A pivotal figure in the transition from abstract expressionism to subsequent art-making strategies, Robert Rauschenberg contributed to the genesis of assemblage, junk art, pop art, happenings, process art, conceptual art, performance art, environmental art, installation art, and the incorporation of photography into a fine art context. As well, he numbered among the first artists to appreciate the possibilities of new electronic technologies within the creative process. Vowing to situate his work in the “gap” between art and life, he broke with traditional beliefs about the nature and purposes of fine art to embrace instead a multifarious ingathering of experiences within the creative act. No other artist proved more essential to the 1950s and 1960s. Motivated by an ideal of worldwide human communication, he devoted much of his later career to internationally based projects and to a philanthropic foundation.
Born and raised on the Gulf Coast, in Port Arthur, Texas—better known for oil refineries than cultural refinement—Rauschenberg enrolled at the University of Texas but soon was drafted into the U.S. Navy. While working at a military hospital in San Diego, he made his first visits to an art museum. In 1947, he began training as an artist at the Kansas City Art Institute but early in 1948 headed to Paris. That fall, he returned to study at Black Mountain College, which unleashed his prodigious creative energies. There, intermittently during the course of the next four years, he studied with Josef Albers, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jack Tworkov. He also took up photography, aided by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, and befriended John Cage, as well as dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham. In 1949, Rauschenberg began three years of classes at New York’s Art Students League, where gentle fantasist Morris Kantor (1896–1974) and Vaclav Vytlacil numbered among his teachers. Black Mountain remained an inspiration, however, and he returned there for summer sessions in 1951 and 1952. During the second summer, he collaborated with Cage in staging a theatrical event that forecast the development of happenings. Even in these earliest years as an artist, Rauschenberg’s fundamental quest to test—and sometimes breach—the normal limits of art prompted highly original works that nevertheless maintain his innate sense of formal elegance. These included a series of dreamy cyanotypes, produced by arranging objects on blue photographic paper before exposure (c. 1950) and a 22-foot-long print produced by the tire tracks of Cage’s automobile (1953; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). In a 1952 rebuke to abstract expressionist theatrics, he created a series of all-white paintings, soon followed with all-black works, painted on newsprint, which remained faintly visible in places. In the fall of 1952, he departed for several months in Europe and North Africa with Cy Twombly. Abroad, pioneering a form of junk art, he used whatever was at hand, including trash, to create collages and boxy sculptures. Twice in Rome he visited Alberto Burri’s studio; although the two could not communicate verbally—neither knew the other’s language—Burri’s sacchi reinforced important nascent interests. In an audacious gesture of rebellion against the abstract expressionist establishment, in 1953 he wheedled a drawing from Willem de Kooning and then erased it (with de Kooning’s assent) to create from its barely visible traces a new work of art, Erased de Kooning Drawing (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). At the same time, his respect for the abstract expressionists, de Kooning in particular, remained apparent in the controlled structure and facture of his work.
Around the beginning of 1954, Rauschenberg met Jasper Johns, soon his partner for several years. During this time, inspired also by Marcel Duchamp, the two, along with Cage and Cunningham, stimulated each other’s creativity. In the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg launched a series of what he called “combines,” which bring together elements of painting and sculpture in high-spirited works that resist intellectual analysis and remain among his best-known accomplishments. For the wall-mounted Bed (1955; New York, Museum of Modern Art), a sort of relief sculpture, the artist painted swaths of color across a pillow, sheet, and quilt arranged to simulate a life-size bed in disarray. The bizarre Monogram (1955–59; Stockholm, Moderna Museet) features a long-horned, long-haired stuffed goat girdled with an automobile tire around its middle, while Canyon (1959; New York, Museum of Modern Art) includes a taxidermied American eagle seemingly flying at the viewer from a large collaged canvas. While creating the disparate works of his early career, Rauschenberg had also begun what would become an extended involvement in dance. From the early 1950s until 1964, he served as Cunningham’s full-time designer. He also worked with Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and in the 1960s became a leading figure in the experimental dance community associated with the Judson Memorial Church. During the Vietnam War, he participated actively in protests.
For 34 Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1958–60; New York, Museum of Modern Art), he invented a method of transferring imagery that enriched hand-worked abstract expressionist passages with scenes lifted—literally—from newspaper and magazine photographs. The resulting works resonated with contemporary events to produce an intensity of feeling from the collision of reality and artifice. Soon extending the transfer process to canvas and to printmaking processes, primarily lithography, during the 1960s he gradually returned to these two-dimensional media as primary interests. Winning the grand prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale—the first American to be so honored—bestowed on him international celebrity. In 1966, together with happenings participant and experimental installation artist Robert Whitman (1935–) and two Bell Labs scientists, Rauschenberg staged “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering,” a series of performances created by 10 artists or dancers and some 30 engineers. This revolutionary event introduced cutting-edge technologies—including closed-circuit television projection and wireless sound transmission—previously not available to artists’ creative endeavors. Soon, Rauschenberg followed up by spearheading the organization of Experiments in Art and Technology (or EAT), which for several years brought artists and scientists together to collaborate on works that neither could have accomplished alone.
Although he subsequently traveled widely, in 1970 Rauschenberg settled permanently on Captiva Island off Florida’s Gulf Coast. From then on, he specialized in prints and paintings that he sometimes aggregated into enormous installations. In 1984, he founded the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange to facilitate dialogue with foreign artists working under difficult conditions. His foundation, established in 1990, made use of the considerable wealth he had by then accumulated to foster educational and charitable purposes. A stroke in 2002 slowed his pace, but he continued to work productively for several more years. See also ; ; ; .
The foremost champion of modern art in Britain from the 1930s until the 1960s, art historian and critic Herbert Read, also an accomplished poet, articulated the individualistic and expressionist foundations of 20th-century forms. A conduit for German art theory, he also numbered among the first Britons to take an interest in existential philosophy. His strongly held left-wing and pacifist political views accorded with an emphasis on artistic autonomy. Born in Yorkshire, he studied at the University of Leeds. His early career was devoted to literature, but he turned his attention more fully to art while working as a decorative arts curator at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum from 1922 until 1931. Through professional activities, he made contacts in Germany. Most importantly, he befriended art historian and theorist Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), an early defender of expressionism, and became acquainted with Bauhaus personnel. While editing the prestigious Burlington Magazine from 1933 until 1939, Read began to support leading British modernists, including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Ben Nicholson. During these years, he also published Art Now (1933), the first extensive defense of modern art published in English, and in 1936 he was instrumental in organizing London’s “International Surrealist Exhibition,” the first major survey of that movement in Britain. Together with painter, art historian, and collector Roland Penrose (1900–1984)—known particularly for his attention to surrealism and the work of Pablo Picasso—in 1946, Read founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts, a London cultural center devoted to supporting creative activity through lectures, films, and other events, as well as exhibitions. In 1950, he returned permanently to Yorkshire but remained an influential force through writing and lecturing internationally. A prolific author, Read turned out dozens of books and essays on art, literature, and society. His numerous key texts on art include The Meaning of Art (1931), Art and Industry (1934), Art and Society (1937), Education through Art (1943), A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959), and Art and Alienation (1967).
American abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt demanded a lot from his audience. His monochrome abstractions, particularly the all-black ones of the 1960s, offer little in the way of visual incident. His similarly austere esthetic—“Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else”—sets a high standard for pure, uncontaminated art. Also a writer on art topics and a witty cartoonist, an accomplished draftsman and sharp-eyed photographer, a leftwing activist and a student of religion, Reinhardt possessed one of the most limber minds among the artists of his generation.
Born in Buffalo, Reinhardt grew up in New York City and graduated in 1935 from Columbia University, where he studied with Meyer Schapiro and formed an enduring friendship with Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk who gained fame as a poet and promoter of social justice. Interested in art since childhood, Reinhardt then began the full-time study of painting. Personal contacts with Carl Holty and Stuart Davis, along with cubism and Piet Mondrian’s work, provided important points of departure for Reinhardt’s increasingly abstract work during the 1930s. In the early 1940s, he began to publish cartoons that often commented wryly on art world shenanigans. After military service toward the end of World War II, he resumed studies at New York’s Institute of Fine Arts, where he specialized in Asian art. From 1947 until the end of his life, he taught art history at Brooklyn College.
Meanwhile, his paintings explored various approaches to abstraction. By the end of the 1940s, he had devised a personal style of brightly colored, scintillating geometric elements. Early in the next decade, partly in response to Josef Albers’s work, he simplified his approach, now deploying larger rectangles in more placid, monochrome compositions. In the late 1950s, he abandoned his usual reds and blues to work solely with black (or very dark hues). The 1960s canvases stick to a large, square format, divided into grids of nine barely discernible, equal components. From a distance, this blackness may appear absolute, but closer examination reveals minute variations among the squares. Almost impossible to photograph—and, he thought, in his disdain for commercialism, almost impossible to sell—the paintings implicitly and uncompromisingly demand a personal encounter. Reinhardt’s late paintings take art to the edge of possibility but offer to the serious onlooker the grandeur and solemn beauty of a timeless and unsentimental expression. See also ; ; .
An American abstract expressionist, Milton Resnick developed a personal, heavily worked variant of the style. His intense and principled devotion to art seems palpable in the materiality and sobriety of his paintings. Although he participated during the late 1930s in the early formulation of abstract expressionist ideas, circumstances delayed recognition of his talent. As a result, some observers unfairly thought of him as a latecomer to the movement. In the end, he brought the tendency to its conclusion by outlasting his notable colleagues.
Born in Ukraine, Resnick arrived in New York as a small child in 1922. His family so adamantly forbade his intention to become an artist that he left home while still a teenager and endured considerable hardship as he supported himself while attending art school. Just as Willem de Kooning and other friends were about to bring abstract expressionism to fruition, Resnick was drafted into the U.S. Army. Following five years of service, he studied in Paris for three years. When he returned in 1948, William Baziotes, de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock were already coming to attention for their highly original signature styles. Resnick’s paintings of the 1950s and 1960s featured vigorous, colorful brushwork. Over the years, he retreated toward increasingly subtle, all-over surfaces, from which any hint of design has been expunged in favor of a unitary expanse of barely differentiated coloration. Paradoxically, these overwhelming canvases offer the viewer a glimpse of transcendence despite their physical heft. Forbidding, they also throb with life. During Resnick’s last decades, figural, landscape, and geometric elements emerged from the gloom, as in a memory. His health in decline, he took his own life. Although deeply rooted in abstract expressionism, Resnick’s solitary attainment nevertheless proved instructive to a younger generation’s interests in process, reduction, and elimination of metaphor.
In 1961, Resnick married painter Pat Passlof (1928–2011), his companion of the previous decade. Born in Georgia, she studied at Black Mountain College with de Kooning and at the Cranbook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, before settling in New York in the late 1940s. Her early, abstract expressionist work featured interwoven brushstrokes, but her more original later paintings often accommodated geometric or representational elements. As dedicated an artist as her husband and a masterful colorist, she created allusive fields held together by great personal integrity of expression and technique. She remained at the height of her artistic power until her death, which preceded by days her final one-person show.
African American Faith Ringgold addresses issues related to the lives of blacks and women in visually exuberant, tough-minded, and often humorous paintings, sculptures, installations, and prints, as well as the distinctive story quilts that have become her most widely known works. In addition, she has participated in performance art and written and illustrated children’s books. Born in New York, she earned BA and MA degrees in 1955 and 1959, respectively, at the City College of New York, where Robert Gwathmey was among her teachers. During the 1960s and 1970s, she numbered among leading activists working on behalf of artists’ welfare, civil rights, and recognition for women’s art, while also protesting injustice and the Vietnam War. She threw her support behind the Art Workers Coalition and the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists before helping to found, in 1971, Where We At, a black women’s art collective. Ringgold’s early painting devoted largely to landscapes gave way during the 1960s to simplified, patterned images that she employed effectively in posters and murals, as well as paintings. Among her most biting works, Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger (1969; artist’s collection) responds with bitterness and irony to the first moon landing in the context of the civil rights era. The word “die” emerges indistinctly amid the field of stars, while—reading from bottom to top—the stripe pattern forms the word “nigger.” In 1970, she began making soft-sculpture dolls, which she later used in performances. For expertise in needlework, she turned to her mother, Willi Posey Jones, a dressmaker and designer, who continued to collaborate with Ringgold until her death in 1981. Two years later, the artist embarked on a long series of colorful painted and stitched story quilts. Their imaginatively treated themes, centering on the lives of black women, acknowledge the history, traceable back to the era of slavery, of African American quilts and the traditional assumption that quilt making belongs to women’s work. Formally more complex than her earlier work, the quilts frequently offer witty riffs on the history of art. The French Collection, for example, a series of 12, narrates the adventures of a black teenager who absconds to Paris during the 1920s to work as an artist and model.
Brash, funny, and sometimes outrageously provocative, American painter, printmaker, and sculptor Larry Rivers subverted the abstract expressionism of his youth with imagery that variously offended or amused. Something of a loose cannon, he loved publicity, cared little for elite opinion, and tried his hand at filmmaking, writing, and occasional acting, while also indulging a taste for louche behavior. Born in New York, Rivers devoted his youth to jazz and continued to tour as a saxophonist throughout his life. In the early 1940s, he played with a military band and then studied at the Juilliard School of Music, where he struck up a lifelong friendship with jazz great Miles Davis. After he began painting in 1945, he worked with Hans Hofmann and also, in 1951, completed a degree at New York University, where William Baziotes numbered among his teachers. Following several months in Paris, where he familiarized himself with the history of painting, he completed a parody (1953; New York, Museum of Modern Art) of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Its ironic treatment of subject helped pave the way for pop art, but its sensuously handled surface tied it to the period’s prevalent admiration for abstract expressionism. Not all his shocking work was so snide, however. Double Portrait of Berdie (1955; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art) and other candid paintings featuring his unidealized nude mother-in-law suggest respectful affection. In the 1960s, he increasingly incorporated found objects and commonplace materials into works that bridge the gap between sculpture and painting. His creative powers and reputation reached their apex in the mid-1960s, with such works as the enormous (more than 30 feet wide) History of the Russian Revolution: From Marx to Mayakovsky (1965; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum). Later work seems less original, sometimes repetitive or overblown, but that hardly bothered him. See also ; .
Known almost exclusively for the singular Watts Towers he constructed in Los Angeles, Simon Rodia must number among the most ambitious and successful untrained artists of all time. His masterwork comprises 17 decorative towers rising as high as 10 stories. Constructed mostly from scrap steel encased in wire mesh and concrete, they flaunt surfaces encrusted with all manner of found decorations, including mirrors, broken ceramics, seashells, glass, and tiles. Although Rodia presumably had no knowledge of Antoni Gaudí’s architectural ensembles in Barcelona, his otherwise incomparable towers and their surrounding ambience of walls, benches, and terraces recall the Catalan architect’s extravagant additive esthetic. Born Sabato Rodia in a village east of Naples, he used Sam as a nickname in the United States. However, he remains widely known as Simon, despite the error traceable to a newspaper article. He moved as a youngster with his family to Pennsylvania and then, in his late teens, to the West Coast, where he subsisted as an itinerant laborer. After purchasing the Los Angeles site in 1921, he worked in his spare time on the project, substantially completing the ensemble by the late 1940s. In the mid-1950s, he joined family near San Francisco. Although his creation brought him some attention in later years, he never again saw it. Nor did he engage in any other artistic activity. Unattended, the enclosure deteriorated and was threatened by the city with demolition. A crusade by admirers preserved it, and in 1990 the Watts Towers joined the prestigious list of National Historic Monuments.
A New York art critic particularly remembered for writings on abstract expressionism, Harold Rosenberg focused on meanings embedded in its formal characteristics. Only Clement Greenberg, who held quite antithetical views about the movement’s significance, rivaled his importance in articulating to an interested public the new art’s achievements. Rosenberg’s immediately acclaimed 1952 essay, “The American Action Painters,” lent a coherence it had not previously enjoyed to abstract expressionism as a movement. Rosenberg wrote, “At a certain moment, the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Although he did not specify the painters he had in mind, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock certainly numbered among them. However, action painting did not characterize the canvases of less gestural abstract expressionists, such as Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. Attuned to the existential climate of the post–World War II period, Rosenberg saw art within the ongoing drama of human experience. Much less concerned than Greenberg with formulating a consistent theoretical position, he responded intuitively, poetically, and ethically to the art he confronted. Born in New York, Rosenberg earned a law degree in 1927 but soon redirected his life when struck by a serious illness. Turning to poetry, fiction, and a thoughtful engagement with cultural issues, he wrote for literary and leftist periodicals while also becoming acquainted with de Kooning and, soon, other New York artists. In the 1950s, Rosenberg began to supplement his writing with a teaching career, which culminated in 1966 with a professorship at the University of Chicago. The following year, appointed as the New Yorker’s art critic, he gained a larger general audience for his writings, which continued his perspicacious inquiry into visual art’s philosophical and cultural situation. In these later years, after abstract expressionism had played itself out, he came to believe that in its self-conscious pursuit of new modes, art had shed its oppositional integrity as it aped avant-garde gestures, on the one hand, and responded to mass culture on the other.
Because of his distinctive use of commercial billboard imagery, James Rosenquist made his name as a pop artist. However, his paintings offer a distinctive appeal to memory and to the surrealist unconscious. His best-known work remains a landmark of the era. F-111 (1964–65; New York, Museum of Modern Art), startlingly juxtaposes warfare imagery—such as the eponymous air force bomber and a nuclear-explosion mushroom cloud—with banal, middle-American subjects, including canned spaghetti (in a frighteningly close-up view) and a grinning girl under a beauty parlor hair dryer. Observers during the Vietnam War experienced an unsettling reminder that American consumer culture and technologically advanced carnage belonged to the same ethos. But, more generally, this disconcerting work also evokes discontinuities of the modern, urban consciousness that rarely lingers for long on a single topic. Characteristically, Rosenquist uses fragmentation and disruption to invoke irrationality and drain representation of its original meaning. An air of pessimism and doubt, unusual among pop artists, hangs over his achievement.
A native of the North Dakota plains, Rosenquist grew up there and in Minnesota. At the University of Minnesota, he studied painting with Cameron Booth (1892–1980), a Hans Hofmann–trained colorist known for both representational and abstract works. In 1955, Rosenquist headed to New York for a year at the Art Students League. While yet in Minnesota, he had worked as a sign painter. Subsequently, in the late 1950s, his experience as a commercial billboard painter heightened Rosenquist’s appreciation for the techniques of producing visually realistic images on a highly magnified scale. As he labored high above the streets of New York, before his eyes he could see only what appeared to be abstract forms. Meanwhile, he continued to paint while also making the acquaintance of leading abstract expressionists, as well as Robert Indiana, Ray Johnson, Jack Youngerman, and others interested in jettisoning the gestural approach. In 1960, as he turned his attention to painting full time, he abandoned his previous interest in abstraction. The following year, basing his compositions on preliminary collages, he first combined commercial techniques and fractured advertising illustrations as his essentials. His work gained much of its effect from the incongruity between commercial strategies devised to deliver maximum clarity and its deliberate negation in the context of his paintings. In 1965, this approach came to fruition as the powerful F-111 wrapped its 86-foot length around the walls of Leo Castelli’s gallery. Reflective panels included among the images enhanced the work’s immersive psychological impact. Within a few years, Rosenquist began to extend his range of approaches aimed at provoking the viewer into questioning the superficial realities of everyday life. In 1970, he exhibited reflective panels in combination with dry ice fog to create disorienting environments. Later, a series of dolls seen through cellophane wrappings offered disquieting distortions of presumably innocent subjects. With time, representation as such increasingly faded from his art, as he devised whirling, eye-popping abstractions based on cosmic themes. An occasional sculptor but also long active as a printmaker, Rosenquist has brought his dramatic vision to oversized lithographs, some reputed to number among the largest ever produced. Since the mid-1970s, he has maintained his studio and primary residence in Aripeka, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. His work offered a jumping-off point for certain neo-expressionist and postmodern American artists, such as David Salle. See also .
American sculptor Theodore Roszak switched in the mid-1940s from an accomplished form of constructivism to an impassioned abstract expressionist approach. Born in Poland, he grew up in Chicago and trained as a painter there and in New York. His work showed little interest in modern styles before 1929 when he departed for Europe. There he lived principally in Prague but also traveled to Paris and other centers. His 18 months abroad brought him into contact with the most advanced art of the period and caused a radical rethinking of his aims. Notably, he became aware of Bauhaus principles and read László Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion. Cubism, geometric abstraction, and surrealism also enlarged his vision.
While living in New York after his return, he continued to paint for some years but also turned to sculpture. In the early 1930s, much of his work reflected an imaginative immersion in technological progress, with interests verging on science fiction in themes of space travel and exploration. In the mid-1930s, he began creating sculptures—some in metal, others incorporating plastics, and other new materials—echoing mechanistic Bauhaus precedents. In 1938, he was appointed an instructor at the government-sponsored Laboratory School of Industrial Design (founded in 1935 under Moholy-Nagy’s guidance), and during World War II he worked for both military and civilian organizations as an aeronautical engineering designer and draftsman. Although these experiences might logically have led to further development of his prior constructivism, awareness of wartime brutality and the atomic bomb disillusioned him about mankind’s ability to progress into a rational future. In the mid-1940s, he began creating expressionistic welded and brazed sculptures, incorporating distorted, surrealistic forms. Rough-surfaced, biomorphic shapes suggesting agony, death, and destruction combine in pessimistic and often quite violent works. Like other abstract expressionists, he found inspiration and solace in myth, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Asian art. With time, his bitterness mellowed somewhat, and during the 1950s and 1960s he received a number of important commissions for monumental public sculptures, including a controversial 37-foot eagle for the facade of Eero Saarinen’s U.S. embassy in London. Throughout, drawing never failed him as a creative mechanism, and during the 1970s—especially after poor health limited his capacity to cope with weighty metals—he produced highly original surrealist drawings and prints. Nearly apocalyptic in tone, they envision human and animal forms in states of transformation ranging from horrifying to transcendent. See also .
An American painter known for grandly scaled, subtly hued compositions featuring hovering, soft-edged rectangles, Mark Rothko numbered among leading abstract expressionists. Although the artist disavowed mystical intentions, these works nevertheless offer to many a spiritual pathway consonant with our times. Claiming that the subject of his work was pure and impersonal emotion, Rothko strove for a “timeless and tragic” art grounded in profound human experience. He did not even like to be called an abstract artist.
Born in Russia (in an area now within Latvia), at 10 he settled with his family in Portland, Oregon. After two years at Yale University, he left to become an artist. In 1925, he settled permanently in New York. His artistic education was limited and spotty. A class with Max Weber may have been the most important in his formal training. However, he benefited greatly from informal contacts in the New York art world, notably a friendship with Milton Avery. In the 1930s, he painted figural subjects, most often with a melancholy air. In the early 1940s, as New York’s artistic and intellectual milieu took up psychoanalysis, myth, and primitive symbolism, Rothko adapted surrealist conventions to these interests. Through the next few years, most of his works featured biomorphic forms drifting through indeterminate spaces. This approach gave way rather abruptly in the late 1940s as he found in his signature format a more original way to encode his goals. Paintings of this sort first appeared as a group in a 1949 solo exhibition, announcing the project that would interest him for the rest of his life and provide a foundation for color field painting.
Importantly, Rothko’s transcendental effects result directly from material means. Untextured, multi-layered paint surfaces leave only subtle traces of the hand that so painstakingly modulated their hues. In their enormous proportions, the characteristically vertical canvases can overwhelm the viewer’s field of vision. As nothing is clearly resolved, images remain tense with expectation. Within his limited format, Rothko’s indeterminate and luminous forms variously hover, recede, or float, contributing to their varied emotional tenor. In general, over the years, Rothko’s paintings became larger, simpler, and darker in color and mood. At the same time, he became increasingly obsessed with the presentation of his work. To prevent distractions and amplify the power of his vision, he fidgeted with lighting and sometimes demanded that the paintings be shown in isolation, as they are in an interdenominational Houston chapel designed by Philip Johnson. Often considered to epitomize the integrity of his vision, this commissioned suite of 14 dark and nearly featureless paintings (1964–67; installed in 1971) offers a subdued, contemplative experience. As a painter, Rothko aspired to carry the weight of civilization into his visionary art. But life was more complicated. Though professionally recognized and financially successful, he often felt misunderstood, health problems arose, and finally he took his own life—in his studio. See also ; ; ; .
French painter Georges Rouault numbers among few leading post–World War II artists whose work maintained direct and unironic contact with religious tradition. He specialized in passionately felt, expressionistic treatments of biblical subjects, rendered in glowing hues and heavily impastoed surfaces, but also addressed subjects from contemporary life to express his revulsion at hypocrisy, greed, and indifference. A native Parisian, he apprenticed as a stained-glass maker and restorer; the patterned, bright, distinctly bounded forms of this technique later informed his mature painterly esthetic. Along with Henri Matisse, he subsequently studied with Symbolist Gustave Moreau, becoming the favorite pupil of this painter known for spiritually evocative and lushly realized imagery. Early in his career, Rouault concentrated on subjects from the fringes of society, such as clowns and prostitutes, but he also painted a number of distinctive works depicting judges, who did not always live up to their moral obligations as arbiters of good and evil. Francisco Goya and Honoré Daumier numbered among precursors who similarly deplored human misery and strove to lay bare its sources. Time intensified Rouault’s interest in religious subjects, which took on symbolic resonance as beacons in an unhinged world when war loomed and then devastated Europe. In forceful later works, heavily outlined, static figures (often only bust length) or Christian narratives approach the solemn majesty of medieval and Byzantine precedents. In addition, a distinguished printmaker and book illustrator, Rouault also produced ceramics, enamels, and designs for stained glass and tapestry.
In characteristic paintings picturing words or phrases, California artist Edward Ruscha has staked out an idiosyncratic territory at the border of pop art. In these works, he plays with the paradoxes of written language as both carrier of meaning and as its visual embodiment. Although he shared with many of his New York–based pop colleagues a grounding in commercial art, punning and visual conundrums offer a lighthearted wit rarely encountered in their context. “Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head,” he explained. On the other hand, the expansive spaces, luscious colors, and glowing light effects of his settings demonstrate affinities with the light and space movement, an almost purely California phenomenon. Like the work of others of his generation who rejected the moral anguish and transcendental aspirations of abstract expressionism, his art appears not to take life too seriously.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he grew up in Oklahoma City. In 1956, he moved permanently to Los Angeles. He spent the next four years at the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts), where Robert Irwin and Emerson Woelffer numbered among his teachers. In the early 1960s, Ruscha worked as a graphic artist while developing his approach to painting. However, photography first gave his career a boost. Self-published as an artist’s book dated 1962, Twentysix Gasoline Stations pictures its subjects in black-and-white snapshots taken along Route 66 between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City. Their unestheticized literalness and mundane subject matter startled observers. Among others in a series that continued this conceptual approach, mostly dating to the 1960s and 1970s, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) perhaps remains the best known. His 1960s paintings often dramatize with the cinematic flair of advertising similarly chosen subjects, such as Standard gas stations or the famous hillside Hollywood sign. Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–68; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), an imagined event depicting the then-new institution in peril, numbers among several provocative fire paintings. The trompe l’oeil illusionism that undergirds the impact of this sensational image carried over into many of the word paintings and drawings that became his specialty. Over the years, he has experimented with a wide range of unorthodox materials, such as gunpowder, milk, and blood, as he toys with meaning and representation. Throughout his career, Ruscha has also been active as a printmaker and draftsman, while in the 1970s he also made experimental films.
An American painter, printmaker, and collage artist, Anne Ryan was nearing 50 before she turned to art making. It was another 10 years before she embarked on the collages that constitute her finest and best-known work. Ryan’s earlier life had been centered on writing fiction—which she continued to publish throughout her life—and poetry. A New Jersey native, she had quit college to marry and have children. In her early thirties, she left her husband and lived for a time in Europe, working as a freelance writer. Upon settling permanently in New York’s Greenwich Village, in the 1930s she befriended its legendary art community—including such artists as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Tony Smith. Encouraged by her associates to turn her creativity toward painting, around 1938 she did so. In 1941, she tackled a new medium, printmaking, at Atelier 17, which provided her only formal training as an artist. In this hotbed of the latest ideas, from 1945 she became an accomplished specialist in color wood engravings that generally combine abstract and representational elements. In their surrealist and mythic content and sensitivity to biomorphic form, these demonstrate interests common at that time among burgeoning abstract expressionists. In 1948, she first encountered the work of Kurt Schwitters. Inspired by his example, during the final six years of her life she created some 400 small-scale, finely composed abstract collages. Often deftly incorporating cloth, string, foil, or other materials besides paper, she demonstrated a distinctive sensitivity to the expressive power of materials and textures. In essence, the collages constitute a highly elaborated form of miniaturized abstract expressionism.
Associated tangentially with minimalism, Robert Ryman has specialized throughout his career in ethereal, loosely brushed, square abstractions in barely differentiated shades of white. “I am not a picture painter,” he has said. “I work with real light and space.” To this end, his creative effort has focused on the materials of his art, as he has constantly experimented with varied paints and supports. His patently unironic endeavor wrestles with the limits of what constitutes a painting. Born in Nashville, Ryman studied at the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute in Cookeville and at Nashville’s George Peabody College for Teachers (now part of Vanderbilt University) before enlisting in 1950 in the U.S. Army. Upon discharge in 1952, he moved to New York to pursue a career as a jazz musician. Although untrained as an artist, he soon began experimenting with painting after coming to admire abstract expressionist work and befriending other artists, including Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt. From the outset, his work centered on monochrome arrangements. Before 1960, these faded to a graduated scale of warmer and cooler whites, leaving him otherwise to achieve variety with texture, scale, and relationship of painted areas to edges. His art demands a sustained, thoughtful, and discriminating attention, today in short supply. See also .