Among the first Americans to create abstractions, painter Georgia O’Keeffe soon fused representational and abstract elements into a distinctive personal style. Some 50 years later, as feminist artists and their allies brought new attention to under-appreciated women artists, her reputation skyrocketed. By the time of her death at 98, she had taken on the aura of an American icon. Indebted in the mid-1910s to Wassily Kandinsky’s published writings but largely immune to the accomplishments of European modernism, she was the only avant-garde artist of her generation who did not visit Europe. (Not for nearly another four decades, that is.) Instead, she honed and sustained an approach reverberating with American affection for the objective fact as a sign of transcendental values. Her independent mind, dedication to art, uninhibited emotion, adventurous temperament, and appreciation for the spirituality of nature earned widespread admiration.
Born on a Wisconsin farm, as a teenager O’Keeffe moved with her family to Virginia. She studied for a year at the Art Institute of Chicago, then continued her training at New York’s Art Students League, where the distinguished impressionist William Merritt Chase ranked as her most important teacher. Discouraged, she quit painting in 1908 and took a commercial art job in Chicago. A painting class during the summer of 1912 at the University of Virginia revived her interest. The new enthusiasm owed much to artist and theorist Arthur Wesley Dow’s notions about abstract compositional principles of line, shape, and color in the service of radical individualism. After teaching for two years in Amarillo, Texas, she enrolled for a year at Columbia University Teachers College, where she studied with Dow himself. In the fall of 1915, she became an instructor at Columbia (South Carolina) College. There, in relative isolation, she produced breakthrough charcoal abstractions that reoriented the course of her art and life. A friend in New York took some to photographer and modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), who, profoundly impressed, exhibited them in 1916 at his 291 gallery. Soon the two met, and although O’Keeffe went off that fall to head the art department at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, they corresponded, and Stieglitz mounted a show of watercolors and oil paintings—her first one-person exhibition—in the spring of 1917. Early in 1918, at Stieglitz’s invitation, she returned to New York and quickly became his lover, muse, and frequent photographic subject. (They married in 1924, after Stieglitz’s divorce.) Spending that summer at Stieglitz’s family compound on Lake George in upper New York State, they established an annual routine, although O’Keeffe sometimes went off on her own for part of the season. Following her return from Texas, O’Keeffe at first continued to paint abstractions that generated the elements of her personal style: strong two-dimensional pattern, smooth paint surfaces, clean edges, decorative color, and streamlined surfaces that seem to bend in space. Although she never entirely renounced abstraction, in the early 1920s, she turned to stylized close-ups of flowers and, less often, shells, leaves, or other natural phenomena. Suggesting that she had been looking attentively at recent photographs by Paul Strand and others interested in the formal possibilities of magnified views, these emotionally potent paintings made her public reputation. The flower paintings, in particular, frequently suggested erotic overtones—or so critics said, although she always denied Freudian intentions. Her chagrin over sexual analyses only intensified when Stieglitz publicly exhibited an extensive series of portrait photographs, many of them nude and some undeniably provocative. New York City itself provided her other major subject during the 1920s. Views stressing the modernity of its architectural landscape dovetailed with interests of contemporary precisionists, such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler.
In 1929, O’Keeffe headed to New Mexico for the summer, establishing a pattern that she subsequently followed almost every year until relocating there two decades later. There, her art flourished as she added new subjects to her repertoire: the arid landscape, Spanish missions and crosses, and the bones, skulls, and antlers that she arranged in heroic yet elegiac configurations. Eventually, she bought a house at Ghost Ranch and another in nearby Abiquiu. In 1946, the Museum of Modern Art honored O’Keeffe with a retrospective exhibition, the first ever staged for a woman. While it was on view, Stieglitz died. Until 1949, when she decamped permanently to New Mexico, O’Keeffe neglected her art as she settled her husband’s estate and disposed of his enormous collections of art, photography, and correspondence, acquired during decades of activity on behalf of modern art, especially as gallery proprietor at 291 and then, successively, the Intimate Gallery and An American Place. Meanwhile, as abstract expressionism became the dominant stylistic mode, O’Keeffe’s art came to seem old-fashioned. Still, perhaps accommodating contemporary tendencies, she started working on a grander scale than ever before. Particularly in a series of paintings inspired by the courtyard of her Abiquiu residence, she geometricized its visible features. Less overtly passionate than much of her earlier work, these nevertheless connect to contemporary color field and minimal trends. The new experience of traveling by air led in the 1960s to a group of paintings based on clouds seen from above.
A large retrospective exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum in 1970 reignited interest in her work, especially among women artists newly sensitized to their marginal status in the art world and eager to find new role models. Since then, her reputation has not faltered among a large and enthusiastic public, although the show, as it turned out, was her last hurrah. O’Keeffe soon began to suffer from macular degeneration and by the mid-1970s could no longer see well enough to paint unassisted. However, she continued to draw for several years and tried her hand at pottery. By the time of her death, she enjoyed widespread celebrity not frequently accorded to American artists.
A leading participant in happenings and in the rise of pop art, Claes Oldenburg remains known primarily for whimsical sculptures based on everyday objects. Since the 1980s, his projects have been realized on a monumental scale in numerous urban settings. Born in Stockholm, he grew up in Chicago. After graduating from Yale University in 1950, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1956, he moved to New York, where soon he participated in happenings along with Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, and George Segal, among others. His involvement in making props and costumes for these performances piqued an interest in producing independent works with similar materials. Reinterpretations of commonplace commodities in papier-mâché or plaster culminated in The Store (1961), a rented space stocked with ersatz consumer items. During the 1960s, Oldenburg became well known for the soft sculptures he had started making in the late 1950s. Sewn together from cloth and stuffed, these enlarged representations of such ordinary objects as cigarette butts or hamburgers offer a loopy, somewhat surrealist dislocation of normal experience. In their day, they also challenged sculpture’s traditional structural integrity, as well as the prevailing, highly developed abstract expressionist rhetoric about the seriousness of art. In the mid-1960s, he began making drawings and collages forecasting the public art that would eventually take over his practice. An early realization, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969–74; New Haven, Yale University) offered a bone-chilling conflation of a commercial beauty product (here, grotesquely enlarged and pointed skyward, suggesting artillery) and the treads of a military tank. Like James Rosenquist’s more complex F-111 (1965; New York, Museum of Modern Art), it brought to mind the integration of consumer culture and the war then raging in Vietnam while tearing apart the American public.
Subsequently, as he came to depend on colossal scale and clever design, Oldenburg amused but rarely challenged viewers’ psyches or social situations. (His preparatory drawings for these, like those for unrealized visionary projects, often suggest a richer, darker, surrealist-inflected creative vein.) In 1976, Oldenburg began to collaborate with Coosje van Bruggen (1942–2009), a Dutch-born writer and art historian who became his wife the next year. (All works produced from 1981 until her death are officially credited to the two of them.) Among many others, their subsequent public sculptures included Stake Hitch (1984; Dallas Museum of Art), showing a rope knotted around a stake driven into the ground); Dropped Bowl with Scattered Slices and Peels (1989; Miami, Metro-Dade Open Space Park), brightly colored ceramic fragments and orange parts discontinuously arranged across a plaza in sly reference to the local Orange Bowl football stadium; and Cupid’s Span (2002; San Francisco, Rincon Park), an inverted bow with an arrow poised to shoot into the ground. From 1972 until 1994, the artist’s brother, Richard Oldenburg (1933–), directed the Museum of Modern Art.
Known for vast abstractions in subtly modulated hues, American Jules Olitski numbers among important exponents of color field painting. For him, pictorial incident played second fiddle to chromatic considerations. Born in what is now Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), he arrived as an infant in New York, where he trained as an artist. After military service during World War II, he moved to Paris, where he studied with Ossip Zadkine, among others, before returning to New York in 1951. There, under the sway of abstract expressionism, he produced heavily impastoed abstractions, then moved toward simpler compositions of more discretely bounded shapes. In 1960, he began to develop his distinctive approach in stained canvases. Not infrequently, however, he bounded their misty veils with sharp contrasts of value or hue or with brushy passages. Some made pioneering use of sprayed color. During the 1970s, he reverted to painterly handling of his medium, sometimes slathering his canvases with heavily viscous strokes. In many works of his final years, he employed large forms, often seeming to allude to landscape or sky. He also worked as a printmaker and, spurred by a 1968 visit with Anthony Caro, as a sculptor.
Inspired originally by surrealism, British-born Gordon Onslow Ford developed an individualized form of abstraction that seems to mirror both the interior of the artist’s mind and the infinite spaces of the universe. In characteristic mature works, arrangements of lines, dots, and circles float amid unbounded spaces, giving expression to cosmic forces beyond the visible. A naval cadet as a teenager, Onslow Ford subsequently served in the Mediterranean fleet. Already an accomplished painter—mostly of landscapes and seascapes—by the time he resigned his commission in 1937, he soon settled in Paris and met Roberto Matta. The two spent the summer of 1938 together, reading visionary literature and investigating its implications for painting. Later that year, Onslow Ford joined André Breton’s surrealist group and soon became acquainted with Wolfgang Paalen, Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy, and others. Besides working with biomorphic form in this period, Onslow Ford also devised a technique of pouring his paints, anticipating Jackson Pollock’s distinctive method of a few years later. In 1940, Onslow Ford arrived in New York, where he organized exhibitions and gave a landmark series of lectures. One of few English-speaking surrealists, he drew the attention of nascent abstract expressionists, including William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and, according to some accounts, Pollock. The following year, he moved to a remote Mexican village. In 1947, he relocated permanently to California. In San Francisco, within a couple of years he banded with Lee Mullican and Paalen to establish the Dynaton art movement. Around the same time, his houseboat studio, moored off Sausalito—and shared with Greek-born painter, collage artist, and mosaicist Jean Varda (1893–1971)—served as an outpost of the Bay Area beat movement. During the 1950s, Onslow Ford became increasingly interested in Asian philosophies, particularly Zen Buddhism, which further encouraged his interest in metaphysical dimensions of art. In 1957, he acquired a large tract of woodland near Point Reyes in Inverness, where he built a house and established something of an art colony to encourage creative exploration into forms of consciousness. There, in the 1960s and beyond, as he survived others of the original surrealist coterie, his art flourished through his 90th year.
A form of art dominated by interests in perceptual phenomena, op art—short for optical art—offers abstract designs that titillate the beholder’s eye, thus situating the esthetic experience in a relationship between spectator and art object. Rooted in constructivism, Bauhaus methodologies, and the paintings of such geometric abstractionists as Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, it also incorporated research into the eye’s physiological functions and into the mind’s interpretation of what is seen. First identified as a tendency in a 1964 Time magazine review, op art suggested, by its very nomenclature, an alternative to contemporary pop art. While the two movements represent distinctly different attitudes toward the relationship between fine art and popular culture, op art nevertheless shares with its counterpart a sprightly and insouciant air; a preference for bright, clean design; a repudiation of abstract expressionism’s philosophical substrate and painterly surfaces; and a general accessibility to non-specialist audiences. A substantial wow factor accounted for much of its appeal. Kinetic art loosely represents a manifestation of interests similar to those expressed in op art, but more intently focused on the illusion or actuality of movement.
In New York, op art peaked with a 1965 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “The Responsive Eye,” organized by William C. Seitz. Casting a wide net, it included such color painters as Gene Davis, Lorser Feitelson, Robert Irwin, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella, in addition to core members of the more narrowly defined movement. Among them, painter and graphic artist Victor Vasarely remains widely regarded as its grandfather. A second major contributor, Bridget Riley (1931–), specialized in black-and-white designs—which remain her most distinctive works—that appeared to flicker, warp, or undulate. Born and trained in London, around 1960 she embarked on her signature project. From the late 1960s, she often modified her approach to incorporate color.
Among leading American op artists, Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930–) has throughout his career maintained a fruitful engagement with op art strategies, to which he has brought a particularly poetic tone. His works often seem to glow from within, to resonant and sometimes highly dramatic effect. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, he studied at the Cleveland (Ohio) Institute of Art before earning a master’s degree in 1955 from Yale University, where he studied with Albers. Much indebted also to Henri Matisse’s work, he ranks as arguably the finest and most subtle colorist associated with the movement. Polish-born American Julian Stanczak (1928–) lost the use of his right arm during severe privations of World War II. After arriving in the United States in 1950, he too trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art and in 1956 earned a master’s degree under Albers at Yale. His high-keyed approach often features linear configurations that provide lively activation of the canvas. He has lived in Cleveland during most of his career. Larry Poons (1937–) made his name in the 1960s with paintings featuring small ellipses or circles scattered across the surface. Afterimages induced by the hues he chose caused them to seem to skitter. Born in Tokyo to American parents, he initially studied music in Boston before training as an artist there and in New York. By about 1966, he had already moved away from his early signature style in favor of a more painterly mode allied with color field painting, but he has maintained a preference for all-over design and pulsing rhythms.
Others associated with op art include Israeli-born Paris painter and sculptor Yaacov Agam (1928–), best known for mural-size works fitted with vertical slats across the surface so that the appearance of the design changes as the viewer moves; Venezuelan-born Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923–), also active mainly in Paris, a wide-ranging artist whose early identification with op art—in low-relief works formed of thin vertical bands—formed only a prelude to a career devoted to experimenting with possibilities of light and color; and French artist François Morellet (1926–2016), who together with Argentinian Julio Le Parc (1928–) and others participated in the Paris-based Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, active between 1960 and 1968 and devoted to a collective experimental approach to visual issues. See also .
Puerto Rican–born Philadelphia resident Pepón Osorio made his reputation with elaborate, overstuffed installations that speak to the meaning of objects—particularly to Latinos—by incorporating all sorts of knickknacks and domestic items, as well as objects of religious or ceremonial significance. Distinctive, highly decorated chandeliers offer a baroque riff on these home furnishings much beloved among many Latinos, both abroad and in the United States. Since the 1990s, he has moved toward complicated, if sometimes more formally restrained multimedia installations (some including video components) and tabletop arrangements that deal with universal emotional issues seen through the lens of culture. After arriving in New York in the mid-1970s, Osorio graduated from Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York in 1978 and earned a master’s degree in sociology from Columbia University in 1985. His profession as a social worker immersed him in the lives of others, predominately Latino immigrants, but also African Americans (the artist himself is partly of African ancestry) and others. See also .
Associated early in his career with the abstract expressionists, including his good friend Jackson Pollock, the imaginative Alfonso Ossorio veered in the 1950s from painting to a distinctive form of assemblage. Uniquely among well-known members of his artistic cohort, he established a personal link with avant-garde art in Paris, where he forged a friendship with Jean Dubuffet. Uniquely also among this group, he was not only racially mixed and Catholic, but also openly gay. Born in Manila, of Filipino, Hispanic, and Chinese parentage, and schooled in England and the United States from the age of eight, in 1936 he graduated from Harvard University, where he studied fine arts. Family wealth underwrote his significant contemporary art collection.
Ossorio’s early involvement with surrealism colored his sensibility throughout his career. In paintings from the 1940s, he practiced a form of free abstraction. In 1950, he traveled to France to meet Dubuffet, whose advocacy for art brut drew Ossorio’s attention to the art of children, the insane, and outsiders more generally. By the mid-1950s, he had turned his creative bent from painting toward idiosyncratic assemblages—which he called congregations—that suggest untrammeled access to the unconscious. Using all manner of detritus, found objects, toys, and natural materials such as driftwood and shells, he constructed crowded and sometimes bizarre works that had few precedents. He also made freestanding sculptures employing similar methods. In 1952, Ossorio moved into a 60-acre East Hampton estate. Over time, he transformed the opulent house and grounds into something of an independent work of art. He restored the elaborate 19th-century mansion, installed in it his extensive collection of Dubuffet’s work and abstract expressionist paintings, and created an arboretum and sculpture park on its grounds.