract sculpture and sometimes employed highly polished metals. He continued to live in the West during most of his life.
Fred Sandback (1943–2003) created a form of three-dimensional minimalism that barely qualifies as sculpture. He specialized in ethereal installations made of string, wire, or, most often, colored yarn, tracing geometric forms in space. He also devoted much attention to prints delicately inscribed with similar forms. Born in Bronxville, New York, he graduated in 1966 from Yale University and, three years later, earned his MFA there.
Minimalism in its pure form remained essentially a sculptural pursuit. Although painting, too, responded to minimalism’s reductive urge, nevertheless those painters commonly associated with minimalism could hardly avoid the at least marginally more expressive demeanor inherent in painting. The late work of abstract expressionists Newman and Reinhardt hinted at minimalism to come, as did certain spare works by hard-edge painters, such as Ellsworth Kelly and John McLaughlin. Agnes Martin devised a highly personal renunciatory style that found wide admiration, although the artist herself regarded her work within the context of abstract expressionism.
In her work of the 1960s and early 1970s, Jo Baer (1929–) devised an extreme approach to minimalist tendencies, although she insisted that poetic objects were her goal. In the earlier works—large, often square works, sometimes arranged as diptychs or triptychs—most of the canvas remained an undifferentiated white or pale gray. At the perimeter, a narrow band of color or black (often appearing in combination) played on the eye’s perceptual response to certain scientifically known principles. In the 1970s, she varied her approach with white works that offer only small color areas, which sometimes wrap around the side of the canvas. Born in Seattle, she attended the University of Washington there from 1946 to 1949. After three years in New York, in 1953 she moved to Los Angeles, where she befriended Edward Kienholz and others in his circle and made a commitment to art. In 1960, she returned to New York and abandoned her interest in abstract expressionism. By 1975, feeling that her distinctive art was in danger of becoming formulaic, she renounced not only minimalism but abstract painting more generally and moved to Europe, turning to the figurative approaches that she has subsequently pursued ever since. Since 1984, she has lived in Amsterdam.
Robert Mangold (1937–) has pursued a consistent interest in combining flat, simple shapes—at first in mostly grayed hues, but later more colorfully tinted—with spare, linear elements in works of dignified, authoritative, often classical spirit. A native of the Buffalo, New York, area, he studied for three years at the Cleveland Institute of Art before transferring to Yale University, where he earned his BFA and MFA in 1961 and 1963. In New York, he became known in the mid-1960s for monochrome, literalist constructions that reflected the city’s industrialized milieu. His more refined mature style emerged around 1970 as he adopted the shaped canvases that have characterized much of his work since.
In distinctively conceived drawings, mathematically inclined Dorothea Rockburne (1934–) used folds and creases to create geometric patterns. Born in Montreal, she moved to the United States in 1950 to enter Black Mountain College. There, in addition to art, music, and dance, she studied mathematics with Max Dehn, known particularly for work in geometry and topology. She settled permanently in New York in 1955. After devoting much of the 1960s to dance and performance art, which enhanced her feeling for space and movement, as well as for material substance, she embarked on austere installations and sculptures comprising simple, geometric elements. A series begun in 1971, Drawing Which Makes Itself, demonstrated at first the range of effects that could be achieved purely by folding white paper but soon also incorporated color or tracings made with carbon paper. Subsequently, she painted more vivid geometric abstractions, often making use of shaped canvases. In the 1990s, her vision broadened beyond mathematics as she took on astronomy to create freely conceived color abstractions, no longer bound by geometry but instead responding to the workings of the universe with a more painterly touch.
From her outpost in Paris, where she has lived since 1991, American Edda Renouf (1943–), born in Mexico City and brought up near New York, continues to produce subtle, not quite monochrome paintings of considerable meditative integrity. She emphasizes the materiality of her linen canvas supports by pulling threads and working the surface so as to provide variations within otherwise understated visual fields. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville in 1965 and earned an MFA at Columbia University in 1971, but she also trained in Paris and Munich.
Others who figured as contributors to 1960s minimal art include Larry Bell, Tony DeLap (1927–), Tom Doyle (1928–2016), Peter Forakis (1927–2009), Robert Grosvenor (1937–), Lyman Kipp (1929–2014), Forrest Myers (1941–), David Novros (1941–), Michael Todd (1935–), and David von Schlegell (1920–92). See also ; ; ; ; ; ; .
An independent spirit who contributed to several important art tendencies, painter and sculptor Joan Miró nevertheless resisted identification with any particular group. He is best known for brightly colored arrangements of semi-abstracted and often witty organic forms. However, some of his work, especially from the post–World War II era, strikes a more somber note. At heart a transcendentalist, he followed his own star in seeking to discover, as he once wrote, “a deep poetic reality.” Indefatigably productive, he also worked as a printmaker, book illustrator, ceramist, and designer.
A Catalan, he grew up in his native Barcelona and attended art school there. Although he lived during much of his adult life in Paris, he retained strong ties to Spain and returned often. His early work, drawing on post-impressionist and fauve currents, already displayed the bright colors, flat patterns, and acute observation that distinguished most of his creations. Between about 1918 and 1922, he tempered this approach with more structural concerns learned from cubism and the work of Paul Cézanne, while at the same time investigating a meticulous, almost hallucinatory, if somewhat distorted realism. The Farm (1921–22; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art) displays a wholly original combination of these incongruous interests in a quirky view of his family’s country retreat. Increasingly in the early 1920s, Miró’s work anticipated surrealism, and throughout the later 1920s and 1930s, much of his art suggested ties to that movement. However, although much praised by its leader André Breton, Miró never formally allied himself. Mediating between representational and biomorphic approaches, his variant proved suggestive to nascent abstract expressionists, especially after a retrospective appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1941. Twenty-three small, sprightly, completely abstract “Constellations” (1941–42) further interested New York artists when they were shown at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in 1945. After World War II, Miró often extended the personal language he had developed in prior decades, but in other works he responded to the large scale and dramatic impact of abstract expressionism. Important commissions in these years for public sculptures and murals brought his brand of organic abstraction to a larger audience. In the 1960s, his stripped-down abstractions employing unbroken expanses of color resonated closely with color field interests of that time. After the student strikes and other disruptions of 1968 and immediately succeeding years, Miró responded with uncharacteristic anger by burning and slashing canvases in dadaist gestures of protest. Although heartfelt, these works—lacking his usual subtlety, formal invention, refined color, and spiritually symbolic goals—do not play to his strengths, and he soon jettisoned the approach. His creative spirit barely slowed before his death on the island of Majorca, his primary residence for many years. See also ; ; ; ; ; ; .
Among the most accomplished second-generation abstract expressionists, Chicago-born Joan Mitchell lived in Paris or nearby throughout most of her career. Combining verve and elegance, she characteristically relied on short, jabbing arcs of ravishing color applied to white backgrounds. Often, her works offer cascades of gestural brushwork, as if the marks were falling vertically down the canvas. Memories of landscape frequently hover in the atmosphere. Especially late in her career, many works stake out enormous dimensions, sometimes achieved by abutting two or more canvases. Mitchell studied at Smith College for two years before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The year after graduating in 1947, she sailed for Europe, where she remained for nearly two years, primarily in Paris. Subsequently, for some time she divided her time between there and New York. Upon returning more or less permanently to Paris in the mid-1950s, she befriended other American artists—including Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, and Shirley Jaffe—but more significantly, she soon met Jean-Paul Riopelle, her partner until 1979. In the late 1960s, she moved to Vétheuil (about 20 miles northwest of Paris), which remained her permanent home. There, in part at least, she seemed to build on the spirit of paintings by an earlier resident, Claude Monet. Other artistic ancestors include Vincent van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. Although ill health plagued the final decade of her life, Mitchell’s zest for painting remained strong until the end.
Indian abstractionist Nasreen Mohamedi drew on currents from both Eastern and Western art and philosophy in forming a cosmopolitan personal expression that reflected not only her individuality but also extensive travels and familiarity with wide-ranging sources. Born in Karachi, she moved as a child to Mumbai and studied at London’s St. Martin’s School of Art (now Central St. Martin’s) from 1954 until 1957. After rejoining her family, now in Bahrain (partly of Arab ancestry, she subsequently visited there from time to time), she returned to Mumbai, where she befriended V. S. Gaitonde and other painters interested in modernism, but studied again in Europe, between 1961 and 1963 in Paris. From 1970 until 1972, she lived in New Delhi before relocating to Baroda (now Vadodara) in the west-central province of Gujarat. Her early abstractions, sometimes based on plant forms, suggest interest in the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Even then, she worked with pale tones, and from the 1970s, she more or less relinquished color as she relied on drawing and watercolor for an austere, linear, and often grid-based minimalist approach. In spirit perhaps comparable to the work of Agnes Martin, formally her work suggests attenuated connections to the work of her admired predecessor Kazimir Malevich, yet ultimately it stands on its own as a refined and subtle attainment. As well, her art reflects interests in the forms of Mughal arts and architecture, in the structures of classical Indian music, and in Sufi, Zen, and her own Islamic spiritual traditions. Mohamedi never showed her photographs during her lifetime, but they stand as a parallel achievement to her other work; softly focused, sensitively responsive to form and light, and printed in warm tones, they often offer no clues to their real-world sources. In ill health during the final decade of her life, she produced increasingly small and wispy drawings. She returned to the Mumbai area in 1988.
Painter, photographer, sculptor, printmaker, filmmaker, and designer László Moholy-Nagy numbered among the 20th century’s most innovative proponents of a scientific and technological approach to art. An idealist as well as a rationalist, he hoped to harness recent advances in understanding space, time, light, and motion to human betterment. He also promoted the benefits of good design for industrial production and made use in his own work of recently developed plexiglass and other man-made materials. Although he died not long after the end of World War II, his writings and teaching, no less than his art, remained beacons to those who yearned for a distinctively modern future. In his final years, Moholy-Nagy founded and directed Chicago’s famed Institute of Design (now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology), to this day the largest graduate design program in the country. (The undergraduate program came to an end in 1998.) Former faculty include Alexander Archipenko, György Kepes, and photographer Aaron Siskind, as well as luminaries from the fields of architecture and industrial design.
Born in Hungary, Moholy-Nagy showed interest in art from childhood, but in 1913 he started law school in Budapest. Wounded after more than two years of military service during World War I, he turned seriously to drawing during his convalescence. After his return to Budapest, he briefly pursued art studies and, more importantly, became acquainted with advanced artists and writers, who spurred his thinking about the role of art as an agent of social change. The next year, he moved to Vienna but before long headed to Berlin. There he associated with international leaders of dada and constructivism. In 1923, he accepted the invitation of its director, architect Walter Gropius, to join the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar. He not only became an influential teacher but, during his tenure, also developed his thoughts on what he deemed “the new vision,” explicated in the first of his many well-regarded books on art and design topics. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, he went along, but political pressures and disagreements over the school’s direction led him to resign, along with Gropius and others, in 1928. Back in Berlin, he engaged in experimental photography and filmmaking, as well as stage design. During this period, continuing work initiated in the early 1920s, he combined metal and glass geometric elements into what became well known as the Light-Space Modulator (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums). Engaging movement and light effects, it presages kinetic art of the post–World War II period. Unsettled by the increasingly powerful Nazi regime, he left for Amsterdam in 1934 and then London the following year. In 1937, he arrived in Chicago to establish the New Bauhaus. Although it failed only a little more than a year later, Moholy-Nagy managed to restart his venture as the Institute of Design (until 1944, School of Design) in 1939. Pedagogical responsibilities notwithstanding, he remained vigorously engaged with varied ambitious projects. During these final years, he also wrote Vision in Motion (posthumously published in 1947), an influential summary of his thoughts on teaching art and design. See also ; ; ; .
Among the most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century, Henry Moore convincingly updated the Western tradition of figurative sculpture by adapting it to distinctly modern forms. In developing his personal style, Moore synthesized many sources. The Parthenon sculptures and Michelangelo’s nudes provided inspiration. But he drew also on surrealism, constructivism, pre-Columbian art, and such contemporary exemplars as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Naum Gabo, and Pablo Picasso. Some pieces offer completely non-representational but nevertheless metaphorical biomorphic shapes, but the great majority imply the human body as a reference point. Many simultaneously invoke reminiscences of landscape. In the post–World War II period, Moore’s simplified and abstracted, monumental marble or bronze works came to be widely admired for their humanistic tenor in the face of much existential doubt. Commissions for public spaces flowed his way from around the world, and today his work ranks as the geographically most widely distributed in the history of art. From the late 1960s, he frequently also created prints, mostly lithographs, which reprised themes of his sculptures.
Born in Yorkshire, after his World War I military service, Moore studied art in Leeds and then in London, which remained his principal residence until 1940. Like fellow student and longtime friend Barbara Hepworth, at an early date Moore advocated direct carving to best take advantage of the nature of materials, which he, too, explored in generalized human and animal subjects. In the 1930s, visits to Paris better acquainted him with modern styles and with the modern preference for vitality over formal beauty. Like Hepworth, he gravitated toward abstraction and explored the full three-dimensionality of materials by introducing openings that emphasize plasticity. As German bombing of London commenced in 1940, Moore relocated permanently to the hamlet of Perry Green, near Much Hadham in Hertfordshire. However, in his capacity as an official war artist, Moore produced notable drawings (1940–42) of Londoners taking refuge in Underground stations during air raids. The bronze Family Group (1950), installed outside the Barclay School in Stevenage, not far from his home, initiated his productive postwar career in large-scale public sculpture. A seated couple with their child, rendered in smooth but relatively naturalistic contours, suggests the intimacy of family life. Before long more adventurous, Moore often abstracted until only memories of the human subject remain. Yet often the sense of a reclining figure governs the shapes and rhythms of these works. In some of his most original treatments, voids separate components redolent of prehistoric megaliths. Moore had occasionally cast in bronze during the 1930s, but after the war, this became his preferred medium, superseding his attention to the integrity of materials. As more and more commissions came his way, casting proved the only practical method to fulfill his obligations. (Most exist in editions of as many as 10.) Moore’s practice remained varied, however, in its balance of representation and abstraction, in materials, and in scale. An unassuming person, Moore was not given to expounding upon his art. Yet his succinctly stated goal of making “sculpture that would stand beside the great sculpture of past ages and masters” discloses great ambition. By the end of his life, after four decades as Great Britain’s most prominent artist, many agreed that he had done so. See also ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; .
Italian painter Giorgio Morandi remains known principally for meditative still life arrangements in muted tones. Most frequently, bottles, jars, vases, and other containers, placed in simple groupings on shelves or tabletops, provide armatures for carefully considered, abstracted visions of a pure reality. Early and late in his career, he also painted landscapes. Morandi trained at the art academy in Bologna, his birthplace and lifelong residence. Attracted above all to the work of Paul Cézanne, he also responded to cubism and to the formal dignity of such earlier Italian painters as Giotto, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca. As a young artist, he experimented with aspects of futurism and, later, with the sharp-edged metaphysical painting style associated with Giorgio de Chirico. During the 1920s, he slowly refined his characteristic approach, which remained independent of successive esthetic movements of his time. Warm tonalities, painterly surfaces, and slight irregularities within his analytical compositions humanize his geometric regularity. The architectonic lyricism of his subtle variations on restricted subject matter testifies to a noble apprehension of fundamental unities in visible reality. In etchings and drawings, the limitation to black and white emphasizes Morandi’s sensitivity to light and his masterly control of its effects.
An originator of minimal art, American Robert Morris soon deftly pivoted to champion postminimal tendencies, particularly process art, as well as performance art, earth art, scatter art, and aspects of conceptualism. In his writings, he served as an important theorist for all these developments. Born in Kansas City, Morris studied at the University of Kansas and the Kansas City Art Institute before relocating to San Francisco to train at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) for a year. Following service in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the next year, in 1953 he enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Returning to San Francisco in 1955, he directed his attention primarily to dance and theater performances. (At the time, he was married to dancer and choreographer Simone Forti.) After settling in New York in 1960, he earned a master’s degree in art history from Hunter College, where he subsequently taught for many years. During this time, while also continuing performance-related activities, he abandoned abstract expressionist–oriented painting to concentrate instead on geometrically determined, simple objects that contributed to the early history of minimalism. His three-part “Notes on Sculpture” (1966–67) served as an influential meditation on the meaning of what he called the “unitary object.” In the late 1960s, resisting minimalist discipline and rejecting altogether discrete, well-crafted objects, he served as a founding theorist of postminimalism in such articles as “Anti-Form” (1968) and “Beyond Objects” (1969). In these, he articulated the postminimal urge to produce works that dematerialize the object and/or emphasize the viewer’s perceptual role in completing meaning in a work of art. In his own process-oriented work, he employed non-art, often industrial, sometimes ephemeral materials and decidedly non-art methods to emphasize the obsolescence of traditional forms and means. Characteristically, his malleable materials nevertheless refer to minimalist geometric form; often they respond to gravity, a natural force beyond the artist’s control. The final work thus incorporates physical evidence of “making itself,” he proposed. A number of dramatic pieces fashioned from heavy gray felt, allowed to hang and drape, remain among the most powerful of these works. He also used urethane foam, thread waste, dirt, and even steam. In the late 1960s, by distributing abstract elements in disorderly arrays across gallery floors, he also pioneered in conceptualizing scatter art. During the 1980s, Morris’s work took an unexpected turn, puzzling to many. He returned to figuration, fusing two- and three-dimensional elements into highly romantic, neo-expressionist invocations of death and destruction, bringing to mind themes of apocalypse and holocaust. Since then, he has experimented with other varied techniques, such as drawing while blindfolded and mirror installations, while also continuing to produce monumental sculptural and felt pieces. See also .
A leading American abstract expressionist, Robert Motherwell ranks as perhaps the most elegant stylist among them, as well as the movement’s most important spokesman. While mindful of gesture and process, his work bespeaks a controlled and well-informed sensibility, more responsive to literary sources than was common among his abstract expressionist colleagues. Among this group, Motherwell also sustained the most significant interest in printmaking throughout his career, and he more frequently turned to collage than most. An articulate writer, he promoted international modern and contemporary art in articles and in publications he edited. Aided by a sophisticated grasp of art and literature, Motherwell argued effectively for the spiritual value of art as the means to “close the void that modern men feel” and so to heal the breach with nature. His cosmopolitanism fostered the internationalization of American art, as well as abstract expressionism’s intellectual seriousness.
Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and grew up in the West, mostly in California. In 1937, he graduated from Stanford University, where he had majored in philosophy but also cultivated interests in Symbolist literature and in psychoanalysis. Subsequently, he did graduate work at Harvard and at Columbia, where he studied with Meyer Schapiro. He also studied and traveled in Europe in 1938–39. In the end, however, he chose not to complete a degree but rather to accede to his long-standing attraction to art making. An introduction through Schapiro to exiled surrealists—particularly Roberto Matta—proved critical, as Motherwell began to understand the creative potential of automatism. In the early 1940s, in paintings such as Pancho Villa Dead and Alive (1943; New York, Museum of Modern Art) and Mallarmé’s Swan (1942–44; Cleveland Museum of Art), he played the linear freedom of automatism against controlled structure. Peggy Guggenheim mounted his first solo show, in 1944, at her Art of This Century gallery. In 1948, Motherwell embarked on his best-known theme, to which he returned intermittently for many years. Numbering more than 150 works and collectively titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic, these memorialize the 1930s civil war that symbolized for his generation the struggle against Fascism. They also allude more generally to man’s tragic fate. These grand and solemn, mostly black-and-white paintings feature roughly ovoid shapes held in check by forbidding verticals. His other work of subsequent decades, often produced in series, demonstrated considerable variety. In the 1950s, he produced many collages, as well as a series of paintings incorporating the written French phrase “Je t’aime” (I love you). In the 1960s, he created a Beside the Sea series, splashing the paint on his canvases to recall waves against a shore; the Lyric Suite, consisting of quickly executed ink drawings on rice paper; and, responding to the interests of the day in color field and minimal styles, the Open series, which features spacious, almost undifferentiated canvases barely inflected by simple geometric shapes. From 1958 until 1971, Motherwell was married to Helen Frankenthaler.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Motherwell’s literary activities were unparalleled in the education of artists and the public alike. In addition to writing articulately about abstract expressionism and its sources, he edited periodicals and collections. Notably, from 1944 he served as series editor of the scholarly Documents of Modern Art (later Documents of Twentieth-Century Art) issued by George Wittenborn. Republishing earlier writings, along with explanatory introductions (some written by himself), the series familiarized artists and the public alike with ideas crucial to the ongoing development of advanced art. The Dada Painters and Poets (1951), with his own notes, ranks as the first significant English-language publication on this movement and remains a standard reference today. See also ; ; .
Born in New Orleans, Archibald Motley lived nearly all his life in Chicago. He graduated in 1918 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the following year studied there with visiting artist George Bellows. His 1928 New York gallery show ranks as the second (preceded only by expatriate Henry Ossawa Tanner’s 20 years earlier) for an African American artist. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1929, he headed to Paris for a year. Although Motley also painted landscapes, studio scenes, and closely observed, psychologically astute portraits, his most distinctive work centers on the experience of urban blacks during the Jazz Age of the late 1920s and 1930s. In these works centering on sophisticated nightlife, slightly generalized figures—nearly all African Americans—dance, drink, live it up in clubs, and roam crowded streets. Brightly colored patterns, crowded compositions, and strong tonal contrasts underscore their energetic enjoyment of life. Despite these vivid and positive images of black life, intentionally created to convey the vibrancy of the “negro soul,” Motley’s fundamentally integrationist views, held against him in a later, more strident period of race relations, contributed to his near obscurity during the final years of his life. See also .
An Oklahoman who had only limited training as an artist before honing his sensitivity to form and pattern as a topographical draftsman in the World War II military, Lee Mullican subsequently lived in California. There, during the heyday of abstract expressionism, he forged a related but individual manner evoking transcendent visions. His characteristically large, abstract paintings, constructed with thickly painted but narrow linear elements, form tapestry-like conglomerations of interwoven marks. Glowing with an otherworldly, pulsating radiance, compositions often suggest galactic spaces harboring celestial bodies, while at the same time maintaining the flatness of the pictorial surface. Besides surrealist and other forms of abstraction, Mullican drew on American Indian art, Jungian psychology, and the teachings of Eastern religions—notably Buddhism and Hinduism—in formulating his universalizing, mystically tinged approach. Settling in San Francisco in 1946, Mullican soon met Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford, with whom he collaborated in the Dynaton movement. In 1952, he moved permanently to the Los Angeles area. Known also for accomplished drawings, Mullican produced sculptures and ceramics as well.
Matt Mullican (1951–), his son, has extended and elaborated his father’s approach, while responding as well to today’s altered cultural climate. Also influenced by tribal and non-Western art, he devises abstract symbols that serve as the building blocks of large, colorful, patterned compositions. His encyclopedic interests tend toward language and signification rather than his father’s more spiritual aims. Since coming to attention as part of the 1970s Pictures Generation with early work centered on conventional signage—as opposed to the later, more idiosyncratic symbols—he has also produced sculpture, videos, performance art pieces, and installations.
Internationally active Japanese artist Takashi Murakami blends pop art’s mixing of high and low culture with the manga and anime enthusiasms of his native country. He has dubbed his approach Superflat, merging an allegiance to the traditional patterned Japanese esthetic with the notion of flattened distinctions between approaches to the visual in contemporary culture. His brightly colored art generally offers childlike glee in its willful cuteness, sentimentality, and embrace of mass culture. Born in Tokyo, he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the national university there. A residency in New York in the mid-1990s advanced his interest in the work of Jeff Koons and others involved with commodity art or simulation. Murakami has also extended his reach beyond the paintings, sculptures, and inflatable objects of his gallery art with designs for accessories and other consumer items.