Perhaps better remembered as a theorist, visionary, and provocateur than as a painter and occasional sculptor, Austrian-born Wolfgang Paalen spent his adult years in Paris, New York, and Mexico. An active participant in surrealism during the 1930s, he developed a form of expression known as “fumage,” using patterns formed by smoke and soot as the basis for paintings that made his reputation. In 1942, while living in Mexico—where he moved in 1939, on the invitation of Frida Kahlo—he founded the interdisciplinary journal DYN (derived from the Greek for possible), which survived for only two years but nevertheless transmitted transformative notions to the nascent New York avant-garde, among others. Rejecting the narrowness of pure surrealist automatism, as his work grew more fluid, Paalen prefigured abstract expressionism’s interest in ambitious, non-representational evocations of consciousness in dialogue with nature. In 1949, in San Francisco, he joined with Lee Mullican and Gordon Onslow Ford in forming the Dynaton art movement, which staged its only major exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1951. The trio hoped to extend DYN’s idealistic program for widening art’s purview to include scientific, philosophical, and ethnographic—particularly pre-Columbian—elements. Paalen died in Mexico as a suicide.
Generally regarded as the founder of video art, Korean native Nam June Paik numbered among the very first artists to incorporate televisions into his work. A few years later, he pioneered the use of the video camera as an artist’s medium. More importantly, in a sustained career devoted to the new visual technologies of television and video, he exploited their creative possibilities, establishing a new form of expression that has since become a mainstream element of artistic practice. Born in Seoul, Paik trained as a musician between 1952 and 1956 in Tokyo, where he also studied esthetics. Subsequently, while continuing his musical studies in Germany, he met Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Wolf Vostell, and by 1959, he was experimenting with electronics. Attracted to Cage’s use of chance and disruption as elements of musical composition, Paik found ways to distort television signals by using magnets. In 1962, he collaborated on the organization of the first fluxus events, and the following year, he exhibited his television art, probably the first public showing of art incorporating the distinctively 20th-century medium. After moving to New York in 1964, the following year, he bought a Sony video camera on the first day these were made available to the public. According to an often repeated story, he made a video that day and showed it to friends that night. During the freewheeling 1960s, Paik’s performance art pieces with cellist Charlotte Moorman drew much attention after he strapped tiny television monitors to her otherwise bare breasts. A restless and prolific experimenter—and a self-described entertainer—Paik enlisted a grand variety of traditional and new technologies and techniques in later works. However, he remains best known for highly effective, large arrays of television sets programmed to show original and/or appropriated video loops in dazzling combinations. In 1965, he married Shigeko Kubota.
English painter, printmaker, collage artist, and relief sculptor Victor Pasmore numbered among distinguished representational artists during the earlier part of his career, but he became a leader of abstract art in Great Britain after World War II. Born in Chelsham, a village south of London, in 1927 he took a job in London and studied painting part time. Within a few years, as he became well acquainted with modern styles of the early 20th century but unsatisfied with what they had to offer, he honed an observational approach to figural subjects, landscapes, and still lifes. His subtle, coloristically sophisticated paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s continue aspects of late impressionism and the intimism of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. In the late 1940s, he quite abruptly abandoned this approach to move toward abstraction. He found encouragement from Ben Nicholson, among others, and inspiration particularly in Paul Klee’s work and in the writings of Charles Biederman. During the next few years, he concentrated on a “square” series of paintings, followed by a “spiral” series. In these, he made adroit use of patterned colors within those geometric elements, arranged in rough evocation of landscape forms. In 1952, he embarked on a more impersonal, constructivist approach to painted, three-dimensional, geometric relief arrangements, which rank among the most thoroughly abstract works of the period. During this time, he also joined the design team for Peterlee, a new town in County Durham. His major contribution, a handsome reinforced-concrete pavilion of interlocking rectangular geometric forms spanning a small lake offers a rare integration of art and architecture of the sort envisioned by Theo van Doesburg and some of his De Stijl colleagues, including architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld. In the 1960s, Pasmore developed a more relaxed painting style that featured flat, free-form, often biomorphic shapes, sometimes with metaphorical resonance. About the same time, he began to devote much attention to graphic work in several printmaking media. In 1966, he moved permanently to Malta.
An American phenomenon, pattern and decoration—quickly nicknamed P&D—offered a lighthearted, visually lush alternative to 1970s interests in minimalism, postminimalism, and conceptual art. Little interested in theory, P&D rejected the frequently astringent styles of such movements, intending instead to recuperate decorative artistic traditions and to reclaim pleasure. To do so, it had to run in the face of two prevailing convictions. First, that “decorative” could be used only as a term of disdain. P&D answered that with defiant demonstrations of its powers and charms. And second, that painting had run its course, so therefore only three-dimensional works counted as serious art. However, reveling in applying paint to canvas, P&D artists demonstrated that painting could still engage the eye and mind. Although P&D artists drew inspiration from a wide range of high and low traditions, they also kept an eye on the work of certain well-regarded contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse and Frank Stella. They also generally acceded to the taste for flatness in post–World War II painting and for the gridded, modular nature of much minimal and postminimal work. Most P&D work complied with the prevailing preference for abstraction, but representational elements may occur within patterns.
Pattern and decoration as a movement offered little in the way of intellectual content, but it nevertheless spurred important conversations about the meaning and function of art. In its attraction to unfamiliar decorative traditions—Islamic architectural ornamentation, Near Eastern carpets, African textiles, Byzantine mosaics, and European folk art, for example—it heralded a subsequently more international and ahistorical point of view concerning the inherent values of other art forms. Some of P&D’s interests overlapped with those of feminist art; both sought to validate crafts traditionally associated with feminine production: quilts, knitted goods, samplers, lace, and the like. P&D artists also extended the interests of pop artists, particularly, and others, including some junk or assemblage artists, in popular and mass-produced culture. P&D artists often found everyday exemplars in wallpaper, patterned fabrics, and other products intended for domestic use. Proposing that decorative patterning is a fundamental human impulse, some P&D artists and supporters claimed a universal basis for the movement. Finally, together with feminist art, P&D encouraged the broad-minded pluralism that has prevailed in recent decades. Some, in fact, have seen it as the first postmodern movement; its eclecticism, disinterest in historical progress, multicultural outlook, and stylistic inconsistency foreshadowed future trends.
The pattern and decoration movement emerged more or less simultaneously in the early 1970s among two groups—one in New York, the other in Southern California. The two came together for discussions in New York before the movement first came to general attention in 1975, when its champion, Holly Solomon (1934–2002), opened her eponymous New York gallery. As a movement, P&D ran its course in 10 years or so, but by then it had made its point—even if it never attracted much praise from establishment critics who continued to view the work as shallow.
The Southern California group had two sources: first, the feminist art programs associated particularly with Judy Chicago, and second, the interests of Amy Goldman (1926–78), a visiting professor of art history at the University of California, San Diego, who shared with her students a passion for Islamic art and subsequently acted as a spokesperson for P&D approaches. As students there, Robert Kushner (1949–) and Kim MacConnel (1946–) developed a P&D approach through her influence. In 1971, Pasadena native Kushner began his involvement with the movement, making extravagant costumes for performance pieces. A 1974 trip through Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey exposed him to the glories of Islamic art and deepened his interest in the decorative as a source of pleasure and solace. While continuing to design performances for some years, he applied his insights in paintings that combined abstract decorative elements with representational drawing much indebted to Matisse. Eventually, flowers emerged as his major motif, particularly after he became more familiar with the art of Japan, which he first visited in the mid-1980s. In recent years, he has combined within opulent frameworks floral and collage elements, expanding the resonance of his work with the romance of historical and geographical distance. He has also completed a number of murals for public spaces.
MacConnel, born in Oklahoma City, entered the P&D movement with an enthusiastic embrace of mass culture, constructing wall hangings, usually left unstretched, from commercially printed cloth, which he sewed together in strips or patterns. On top of these often garish mélanges—he liked the sort of fabric used for Hawaiian shirts, for example—he added his own drawings or other ornamentation. Although more attracted to gaudy source materials than most P&D artists, he nevertheless relied on the structural control they generally all understood from modern forms of flat patterning, ultimately rooted in cubist still life. MacConnel also applied his fabrics to three-dimensional forms, furniture in particular. After a 1990 trip to West Africa, MacConnel began an extended series of vibrantly colored works in simplified geometric patterns of the sort he had observed decorating houses there.
Among the most accomplished P&D artists, as well as the most explicitly feminist, Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) formed her distinctive approach in California. Born in Toronto, she studied for two years at New York’s Hunter College, then moved on to the State University of Iowa (now University of Iowa) in Iowa City. She graduated in 1945 and remained to serve as Mauricio Lasansky’s first studio assistant and, four years later, earn an MFA. After returning to New York in 1952, she first became known for abstract expressionist paintings, then for hard-edge works. In 1967, she moved to Southern California. Becoming involved in the nascent feminist movement, in 1971 she joined Chicago as co-director of the feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In this milieu, she recognized the value of women’s crafts and of such domestic materials as fabrics, buttons, and lace. After returning to New York in 1975, she quickly made her mark with visually vibrant “femmages,” collages on a grand scale announcing that ornamentally rich, feminine experience could undergird strong, bold, and ambitious works of art. The geometry of their abstract designs supported complex, flat patterns. Among the most powerful of these, a semicircular series reminiscent of fans made heroic a format associated with delicacy and intimacy. Her later work, continuing her mixed-media approach but also including many prints, unsystematically mixed abstract and figurative elements while remaining tethered to decorative flair.
Among New York’s leading P&D artists, Robert Rahway Zakanitch (1935–), then a color field painter, reconfigured his approach around 1974 in California after meeting Schapiro and other like-minded artists. He grew up in Rahway, New Jersey, and went to art school in Newark. Initially an abstract expressionist, he has retained that movement’s fondness for expressive brushwork and large scale. In his P&D paintings, he draws on a wide range of inspirations while mixing representational and purely ornamental motifs. A particularly notable early 1990s Big Bungalow Suite, five paintings, each 11' × 30', draws on memories of the working-class domestic interiors of his childhood, with references to linoleum patterns, painted china, curtain fabrics, and the like. He has also filled commissions for art in public places and made designs for work in other media, including tapestry and stained glass.
Also a New Jersey native, Joyce Kozloff (1942–) earned a BFA from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1964 and an MFA from Columbia University three years later. While living in Los Angeles in 1970, she responded to the early stages of the feminist movement, which has remained a touchstone of her life and art. However, her initial attraction to the decorative came less from interest in women’s crafts than from travels to Europe and North Africa (particularly encounters with Islamic art), as well as a seminal 1973 trip to Mexico. These opened her eyes to the uses of pattern in varied forms of traditional cultural production. Once back in New York, she made use of these motifs not only in paintings, but soon also in ceramics and textiles. She began to decorate entire rooms, and in 1979, she had her first opportunity to design art for a public space, heralding her major contributions since. Motivated by a desire to humanize locations (including several subway or train stations, as well as architectural interiors) that affect the lives of large numbers of ordinary people, she presents eye-catching ornamentation that usually includes motifs related to the site or its environment. Since 1999–2000, a year spent in Rome, Kozloff has explored the uses of maps and other historical diagrams as armatures for her work. She is married to art critic and photographer Max Kozloff (1933–).
Also known for a number of public projects, especially murals and floor designs, Valerie Jaudon (1945–) invented a distinctive method of disciplined, often confoundingly intricate pattern making. In her paintings, thin bands characteristically intertwine or move across the surface in dynamic, intellectually determined arrangements that sometimes recall medieval Celtic designs. Born in Greenville, Mississippi, she trained at art schools in Mississippi, Mexico, and London.
Because of his use of lavish ornamentation and inclusion among the P&D artists at Solomon’s gallery, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt (1948–) often appears within considerations of pattern and decoration art. However, his interests center on spiritual rather than decorative goals. Another New Jersey native, born in Elizabeth, he enthusiastically embraced the sorts of kitsch materials familiar from his working-class Catholic childhood. Along with inexpensive pictures of saints or the Virgin Mary and plastic devotional trinkets, he adorns his assemblages, collages, and altars with cellophane, artificial flowers, shiny tinfoil, buttons, beads, glitter, and other trashy, commercially produced materials. He confers an affecting dignity on the sentimental inner lives and capacity for wonder among the unsophisticated people he grew up with. In their manipulation of color, texture, and form, his elegant, completely abstract works reveal most particularly the depth of his artistry. See also ; .
A leader in reestablishing representational painting in the waning days of abstract expressionism, American painter and printmaker Philip Pearlstein has concentrated almost exclusively since the 1960s on the nude figure, usually female, situated in a limited interior space. Described with hard literalness, his images overlap with interests of photorealists, but he has always painted directly from the subject. A Pittsburgh native, he trained at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), graduating in 1949 after interrupting his studies for World War II military service. Subsequently, in 1955, he earned a master’s degree in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Meanwhile, he adopted landscape as his subject in a gesturalist technique derived from abstract expressionism. In the later 1950s, these became harder, more precise, and less emotionally engaging. Within a few years, he applied this newly matter-of-fact approach to the figure, which provided an armature for exploring formal organization. Hard lighting, oblique vantage points, and impersonal cropping contribute to a desolate mood. Early examples generally depicted one or two figures within barren studio spaces, as he disregarded modernist attention to the flat picture plane in favor of clearly legible, three-dimensional space. Disregarding the psychology of his subjects, he focused entirely on their physical presence, producing a disengaged air that reflects the detached coolness of both much pop art and hard-edge painting of the period. Over time, his compositions gained in complexity as he described more intricate spaces and sometimes introduced props that provided colorful accents contrasting with otherwise generally neutral hues.
An American artist of particularly wide-ranging interests, Irene Rice Pereira remains best known for a distinctive geometric style she formulated in the late 1930s. Beginning in 1939, she often painted on plastic or glass in order to incorporate a third dimension by layering two or more transparent surfaces above each other. Because a narrow space separates the individual supports, as the viewer moves from side to side, the image appears to mutate, foreshadowing interests later associated with op art. Her compositions most characteristically feature linear elements that appear to outline geometric forms, along with more freely painted color areas. These original works reflect her interests in philosophy, science, psychology, and modern materials, while at the same time accommodating her increasingly strong transcendental beliefs that held light in mystic regard.
Born in Massachusetts, Irene Rice moved with her family to Brooklyn. As an artist, she used the name I. Rice Pereira (the surname of her first husband) to try to disguise her identity as a woman. While studying art in New York, she was particularly impressed by the teachings of Jan Matulka. Later, during 1931–32, she studied in Paris with Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966)—a painter of abstracted still lifes and co-founder with architect Le Corbusier of purism—and traveled in Europe. Until 1937, she continued to employ an abstracted form of representation, often based on mechanical forms. In the late 1930s, her interest in using materials not previously associated with fine art increased as she taught a course based on Bauhaus precedents. After 1952, she devoted most of her creativity to poetry and to dense—indeed, sometimes impenetrable—theoretical writings, which she published in several volumes.
An elastic term applied to varied forms of expression, performance art generally refers to events that feature an artist live before an audience. Performance artists usually emerge from a background in visual art, and most continue to produce other, less ephemeral forms of art. Not fully theatrical productions, performance art events may be scripted or free-form, multimedia or not, elaborately staged or simply focused on a single artist, or so completely eccentric that any generalization remains out of reach. They differ from most other works of visual art (excepting film and video, of course) in that time, controlled by the artist, is an intrinsic component. They may include humorous elements but are generally not conceived as entertainment. Some performance art has been photographed, filmed, or recorded on video for distribution to wider audiences. Often performance art reflects an artist’s self-absorption, but other performance events critique social conditions. A form known as relational esthetics (or transactional art) takes as its very subject the negotiation of interpersonal relationships. By nature transitory and unmarketable, performance art generally has appealed to artists who wish to subvert establishment values. It has also provided an important avenue of experimentation among artists interested in collaborating with their peers in other disciplines (particularly music and dance) and in attempting, in parallel with conceptual artists, to define new relationships between themselves and spectators. Alternative, artist-run galleries—which flourished at the time—proved essential to the popularity of performance art through the 1970s and into the 1980s.
Although performance art as a term for a particular type of art event has been used only since the 1970s, the intermittent history of the practice reaches into the early 20th century. The contemporary history of performance art begins in the later 1950s, when happenings became a popular form. Around the same time, the Gutai group in Japan, the Zero artists in Europe, and the international fluxus tendency also engaged in similar activities. In the 1970s, as a pluralistic ethos gained ascendency over established styles and techniques, while there also developed a heightened interest in the body as a site of social as well as psychological meaning, performance art became the sustained current it has remained. Such contemporary artists as Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson contributed to aspects of performance art.
A few artists, such as the austere Marina Abramovic, have focused entire careers around performance activities. More lighthearted, and among the earliest and most successful, American Laurie Anderson (1947–) has since the 1970s combined song, storytelling, and fiddling into a widely admired form of communicative expression. With time, her performances have become more elaborate—some have said operatic—including film, light effects, and recordings.
Other artists remain particularly well known for performances, although they have gone on to other interests. British duo Gilbert & George (Gilbert Proesch [1943–] and George Passmore [1942–]) offered some of the more lighthearted moments in 1970s performance art. Neatly dressed and standing on a plinth, they performed together as “living sculpture,” calling into question the separation of artist, style, and work of art. Painter Carolee Schneemann (1939–) moved into performance art through participation in New York happenings. She remains best known for performances in the service of radical feminism, particularly the notorious Interior Scroll (1975). This event culminated with the nude artist reading from a long paper document that she slowly extracted from her vagina.
In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1939–), another New York artist, devised the concept of “maintenance art,” which elevated mundane tasks, such as housekeeping and child care, into performances. Like others who have wished to associate their art with the social sphere, she has engaged the activities of ordinary workers as a means of empowering and improving their status in life. Most notably, as an unsalaried artist-in-residence for New York City’s Department of Sanitation, she created Touch Sanitation (1977–80), a series of “handshake rituals” with garbage collectors. More completely identified with transactional art, Rikrit Tiravanija (1961–), born in Buenos Aires to Thai parents, has built an international career on staged events that bring social interactions into sharp focus. Best known for cooking and serving food to his audiences as a form of performance, among other activities he also co-founded, in northern Thailand, an agricultural center that pursues ecological and educational concerns as a creative endeavor. Today a professor at Columbia University in New York, he recently quipped, “I hate teaching, but somebody’s got to be there to keep people from making stuff.” Tino Sehgal (1976–) has perhaps taken the transactional approach to art making to its logical extreme. Eliminating objects completely, he does not even allow photographic documentation. Born in London to Punjabi and German parents, his career partakes of the fluid internationalism increasingly common among a younger generation. Situating art in conversation and body language, he achieved the best-known demonstration of his goals at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2010. For this performance, he completely emptied the museum’s dramatic, spiraling space. As visitors ascended its ramp, they were met at intervals by specially trained guides who facilitated their involvement in “creating” the work of art. See also ; ; .
A method of reintroducing representation during an era dominated by forms of abstract art, photorealism nevertheless rejected the Old Master project of interpreting individual perception. Instead, spurred by pop art’s recent embrace of camera-produced imagery, photorealists avoided the practice—which had become relatively common over the previous century—of using photographs as aids to creation, rather in the manner of drawings or other studies. Instead, they blatantly reproduced photographic images, discounting—at least in theory—the artist’s interpretive function and acknowledging the dominant position photographs had attained within the culture at large by the mid-20th century. Many even projected slides as painting guides onto their canvases, trying to attain the most mechanical reproduction possible, and often applied paint with an airbrush, which further imitated a photograph’s smooth surface. Thus, like pop art itself, as well as minimalism and other forms of reaction to the New York School, photorealism kept its distance from the values of self-expression, philosophical interpretation, and painterly touch. Because they reproduce a two-dimensional simulacrum of reality, photorealist paintings avoid engagement with the physiological and interpretive complexities of human visual experience. Acknowledging recent developments, the Whitney Museum’s 1970 “Twenty-Two Realists” provided the first definitive examination of the movement, although it also included others whose work fits more comfortably into the larger tendency known as superrealism.
Rooted initially in the objectives of photorealism, Chuck Close remains its best-known practitioner, although his photo-based art showed unique characteristics from the start, and he soon took it into highly individual territory. The poet of the movement, Richard Estes (1932–), uses photographs as the basis for complex and intriguing visual effects. His softer touch with paint, abetted by discerning color harmonies, avoids the more abrasive, impersonal quality that many other photorealists prefer, and he generally enhances the compositional unity of his paintings by adjusting parts of two or more photographs to form a single image. He specializes in generic urban views tamed by geometrical order, yet vibrant with the evanescent energy of the street—an effect often achieved by including transparent or reflective surfaces that introduce a note of ambiguity. A product of small-town Illinois, Estes trained from 1952 until 1956 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Subsequently, in New York, he worked until 1966 as a graphic artist for magazines and advertising agencies before devising his signature approach to painting. Estes has also worked prolifically as a technically adroit printmaker, and in later years he has enlarged his subjects to include landscapes. Malcolm Morley (1931–) pioneered the practice of photorealism in the mid-1960s when, frustrated by the difficulty of representing a ship realistically, he used a grid to transfer a photograph to canvas. Born and trained in London but attracted to American abstract expressionism, he moved permanently to the United States in 1958. By the early 1970s, Morley had moved on from photorealism to neo-expressionist forms of representation.
Among other major photorealists, San Francisco native Robert Bechtle (1932–) has drawn his imagery from Bay Area subjects, particularly mundane street scenes featuring cars and, sometimes, their owners. His views capture an immobilized world rendered in plainspoken language. He earned a BFA in 1954 from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland and, four years later, following military service, an MFA there. Formerly an abstract expressionist, Audrey Flack (1931–) made her reputation in the 1960s with crowded still lifes, often featuring shiny or reflective surfaces. Frequently representing women’s dressing tables or otherwise featuring objects associated with women, her subjects allied her work with aspects of feminist art. Born in New York, she earned a BFA at Yale University in 1952 and for the following decade or so worked in an abstract expressionist vein. From the 1980s, Flack turned her attention primarily to sculpture, usually depicting mythic or historic women in a highly detailed, decorative style. Many of these works have been commissioned for public spaces. Other important photorealists include Brooklyn-born Robert Cottingham (1935–), best known for boldly executed, close-up views of signs and architectural forms, and Californian Ralph Goings (1928–), who has concentrated on the American vernacular of trailers, diners, and lunch counters—including magisterial still lifes of such subjects as paired salt and pepper shakers or coffee mugs and doughnuts. See also .
Pablo Picasso muscled his way into art world prominence while still in his early twenties and remained the most celebrated artist of the 20th century. Inventive, versatile, and prodigiously productive, for decades Picasso gave compelling visual form to modern concerns. Cubist, neo-classicist, surrealist, expressionist, and social activist, he produced paintings, collages, prints, sculptures, theater sets and costumes, book illustrations, murals, and ceramics. Throughout it all, however, the human body, variously dismantled, distorted, or idealized, remained central. His intuitive yet profound apprehension of human experience fuels wide-ranging evocations of passion, tenderness, cruelty, despair, joy, and serenity. From fateful tragedy to witty humor, his art eventually seems to encompass all emotions. However, despite his audacity, Picasso in some senses remained tied to tradition. Unlike the skeptical Marcel Duchamp, the dadaists, and their present-day successors, he showed no interest in undermining the value of artistic expression nor of its realization in material form.
Born in Malaga, on Spain’s southern coast, Picasso demonstrated artistic gifts at an early age. As a teenager he studied in Barcelona, where he found camaraderie in the city’s intellectual and bohemian environment. After 1900, he spent part of his time in Paris while developing his first recognizably individual body of work. The paintings of the so-called Blue Period center on the half-starved poor and outcast, rendered in somber bluish tones to enhance a mood of melancholy sympathy. In 1904, Picasso moved to Paris, which remained his principal residence until after World War II, when he spent most of his time in the South of France. His art quickly entered the softer and more delicately tinted Rose Period, often depicting subjects from the circus or other forms of entertainment. By 1906, Picasso had moved on to a more austere analysis of form, influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne and “primitive” sculpture, first from ancient Iberia and then from Africa. His revolutionary 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (New York, Museum of Modern Art) offers a terrifying vision. The artist himself called it an “exorcism.” Five stylized, life-size, nude prostitutes, two with facial features derived from African masks, acknowledge savage undertones within modern civilization. Stylistically, it assaults the Western tradition of good taste. Soon Picasso was moving toward the analytical cubism he developed in collaboration with Georges Braque. By 1910, he had already arrived as close to complete abstraction as he would ever go. In 1912, he and Braque relaxed their rigorous and nearly monochrome approach to enter the more decorative phase known as synthetic cubism. Color returned, and they investigated textures and patterns in works that make unprecedentedly creative use of the collage technique. Also in 1912, Picasso began to make highly original sculptures, constructed from preexisting materials rather than modeled or carved.
In the aftermath of World War I, Picasso reassessed classicism in works idealizing the human body. However, before long he swerved toward expressionist distortion. From the mid-1920s, surrealist approaches and techniques affected his practice. The half-human minotaur melds classical myth with appreciation for unconscious forces, while many sonorous images incorporate surrealism’s biomorphic shapes, usually in combination with an analysis of form related to his earlier cubism. These same methods produced the black-and-white Guernica (1937; Madrid, Centro de Arte Reina Sophia). Provoked by the bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War, it remains the modern era’s most effective example of protest art. Although Picasso had been active as a printmaker from the early days of his career, in the later 1920s and 1930s, this skill took on new importance.
After World War II, Picasso’s practice remained as varied and ambitious as ever, although he no longer ranked as the pacesetter he had been. Besides his continuing activity as a painter and printmaker, large-scale public sculpture entered his repertoire. Later, he often embellished ceramics with sprightly designs. In the 1950s, he embarked on an extensive series of boldly painted reinterpretations of the Old Masters. While these puzzled many observers at the time, with historical hindsight it is evident that once again Picasso led the way, this time into postmodern neo-expressionism. Among Picasso’s last works, harrowing self-portraits reflect the artist’s coming encounter with mortality. In death, Picasso remains among the most marketable, exhibited, and discussed artists of our times. See also .
A convenient shorthand term for an important group of young artists, the Pictures Generation brought a new sensibility to American art during the late 1970s and 1980s. Mostly born between the mid-1940s and early 1950s and the first to grow up in a visual environment dominated by television, advertising, and pop art, they investigated the role of images in the construction and transmission of meaning. As they came to artistic maturity, they turned against their art school environment of minimalism, postminimalism, and visually impoverished aspects of conceptualism. Instead, while retaining conceptualist fondness for idea-driven art, they adopted various forms of representation, generally beholden to mass media and often infused with the neo-expressionist energy of the moment. At the same time, their art also entwined with vigorous theoretical debates about the nature and purposes of representation.
In 1977, “Pictures” at New York’s Artists Space gallery introduced the new sensibility with a show of five artists: Troy Brauntuch (1954–), Jack Goldstein (1945–2003), Sherrie Levine (1947–), Robert Longo, and Philip Smith (1952–). As early appropriation artists, they relied on preexisting image sources. “While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality,” the curator wrote, “it now seems that they have usurped it.” “Pictures,” he continued, “have become our reality.” By 2009, when New York’s Metropolitan Museum produced “The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984,” it was clear that the 1977 show had been only a tentative foray. The Met show included 30 artists whose work had been central to the tendency, including all but Philip Smith from the initial exhibition. Notably, the artists of this cohort made few distinctions among media. The show included painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, installation, prints, and books.
John Baldessari (1931–), the Pictures Generation’s godfather, came from an earlier era but led the way. A native Californian, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from San Diego State College (now University) in 1953 and 1957, respectively. Initially a painter, in the mid-1960s he followed a conceptualist bent in turning to photo- and text-based imagery. Later, his own photographs or images culled from mass media served as the basis of his art. Baldessari’s interests in contemporaries ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and the fluxus artists predisposed him to open-ended, experimental art. As a teacher at the California Institute of the Arts during the 1970s and early 1980s, and later at UCLA, he inspired many artists, including Tony Oursler and prominent Pictures Generation adherents, such as Brauntuch, Matt Mullican, and David Salle.
Jack Goldstein, another Baldessari student, perhaps epitomizes the Pictures Generation’s fluid approach to art making. In addition to exploring performance art, installation art, and sound art, he gave much attention to film. Among his best-known works, a series of large paintings dating to the 1980s, luridly colored scenes, mostly depicting dramatic natural events or scenes of human destruction, suggest that visual spectacle only masks the emptiness of life. Like others drawn to appropriation, Goldstein lifted these images from mass media photographs. To remove any trace of personal expression, he commissioned others to paint the works. Born in Montreal, he moved as a young teenager to Los Angeles and lived mostly in New York during the 1970s and 1980s. In the last years before his suicide in California, he concentrated on computer-generated texts.
Among appropriation art’s principal figures, Richard Prince (1949–) made his name in the late 1970s by rephotographing mass media images, often combining two or more to ironic or cynical effect. Commentators sometimes pointed to the deconstructive nature of these works, contending that they revealed underlying power structures. The artist himself refrained from inflated claims, speaking instead of the personal appeal of his images, often chosen from mythically romantic American subjects: Marlborough ads, cowboy movies, motorcycles, and cars, but also from images of the nation’s darker side, often racist or sexist. In the late 1980s, he started a new project: redrawing cartoons. More recently, he has embedded small images in large ink-jet-and-acrylic abstract paintings. Prince was born to American parents in what was then the American-controlled Panama Canal Zone (today part of Panama), later lived near Boston, moved to New York in the mid-1970s, and now lives upstate.
Another important appropriation artist, Sherrie Levine stood out for the audacity of her approach, which raises uncomfortable questions about originality in art and about art’s market value. Disregarding mass media sources, she upped the ante by photographing reproductions of revered works of art—at first photographs and later paintings. This transgressive approach startled the art community in 1981 when she exhibited a series based on Walker Evans’s widely admired Depression-era photographs, which she presented unadulterated. Continuing in the same vein to challenge notions of authenticity, after subjecting other well-known photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston to the same treatment, she photographed paintings by Vincent van Gogh and others. She later expanded her practice with exact watercolor transcriptions of paintings (exact, that is, as they appeared in book illustrations), reproductions of sculptures by Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi, and other problematic riffs on modernist icons. A native of small-town Pennsylvania, she earned undergraduate and MFA degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1969 and 1973, respectively, and moved to New York in 1975.
While Levine’s art remains almost unintelligible without a theoretical envelope, Barbara Kruger (1945–) has given appropriation a more dynamic impact. She uses photographs in combination with hard-hitting, pithy texts that draw attention to sexism, consumerism, stereotyping, and political hypocrisy. In particular, Kruger’s attention to women’s issues gave her a leading presence in the feminist art movement. A Newark, New Jersey, native, she studied at Syracuse University and the Parsons School of Design (now Parsons, The New School for Design) before leaving in 1966 to work as a designer, mostly for leading New York magazines. In 1976, she relocated temporarily to Berkeley, California, where, during the next four years, she began to fashion the approach that made her reputation. Her graphic design talent came to fruition in large-scale combinations of photographs, usually black-and-white, with bold text banners typically emblazoned with bright red. Often, images and words relate to each other only obliquely, creating evocative tensions that distance her intentions from the commercial advertising that provides the basis of her formal vocabulary. Since the 1990s, she has also created video installations.
The Pictures Generation included artists who worked exclusively with photography, most notably Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013). First trained as a painter, she did not consider herself a photographer in the usual sense. Rather, to pursue artistic goals, she made use of photography as her medium. Motivated by the concerns of conceptual art, Charlesworth worked in series, each employing a consistent technique to investigate a particular theme related to representation and its meanings. A New Jersey native, in 1969 she graduated from New York’s Barnard College, where she studied painting and earned a degree in art history. Douglas Huebler and, more importantly, Joseph Kosuth numbered among her early mentors. Her first important contribution, the Modern History series of 1977–79, investigated the way ideas are interpreted through newspaper photographs. One intriguing group represented 45 front pages from around the world on a single day when the case of kidnapped Italian politician Aldo Moro was important news. The front pages were reproduced in uniform size, with all text removed—except for the logo identifying the newspaper by name and location. Only the photographic illustrations remained, swimming in white space. In the hugely enlarged, silver gelatin prints of the 1980 Stills series, falling bodies, adapted from earlier photographs and only indistinctly seen, offer sobering and mysterious effects. Presenting an extended consideration of appropriated images in compositions of icy sublimity, Objects of Desire from the mid-1980s opened her use of luscious Cibachrome color, subsequently her preferred medium. Their visually dazzling effects and ambiguous meanings dilute their utility as instruments of analysis or social critique. In the 1990s, for more personal and suggestively allegorical effects, she abandoned appropriated imagery to concentrate on actual objects. By the end of the decade, she had progressed to still lifes of white objects assembled before white backgrounds, producing pale meditations nearly drained of pictorial incident. Her later and increasingly more personal work continued, with great delicacy, as well as her usual cerebral demeanor, to examine effects of light, with particular attention to its role in achieving an aura of perfection.
Besides these artists, the Metropolitan’s “Pictures Generation” exhibition acknowledged the contributions of Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Bloom (1951–), James Casebere (1953–), Louise Lawler (1947–), Thomas Lawson (1951–), Allan McCollum, Matt Mullican, Salle, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons (1949–), among others.
Since the 1980s, African American painter and video artist Howardena Pindell has promoted awareness of injustices toward blacks and women, but she started out as an abstract artist. Born in Philadelphia, she earned a BFA from Boston University in 1965 and, two years later, an MFA from Yale University.
During the 1970s, while living in New York, she concentrated on a series of abstractions layered with small colored dots (made with a paper puncher) to create sensuously textured, pastel-hued compositions loosely indebted to color field painting, to the minimalist grid, and to decorative patterns in African art. Subsequently, she turned toward examining her own issues with race and gender in paintings that draw on autobiography, sometimes even incorporating impressions of her own body. Often these also incorporate references to her interests in self-knowledge and spiritual questions. In the video Free White & 21 (1980), she appears in a blonde wig to comment more pointedly on racism. See also .
Video, conceptual, and performance artist Adrian Piper addresses race and gender from a variety of angles intended to create discomfort among her audience. Born in New York, she studied at the School of Visual Arts before graduating in 1974 from City College of New York with a major in philosophy. In 1981, she completed her PhD in philosophy at Harvard University. Of mixed race, and sometimes mistaken for white, she believes that she is positioned to serve as “a silent witness to the discreet racism of the bourgeoisie.” Consisting mostly of texts, photographs, or videos, her works draw attention to stereotypes and to offhandedly bigoted attitudes. Providing little pleasure to the eye, they reveal her disinterest in conforming to notions of beauty, style, or normative esthetics and reinforce her chosen position as an outsider. She has lived in Berlin since 2005. See also ; .
Among the first 20th-century African American artists to find recognition, Horace Pippin specialized in paintings related to his black heritage, but he also created portraits, landscapes, religious scenes, still lifes, and antiwar allegories. Untrained as an artist, he nevertheless developed a sophisticated pictorial style; flattened forms appear in rhythmic patterns of bright colors, as he intuitively invented compositional structures that speak to a modern sensibility of simplification, two-dimensional design, and emotional reticence. Born not far from Philadelphia, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, he spent most of his childhood in the Catskills town of Goshen, New York. There he attended school through the eighth grade but subsequently worked at menial jobs there and in New Jersey before he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I. During fighting in France, he suffered a serious wound that immobilized his right arm. Demoralized, he returned to West Chester, but he did not seriously pursue a career as an artist for nearly a decade. After returning to the sketching that had interested him since childhood, he then burned his designs on wood panels, using his left arm to move the panel as he braced his disabled arm to hold a hot poker. As his right arm strengthened, around 1930, already in his forties, he began to paint with oils, at first exploring his war memories of violence and horror. During the 1930s, his repertoire expanded, his designs gained in complexity, and before the end of the decade, his art came to the attention of collectors and dealers. His distinctive scenes, with their inherent narrative flair, supplement observation with memory and imagination. From his own experience, he warmheartedly depicted believable although idealized scenes of African Americans’ everyday lives. But much of his work is completely imagined. For example, he painted plantation blacks in the South by drawing on the recollections of others. (He never visited there.) Informed by collective consciousness, his many historical subjects, including Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist John Brown, resonate with African American experience. Throughout his work, immobility prevails. Nothing moves, not even light. His shadow-free tableaux offer a ceremonial dignity that speaks to spiritual nobility. See also .
A leading American abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollock remains an artist of startling originality. In a career that spanned only about 15 years, he revolutionized the way artists and the public alike thought about the nature of painting, the purpose of art, and the cultural role of the artist. Although his late 1940s “drip” abstractions stand as his best-known work, his career as a whole offers much more.
Pollock’s Western origins contributed to a swaggering cowboy persona. He never offered intellectual analyses of his art, and he never visited Europe. His work nevertheless incorporates a sophisticated knowledge of modern traditions, ambitions for the social purposes of painting, and, most significantly, a nearly unprecedented understanding of unconscious and mythic human experience as the artist’s primary subject. By the early 1940s, other advanced artists, as well as such significant art world figures as Peggy Guggenheim and Clement Greenberg, recognized the potential of Pollock’s audacious early successes. He subsequently rocketed to fame—with its inevitable adulation but also mockery. Riven all his life with psychological uncertainties, amplified by periods of depression and alcoholism, he died at 44 in a suicidal car crash.
Born in Wyoming, the youngest of five boys of parents who scratched out a living chiefly farming and ranching while drifting from one place to another, Pollock grew up mostly in California. Not much of a student, he did not graduate from high school. However, before he left, a sympathetic art teacher introduced him to abstract art and modern philosophies related to it, and an older brother, Charles Pollock (1902–88), who later exhibited also as Charles Pima but was then an art student in Los Angeles, sent home materials that enlarged the teenager’s esthetic horizons. At this time, Pollock also became a close friend of Philip Guston. In the fall of 1930, he followed Charles to New York, where he studied for three years at the Art Students League. There, Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) ranked as his most important teacher, as well as something of a mentor. Although Pollock outgrew Benton’s regionalist ethos and style, the older artist left his mark in Pollock’s independence of spirit; his preference for swirling, energetic compositions; and his belief in the importance of art to the collective national consciousness. Pollock’s painting during the 1930s shows both awkwardness and passion, as he struggled from Benton’s example toward more abstract and generalized landscape imagery. Sometimes these works recall Albert Pinkham Ryder’s darkly mysterious and heavily worked little paintings, which Pollock admired. By the mid-1930s, the Mexican muralists—particularly David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose New York workshop Pollock attended in 1936—had impressed Pollock with their grand scale, technical freedom, and serious ambitions to make a difference in the lives of their people. In addition, throughout his career, the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso remained lodestones.
Although between 1935 and 1942 the artist found work with federal art projects, prolonged financial insecurity dogged him. Uncertainty about his way forward as an artist exacerbated his worries. Alcohol, which he had turned to for relief since his teenage years, only made things worse. In 1937, he first sought treatment. The following year, a nervous breakdown put him in the hospital for several months. Following his release, between 1939 and 1941, he underwent Jungian analysis—a process evidently responsible for giving him access to the creative powers that lay within. In drawings completed during treatment, he worked his way into a penetrating apprehension of surrealism. Around 1940, a friendship with John Graham loosened the hold of tradition by sparking his interest in “primitive” art, the arts of pre-industrial, tribal peoples just then becoming widely admired as more authentic than Western art. In January 1942, Graham included Pollock in an important group show of new work. Lee Krasner, another exhibitor, looked him up. Soon they were living together, and they married in 1945. Although their relationship was not always serene, Krasner offered a crucial measure of emotional stability. Moreover, at this point a better educated and more accomplished artist than he, and better acquainted in the New York art world, she could offer her faith to Pollock with considerable credibility.
Increasingly in the early 1940s, as Pollock became acquainted with Roberto Matta and young Americans oriented toward surrealism, especially William Baziotes, he began to work toward an automatic technique that tapped directly into the psychology of the unconscious. In 1943, his first one-person show, at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, made clear he was now an artist to be reckoned with. Startled visitors saw three of his most powerful early works: Male and Female (c. 1942; Philadelphia Museum of Art), Guardians of the Secret (1943; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and The She-Wolf (1943; New York, Museum of Modern Art). In these, fragmented figural images collide viciously within heavily painted, explosive compositions. Later that year, Pollock took his new insights to another level in Mural (1943; Iowa City, University of Iowa Museum of Art), a wall-sized painting for Guggenheim’s apartment. Here, representation is almost entirely smothered by enormous repeating, undulating, aggressive shapes that verge on visual assault. The painted record of the artist’s physical movements, the sense of immediacy, and the all-over composition forecast much that was to come in his finest work. In 1944, Pollock worked at Atelier 17, a printmaking milieu that reinforced interests in process and linear composition.
Shortly after their marriage, Pollock and Krasner moved to Springs, an area of East Hampton on Long Island. Here, in relative isolation from New York’s hyperactivity, Pollock was able to relax, reconnect with nature, and work productively. In 1947, he embarked on the drip paintings that constitute his most important legacy. Tacking his canvases to the floor, he was able to dance around them—a procedure that he praised as allowing him “literally to be in the painting”—as his arm traced complex skeins of dripped, poured, and flung paint. Nevertheless, however much Pollock thought he was guided by his unconscious, these paintings achieve their ecstatic impact through delicate and deliberate control of line and color, as is evident in Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950; New York, Metropolitan Museum) or Number 27 (1950; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art).
The early drip paintings appeared to considerable acclaim in his 1948 show at Betty Parsons’s avant-garde gallery. A succession of masterworks followed. In 1950, however, Pollock’s depression and alcoholism returned. He never again consistently equaled his recent accomplishments. Although he turned out one last drip painting of the highest caliber, Blue Poles: Number 11 (1952; Canberra, National Gallery of Australia), he did not wish to compromise his creativity by repeating a now-established idea. He experimented variously—and often successfully—with figural elements, as in Easter and the Totem (1953; New York, Museum of Modern Art); with severely limiting his palette as in the black-and-white Echo: Number 25 (1951; New York, Museum of Modern Art); and with paint applied so thickly that its material presence overwhelms other considerations, as in White Light (1954; New York, Museum of Modern Art). Despite the considerable, though intermittent, successes of these years, by early 1955, Pollock had run out of creative steam. He barely worked at all before his death about a year and a half later. After a night of heavy drinking, he drove his car at high speed into a tree—perhaps, many have thought, not unintentionally.
No artist could emulate Pollock’s drip paintings without appearing derivative. He had achieved a rarely seen art-historical phenomenon: so completely realizing a style that it could not be elaborated. Nevertheless, his impact on his contemporaries and on the generation to follow only intensified after his death. Besides the personal example of giving himself fully—physically and emotionally—to his art, others found much to think about in his emphasis on immediate experience, his uninhibited brushwork, his confidence in process, his outsized ambitions, and the esthetic power of unconscious impulses. See also ; ; ; .
Best known for large, geometric forms in polished metal—most notably spheres, but also columns, slabs, and torqued bands—embellished with intricate abstract elements applied to the surface or seemingly revealed through “cracks” into the interior, Italian sculptor Arnold Pomodoro worked as a theatrical set designer and goldsmith before he turned to sculpture. Both practices inform his approach to sculpture, which is at once dramatic and exquisitely crafted. A native of Morciano di Romagna, just south of Rimini, he moved permanently to Milan in the mid-1950s, around the time sculpture became his principal pursuit. His early works in this medium comprise modestly scaled abstract relief sculptures, but around 1960, he formulated the approach for which he remains best known. Contrast between formal perfection in the works’ overall conception and the irregular, vaguely mechanistic elaborative passages sets up a tension between ideal vision and disruptive intrusion, tying his works to themes of instability, incoherence, and even menace seen widely in post–World War II art more generally. He has continued to design sets, while also becoming a printmaker and occasionally producing environmental sculptures on a nearly architectural scale.
His brother, Gio Pomodoro (1930–2002), also a sculptor who worked primarily in polished metal, preferred a more organic approach to abstraction. Shimmering, voluptuous surfaces contribute to a decorative élan that testifies to his own origins as a jeweler, although he sometimes worked in non-metallic media, including polished black marble and fiberglass. Born in Orciano di Pesaro, a bit south of his brother’s birthplace, he too moved permanently to Milan in the mid-1950s. He continued to make jewelry and also branched into set design, environmental projects, and printmaking.
A broadly inclusive term, “pop art” refers to work by artists who drew on mass consumer culture as a source of imagery, style, and/or meanings. The practice was not entirely new when pop art roared onto the art scene shortly after 1960. French cubists, for example, as well as later painters including Americans Gerald Murphy (1888–1964), Charles Demuth, and Stuart Davis had cited commercial culture in their works. Nevertheless, the tone of pop art changed the conversation. Instead of estheticizing the forms of advertising and mass-produced products within a fine arts context, pop artists flaunted such sources. To audiences accustomed to more genteel practices, pop art could seem brash and vulgar. Often simplistically interpreted as a celebration of modern life in all its crude vitality, in reality pop art carried a range of meanings—and sometimes remained ambiguous. Despite their common vocabulary of forms drawn from mass culture, the intentions of pop artists varied considerably. However, nearly all disavowed abstract expressionism’s romantic idealism and affection for gestural brushwork. Instead, they reevaluated precedents in dada, assemblage, happenings, and other attempts to engage the commonplace, while also keeping an eye on hard-edge painting.
Pop art flourished most vigorously in the United States, in the work of such New York–based artists as Jim Dine (1935–), Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Marisol (born Maria Sol Escobar; 1930–2016), a Paris-born Venezuelan artist loosely affiliated with New York pop, created blocky figurative sculptures that responded with whimsical irony to contemporary styles, trends, and personalities. Venezuelan traditional and popular art also informed her work. She remains noted for drawings, often devoted to fantastic and surreal subjects.
West Coast artists interested in pop ideas included Edward Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, and Latvian-born Vija Celmins (1939–), who worked in the Los Angeles area from 1962 until 1980, when she moved to New York. Her 1960s work centered on paintings and sculptures of ordinary objects. (Subsequently, for paintings, drawings, and prints, she has drawn inspiration from natural phenomena, particularly celestial subjects.) Organized by Walter Hopps in 1962 for the Pasadena Art Museum, “The New Painting of Common Objects” ranks as the first documented museum exhibition of pop art. It included Dine, Lichtenstein, Ruscha, Thiebaud, and Warhol. New York’s first important pop art show, “The New Realists,” which opened a couple of months later at Sidney Janis’s gallery, included Dine, Indiana, Oldenburg, Segal, and Wesselmann, among other Americans, plus French nouveau réalistes.
An earlier form of the tendency had appeared in Great Britain among members of the Independent Group, which included Lawrence Alloway, generally credited with popularizing the term “pop art.” The work of these artists—including Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi—remained little known in the United States at that time. From around 1960, a cohort of young artists, mostly trained at the Royal Academy of Art, promoted a more cohesive and American-style British pop, which nevertheless remained generally more decorative and intellectually respectable than its counterpart in the United States. Its happy-go-lucky hedonism generally skirted the darker side of American pop. Besides David Hockney, this group included Derek Boshier (1937–), Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005), Allen Jones (1937–), and Peter Phillips (1939–). In France, the nouveau réaliste movement provided its own gloss on the pop ethos, while certain Italian artists responded individually.
Pop art itself became a pop phenomenon. Although rooted in the late 1950s, the movement’s impact on the public at large dates to the early 1960s. In 1962, the mass-circulation weeklies Life, Newsweek, and Time all ran cover stories on pop art. General outrage and bafflement about pop may have peaked in 1964, when Warhol showed Brillo boxes that seemed only to replicate the commercial originals. Pop art’s heyday dimmed in the 1970s. However, its implications remain vital within today’s postmodern arena of irony, pugnacious gestures, and broken cultural norms.
Tranquil, tenderly painted, sensitively composed figural works and landscapes sustain Fairfield Porter’s esteemed reputation. His most characteristic canvases recreate summer idylls drawn from lifelong experience of seasonal visits to his parents’ private Maine island or from the environs of his Long Island home, where he moved in 1949. Among only a handful of representational painters regarded as members of the New York School, Porter sidestepped his contemporaries’ abstract expressionism. Instead, while maintaining friendships among leading poets as well as other painters, he made his own way through avant-garde currents. However, his paintings’ seemingly unproblematic emphasis on individual feeling and private life was hard won. Self-doubt, bisexuality, family turmoil, and just plain bad luck inflected his personal life. He also wrote discerning art criticism (Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935–1975 appeared posthumously in 1979), as well as a book on Thomas Eakins (1959).
Born in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka and educated at Harvard University, Porter studied at the Art Students League for two years after he moved to New York following his graduation in 1928, but he nevertheless remained largely self-taught as a painter. Situating himself in the tradition of such American sober-minded, formally inclined realist painters as Eakins and Edward Hopper, he drew also on French intimists Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. His art grew within a context of artist–friends, including Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, and, perhaps most importantly, Jane Freilicher. Poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and especially James Schuyler numbered among close acquaintances. Once he had established his approach, Porter’s art changed little over the years, as he pursued formal values revealed in light and color and set in flattened space. Pastel tones predominate, but in his later years, brighter and less naturalistic hues sometimes occurred. His wife, Anne Channing Porter, who married the artist in 1932, earned a reputation for her poetry after his death. Photographer Eliot Porter was the painter’s brother.
An internationally known painter and muralist, Brazilian Candido Portinari synthesized representational imagery with modernist abstraction. Born to Italian immigrant parents near São Paulo, he trained at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. In 1928, he left for three years in Europe, primarily in Paris, where Pablo Picasso’s neo-classical style of the post–World War I period made its impression. During the late 1940s, imperiled by his leftist political views, he fled to Uruguay for several years during a period of government repression. Besides portraits, images of hardship among rural and urban communities, depictions of refugees from poverty-stricken areas, and religious subjects, he painted dynamic tributes to historical events, including a suite of four murals (1940–41) for the Hispanic reading room at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. His monumental War and Peace compositions (1953–55) adorn the delegates’ entrance to the General Assembly in the United Nations building in New York.
Building upon minimalism, postminimalism offered a cluster of varied tendencies, which together may be seen as reactions against the object as such (which reigned paramount in minimalism), as attempts to negate the commodification of art, and as efforts to reinject into art the sensuous experience and psychological content generally missing from minimalism. Unlike minimal sculptures, which were so often industrially fabricated (or looked as though they could have been), postminimal work generally reverted to a handmade appearance. Postminimalism impinges on several disparate categories, including body art, earth art, installation art, process art, scatter art, and, to some extent, conceptual art. The term first appeared in print in a 1971 article by critic and art historian Robert Pincus-Witten (1935–). However, although it had gone unnamed, postminimalism as a distinct tendency had emerged several years earlier. Lucy Lippard’s 1966 “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition offered a first glimpse of what was to come, in the work of Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, and Keith Sonnier (1941–), as well as Louise Bourgeois (a generation older than the others, but an under-recognized kindred spirit) and others. In 1969, Robert Morris organized a second overview of recent developments, “9 in a Warehouse,” which included Hesse, Nauman, Richard Serra, and Sonnier, plus—in a nod to the international character of the new tendency—Giovanni Anselmo and Gilberto Zorio. In the same year, the first museum exhibition devoted to what would become known as postminimalism, the Whitney’s “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” showed Carl Andre, Hesse, Serra, Robert Ryman, Sonnier, and Richard Tuttle (1941–), among others. In addition, it reached beyond the confines of visual art to include the work of like-minded composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as filmmaker Michael Snow.
Principal artists associated with postminimalism include Hesse, Morris, and Nauman. Among other major contributors, Louisiana-born Sonnier graduated from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1963 and earned an MFA from New Jersey’s Rutgers University in 1966. After settling in New York, he became known for sculptures cobbled together from non-art materials, such as cloth, latex, and lumber. Although abstract, the pieces suggested metaphorical, emotional, even erotic overtones, reflecting a sensibility related to Hesse’s and other experimental young artists. In the late 1960s, Sonnier numbered among the earliest artists to use neon, subsequently among his major interests. In more recent years, Sonnier’s work has grown in scope and ambition, as he has devised numerous installations featuring colored lighting, often in collaboration with architects, for public spaces.
New Jersey native Tuttle creates a diffident art that rarely speaks above a whisper. After graduating in 1963 from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he moved to New York, where he briefly studied at Cooper Union and, more importantly, befriended Agnes Martin. Drawing on techniques from painting, sculpture, drawing, and assemblage, he creates diminutive, poetic works that characteristically feature cloth or other humble materials and reflect his philosophically inclined spirit. For some years, he has divided his time between New York and Abiquiú, New Mexico. Other notable artists associated with postminimalism include Barry Le Va (1941–), Martin Puryear, Alan Saret (1944–), Joel Shapiro (1941–), Alan Shields (1944–2005), and Jackie Winsor (1941–).
Although postminimalism’s heyday waned after the 1970s, other artists of the same generation extended its ethos into work reflecting diverse approaches. Nancy Graves (1940–95), born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, brought to her art a deeply intellectual interest in the natural world. She graduated from Vassar College in 1961 and three years later earned an MFA at Yale University. During two years in Europe, while married to Richard Serra from 1965 to 1970, she began to base her work on biological forms. Back in New York, in 1968 she startled the art community with life-size fabrications of camels, so realistic that at a glance they appeared to be taxidermied animals. Almost immediately, she backed off from this approach in favor of abstracted meditations on archeological and paleontological themes. After learning the lost-wax technique of casting bronze sculpture, in the late 1970s she embarked on her most original and distinctive work—graceful, surrealistically tinged abstractions incorporating biomorphic fragments, often highlighted with sharp colors. With time, she welded such items as metal tools and farm implements into her assemblages, and in her last years, she enhanced the ornamental élan of her work with handblown glass.
Less concerned than Graves with allusive content, Judy Pfaff (1946–) redirected postminimal interests into decorative territory, somewhat paralleling the late 1970s pattern and decoration movement. Her distinctive, exuberant installations take formal investigation into the realm of dazzling effects. Born in London, she arrived in the United States as a young teenager, graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1971, and earned an MFA at Yale in 1973. In the late 1970s, she invented the room-sized, brightly colored, and ethereal environments that have remained her notable contribution to the ongoing art dialogue.
A term that eludes precise definition but nevertheless remains useful, “postmodernism” indicates a shift away from modernism to a new sensibility that better reflects the social and psychological climate of late 20th- and 21st-century life. Notably, although postmodernism differs from modernism, it remains tethered to many aspects of the earlier movement, continuing it in some respects while also moving in new directions.
Important determinants of postmodern experience include the dominant role in public life of multinational corporations; communications media that render national boundaries irrelevant, while also exerting outsized influence over both public discourse and individual self-definition; sophisticated technologies that sometimes outrun widespread understanding; rampant and guilt-free consumerism, along with wealth as a marker of value and an overheated art market; loss of faith in sources of authority, including leaders and institutions; overpopulation and industrialism as agents of planetary destruction; and cynical acceptance of individual powerlessness in the face of such circumstances. These conditions have tended to demolish the romantic notion of the artist as a vanguard figure who suffers—psychologically and economically—in fulfillment of a vision.
Aspects of what would become known as postmodernism emerged in the early 1970s, and by the 1980s its nature and meaning provoked lively critical debate about what it was, and whether indeed it actually existed. To begin with, separating postmodernism from modernism itself proved problematic. Much discussion circled back to the nature of modernism, with many commentators remaining unsure about its defining qualities. Others denied that a sharp split between the two eras could be identified. The eclectic, multifarious, multimedia nature of postmodern art only muddied the waters. In the end, generalizations about postmodernism remain subject to debate and should always be considered provisional.
Several points of agreement, however, generally signify postmodernism’s salient characteristics. Whereas modernism foregrounded an authentic self and personal expression, postmodernism puts relatively little emphasis on inner life. The self is seen as multivalent, fluid, malleable, and unstable. In contrast to modernism, postmodernism privileges content—often sociological or political—over form. Spurning fealty to modernism’s notion of high art, postmodern artists ransack the history of art, along with popular culture, commercial imagery, and decorative approaches. Postmodernists reject modern notions of progress, in art no less than in human society. Finally, postmodernism often focuses on deconstructing received truths and mediated reality, often with the intent of revealing power structures. Linguistics, Marxist critiques, post-Freudian psychology, and European social theories have played into such endeavors.
A heterogeneous affair by nature, postmodernism can be regarded only as a creative atmosphere, rather than as a style or even a single approach to the purpose of art. Responding to postmodern conditions, artists split into numerous camps and focused on varied issues. Postmodernism therefore operates as a factor within any number of artistic endeavors, including neo-expressionism, the Pictures Generation, appropriation art, neo-geo, and, to some extent, pattern and decoration.
In Europe, the postmodern impulse since the heyday of German and Italian neo-expressionism has been less robust than in the United States. Nevertheless, it includes important figures, with Gerhard Richter (1932–), in particular, achieving international status. A stylistic chameleon, he negates the very notion of meaning in art by working more or less simultaneously—and indifferently—in abstract and representational modes. Born in Dresden and brought up in small towns along the eastern German border, he trained in Soviet-style socialist realism in Dresden. After defecting from East Germany in 1961, he continued his studies at the art academy in Düsseldorf. In the West, Richter experienced relief that art did not have to serve a purpose. His works of “capitalist realism” prefigured the later popularity of appropriation art. Reproducing such photographic sources as advertisements, book illustrations, and amateur photographs, blurry, black-and-white paintings emptied his sources of their original impact. Later, he produced more conventionally photorealistic paintings in color. Among his most compelling and provocative representational projects, the 1988 black-and-white series titled “October 18, 1977” offered 15 images related to the unexplained deaths of four Red Army Faction participants while in custody for radical leftist activity. Grayish, indistinct imagery supports a cryptic and mournful tone. By this time, following earlier experiments with abstraction, including over-painted photographs, he had also begun to produce irregularly surfaced non-representational paintings, again predominately gray. Since the 1990s, while continuing to extend his representational output as well, he has become well known for large-scale abstractions, often constructed from vertical bands of harsh and inharmonious color applied with squeegees or rough planks. Offering neither pictorial incident nor allusion, these works drain painting of its traditional purposes. Their expressionist demeanor is inauthentic, for the artist only represents the mechanics of self-revelation. In addition to working also as a sculptor and printmaker, Richter has designed a glass-and-enamel mural (1999) for Berlin’s Bundestag and a stained-glass window (unveiled in 2007), measuring more than 60 feet tall, for the cathedral in Cologne, where he has resided since the early 1980s. In 1982, he married versatile German postmodernist Isa Genzken (1948–), who works principally as a sculptor but ranges across media and formats, including installation, photography, and video. Since their separation about 10 years later, she has lived mostly in Berlin.
Sharing Richter’s ironic temperament and conceptualist bent, another German, Sigmar Polke (1941–2010), made a career of eradicating any trace of personal style. Born in a small town now in Poland, he spent his early childhood in East Germany before his family escaped to the West in 1953. He studied at Düsseldorf’s art academy, where Joseph Beuys numbered among his principal teachers. In Düsseldorf, he also met Richter and in 1963 participated with him in the 1963 capitalist realism exhibition that brought both of them to attention. Polke’s best-known paintings, offering the subject matter of everyday life presented within a context of dots that suggest commercial printing techniques, resonate with American pop art. He also worked extensively as a photographer, often manipulating results to distance the work from representation. Polke retained a highly experimental approach throughout his work, driven by a mystical streak toward the unknowable. He taught in Hamburg before settling permanently in Cologne for the final three decades of his life. See also ; ; ; ; .
Coined by Clement Greenberg in 1964 as the title of an exhibition he organized, “post-painterly abstraction” refers to colorful forms of abstract painting that emerged in the 1950s. Perceiving that these painters favored “openness” or “clarity,” Greenberg also noted the disappearance of gestural brushwork as a positive step toward maintaining the integrity of the canvas, a primary value in his esthetic. The movement benefited from the availability of newly developed acrylic paints, which could produce smooth and luminous effects. Personal psychology played little role among these artists, as they steered clear of the angst that motivated abstract expressionism and other forms of recent art. As Greenberg used it, the designation embraces both color field painting and hard-edge painting, terms that have remained in more general use today. His exhibition roster included, among others, Gene Davis, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella. See also .
American abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart numbered among the first to anticipate some of the movement’s salient features. In the early 1940s, he moved rapidly from flattened arrangements of biomorphic and geometric shapes controlled by an underlying structural grid—as in the vibrant Desert (1940; New York, Museum of Modern Art)—toward the more loosely constructed all-over fields that marked his distinctive sensibility. A superb colorist, over time he gradually shed allusive forms in favor of a mystic unity. Intricately worked surfaces glow with a transcendent charge, as in White Gothic No. 5 (1961; Washington, D.C., Smithsonian American Art Museum). Pousette-Dart also anticipated abstract expressionism’s characteristically large scale as early as 1941–42 in Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), which measures more than 7 by nearly 12 feet.
The artist grew up in Valhalla, a distant suburb of New York City. From childhood, he pursued his vocation as an artist, encouraged by his father Nathaniel Pousette-Dart (1886–1965), a painter and art writer, but he did not attend art school. In New York during the late 1930s, he internalized the principles of cubism and surrealism, read widely in philosophy and psychology, and came to admire the “primitive” art of tribal and ancient societies. As he did for other nascent abstract expressionists, John Graham provided invaluable guidance. Always an independent personality, in 1951 Pousette-Dart left New York’s intense and somewhat ingrown art circles to live in relative seclusion in Rockland County, west of the Hudson River. There, his art continued to flourish, in refined, simplified, and radiant canvases. He also worked on occasion as a sculptor and photographer. His daughter, Joanna Pousette-Dart (1947–), extends her father’s legacy in her own very different but nevertheless accomplished and dynamic abstractions. See also .
A term popularized in the late 1960s to describe works that emphasize the process of their making rather than an end result, process art numbered among favored postminimal techniques. In its origins, process art harkened back to abstract expressionism’s interest in revealing the workings of the artist’s hand as an aspect of a painting’s overall esthetic. Foreshadowing process art, in 1961 Robert Morris famously demonstrated what was at stake in Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (Seattle Art Museum), a plain wood cube that contained a three-and-a-half-hour tape of the noise that brought the work into existence, as the artist sawed and hammered. With its reminiscences of Marcel Duchamp’s sly wit and its anticipation of conceptual strategies, it firmly locates process art within the trajectory of advanced 20th-century art. The first to see (and hear) the Box, John Cage responded enthusiastically. Much subsequent process work of Morris and others employed all sorts of non-art materials that respond to gravity or mutate over time to indicate the role of natural forces—subject to their own inexorable mechanisms—in creating a work of art. Much process-oriented work embraces impermanence and reflects artists’ desire to challenge the marketability of art. Other important contributors to process art include Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, and Richard Serra.
Refined, simplified, and meticulously crafted, Martin Puryear’s organic sculptures inhabit a region bounded by natural forms on the one hand and human artifacts on the other. Born in Washington, D.C., he graduated in 1963 from Catholic University of America there before entering the Peace Corps. In Sierra Leone, as an African American “outsider” (as he described himself), he found himself little attracted to the African sculpture highly prized in the West. Instead, during two years there, he closely investigated practical techniques, particularly woodworking. He then studied for two years at Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Academy of Arts (and familiarized himself with Scandinavian modern design) before returning to the United States in 1968 to earn an MFA at Yale. His sculptures soften minimalism’s austerity with allusive forms that recollect the intertwining realms of nature and traditional human crafts. Resonating with the accomplishments of such modernists as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and Isamu Noguchi, these warmly sensuous wood pieces at the same time illustrate the artist’s deep reverence for the forms of artistry embedded in such activities as basket weaving and shipbuilding. Each work presents its own individual character, contributing to a family of shapes that avoid repetition but together create a fully realized esthetic. See also ; .