Los Angeles assemblage artist Betye Saar, who graduated in 1949 from the University of California, Los Angeles, took cues from Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers and Joseph Cornell’s boxes as she turned from printmaking to a mixed-media approach in the late 1960s. She came to public attention by challenging African American stereotypes in works that incorporate common images and knickknacks, perhaps most notably in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972; University of California, Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive). The dominant image in this assemblage, a black mammy, holds a broom in one hand, a rifle in the other. A clenched fist, emblem of the Black Power movement, rises in front. With satire and humor, but also an aggressive note, Saar draws attention to the offhandedly humiliating nature of much imagery in mass culture. Although she has continued to incorporate into her work mementoes of black life and labor, her larger purpose as an artist, as she has said, is “curiosity about the mystical.” She characteristically uses materials—found objects, detritus, memorabilia, tribal fetishes, the overlooked and under-appreciated—to invoke memories, associations, or parallels as a “way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously.” In the 1980s, she expanded her evocative method into room-sized installations. Her daughters, Alison Saar (1956–) and Lezley Saar (1953–), have continued their mother’s profession as artists who investigate the allusive meanings of material culture. See also .
British advertising executive Charles Saatchi numbers among the most prominent collectors of contemporary art. Particularly known as an early and enthusiastic supporter of Young British Artists (YBA), he founded London’s Saatchi Gallery primarily to showcase his own collection. Born in Baghdad, he grew up in London. With a brother, in 1970 he founded Saatchi & Saatchi, which grew into the world’s largest advertising agency. In 1969, he began to collect art, which he soon bought in bulk, often acquiring large representations of the work of particular artists. A converted warehouse in a London residential district served as the first Saatchi Gallery, which opened in 1985. In 2003, it relocated to a stately disused municipal building fronting the Thames on the South Bank. Five years later, it moved into its current spacious and impeccably renovated Chelsea venue, originally a grandly scaled military school. For about two decades, Saatchi concentrated on American art, acquiring substantial holdings of work by Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Julian Schnabel, and Andy Warhol, among others. In 1991, turning his attention to Young British Artists, he proved instrumental to their skyrocketing reputation. A selection from his collection, shown in 1997 as “Sensation” at the Royal Academy of Arts, presented 110 works by 42 artists. (It subsequently traveled to Berlin and New York.) Media attention to its many controversial exhibits brought Young British Artists to widespread attention, helped to advance their careers, and ultimately helped to legitimize their work. However, just as Saatchi had quickly disposed of his American art holdings in the early 1990s, in the mid-2000s he sold most of his YBA collection. Subsequently, reflecting a third phase of his collecting activity, his gallery has presented perceptively curated thematic shows of recent art, mostly painting and sculpture, featuring an international roster.
American surrealist Kay Sage, born in Albany, New York, spent much of her childhood in Europe. Following a year’s training at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., she briefly continued her studies in Italy but later insisted she was self-taught because these experiences contributed little to her personal style. Following a decade-long, leisured marriage to an Italian prince, she left her husband in 1935 and returned seriously to her art. In 1937, she decamped for Paris. There, surrealist painting, validating her earlier admiration for the work of Giorgio de Chirico, spurred development of her individual vision. Inspired particularly by the work of Yves Tanguy, she adapted his characteristic vast, empty spaces to her own purposes. In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, she sailed for New York. Tanguy followed, and they married in 1940. She completed nearly all of her best work during the next 15 years, mostly spent in Woodbury, Connecticut. Menacing and desolate in tone, these paintings generally emphasize incomplete or damaged architectural forms of metal or wood. Often, draperies covering unknown objects, sometimes suggesting human forms, flutter in mysterious winds. After Tanguy’s death in 1955, she stayed on in Woodbury but painted little. Instead, she published poetry (mostly in French) and wrote an autobiographical sketch (issued in a bilingual edition after her death as China Eggs/Les Oeufs de porcelaine). Depressed during these years, but also suffering from loss of vision and eventually other health problems, she committed suicide.
French American artist Niki de Saint Phalle created witty, brightly colored, figural sculptures that challenge expectations and, sometimes, standards of conventional good taste. Best known for oversized, sometimes gigantic nude females or hybrid creatures, she combined a taste for pop art with a zany surrealism. Born in an exclusive Paris suburb, she grew up in the United States, principally in New York. After returning abroad as a young adult, she remained mainly self-taught as an artist. Inspired during a visit to Barcelona in the mid-1950s by Antoni Gaudí’s wildly imaginative cathedral and parks, she soon joined forces in Paris with the artists who would come together under the banner of nouveau réalisme, among them Jean Tinguely—soon her partner, her sometime collaborator, and eventually, her husband. After coming to attention with violent works expressing rage at cultural constraints, during the 1960s she embarked on a long series of sexually potent “Nanas” and related large-breasted mythic beings. Harbingers of feminist art, they attracted a large audience with their playful demeanor. Among these, her design for Hon: A Cathedral (1966), a temporary construction in Stockholm, presented an 83-foot, fancifully decorated, recumbent and pregnant nude. Visitors, entering the spacious interior through a vaginal opening, could attend performances in a small theater enclosed within one breast or dine in a restaurant in the stomach as they overlooked a rippling female landscape. In 1998, a her 14-acre Tarot Garden—a project some 20 years in the making, but even then not entirely completed—opened to the public in Tuscany; its 22 walk-through figural sculptures, constructed of concrete and adorned with mosaics and mirrors, offer a bedazzling Eden, a “place where everything was possible,” as the artist explained. Saint Phalle spent her final eight years in San Diego, California.
For her most characteristic work, internationally known Colombian artist Doris Salcedo transforms objects of everyday life, such as furniture and clothing, into tributes to suffering and terror among neglected, forgotten, and displaced individuals for whom there is no place of safety. Inflected by her country’s history of ruthless violence fueled by government oppression and drug wars, her work bears witness to pain and estrangement, while also keeping alive past atrocities. A native of Bogotá, where she earned a BFA at the University of Bogotá, she subsequently completed an MFA at New York University before returning to Bogotá in 1985. Among allusive early installations incorporating household objects, textiles, and other commonplace items, the series Atrabiliarios (1991–97) memorializes victims by incorporating into niches covered with translucent animal membranes personal items, mostly women’s shoes, donated by their families. In subsequent large, public installations, she has particularly effectively deployed chairs to personalize the operations of power. In 2002, she hung 280 of them on the facade of Bogotá’s Palace of Justice in remembrance of victims of an earlier failed coup, while the following year, she filled a space between two Istanbul buildings with an unruly pile of 1,550 chairs, “evoking the masses of faceless migrants who underpin our globalised economy.” Despite inherently disturbing subject matter, Salcedo’s formal, postminimal elegance maintains a reserve that fosters a poetic and meditative mood.
Something of a latter-day surrealist whose highly original work of the 1960s and 1970s did not conform to the principles of any movement, Lucas Samaras nevertheless connected through his art with leading tendencies of the day, including body art, happenings, performance art, and postminimalism. Ranging widely across media, he has created paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages, pastels, assemblages, installations, jewelry, and videos. In 1948, he arrived in the United States from his native Greece, perhaps harboring memories of the rich coloration, opulent decoration, and emotional intensity of Orthodox art and architecture. In any event, his taste centers on sensuous and expressive visual effects.
In 1959, he graduated from New Jersey’s Rutgers University, where he became acquainted with Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and George Segal, among others, and participated in happenings. Subsequently, while also training as an actor, he studied Byzantine art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. During the late 1950s, he also embarked on an intermittent but extended series of pastels, tiny visions in jewel-like hues, quite out of fashion with major trends. Within a few years, he more widely established his reputation with small boxes and other objects covered with offbeat materials. While some examples suggest reliquaries, the more dramatic menace the viewer with needles, razor blades, nails, and other dangerous materials. The potentially masochistic tenor of these generalized into an exploration of narcissism, as seen in a 1964 gallery reconstruction of his bedroom and, soon after, a number of mirrored works, some of room-sized dimensions, allowing viewers to see themselves approaching before entering to contemplate their endless reflections. In 1969, he embarked on a widely admired series of self-dramatizing AutoPolaroids, which resonate with aspects of body art from the period. Soon, in Phototransformations, he tampered with the Polaroid emulsion before it set to create vivid and disturbing distortions. In later years, Samaras has moved into video and other forms of digital media.
The preeminent chronicler of post–World War II New York art, critic and art historian Irving Sandler has observed the art world at close range since the 1950s. He describes not only what happened and why but also analyzes the meaning and significance of what he has seen. Sandler earned a BA degree at Philadelphia’s Temple University in 1948 and a master’s degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania two years later. After returning to his native New York and establishing his contemporary art expertise, in 1976 he completed a PhD degree in art history at New York University. During the 1950s, he befriended many of the abstract expressionists and other progressive artists while managing the Tanager Gallery, an influential cooperative exhibition space, and participating in other art community activities. Soon, as he remained involved with artists’ organizations while also teaching art history, he began to write art criticism for newspapers and magazines. His first important book, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), initiated a sequence of volumes that together constitute a history of post–World War II American art. Volumes on the 1950s and 1960s prepared the way for Art of the Postmodern Era: From Late 1960s to Early 1990s (1996). In addition, he has written numerous monographic studies of individual artists. His 2003 memoir, A Sweeper-Up after Artists, provides an engagingly personal overview of his life in the art world. In 2009, he looked back to his earliest interest in Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation.
Nearly impossible to situate within conventional accounts of art history and among the most offensive painters of the post–World War II period, Peter Saul draws on comics, surrealism, pop art, and sexual deviance, no less than grand-manner history painting. The overwrought exaggerations of Paul Cadmus’s 1930s work provided an early inspiration. A vicious critic of the political and social shortcomings of contemporary life, he nevertheless offers no moral resolution to the difficult topics he addresses. Born in San Francisco, he studied for two years at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) before transferring in 1952 to Washington University in St. Louis. After graduation in 1956, he lived in Europe until 1964. There, he abandoned the abstract expressionism of his early work, although the large-scale, all-over fields of this movement remained with him. As he began to incorporate frighteningly distorted, low-life imagery tinged with humor, Roberto Matta offered encouragement. Upon returning to the United States, he settled for 11 years in the San Francisco area. There, he participated peripherally in the funk art movement and painted horrifying critiques of the Vietnam War. Day-Glo colors, repulsively distorted figures, and antic compositions point to needless violence and suffering. In this toxic context, no one remains innocent. After a few years in New York, Saul lived for nearly two decades, during the 1980s and 1990s, in Austin, Texas, then returned to New York. His sensibility has provided important precedents for such work as Philip Guston’s figural paintings and the efforts of numerous younger artists who wrestle with the interaction of form, representationally oriented content, and the ills of the world. See also .
African American painter Raymond Saunders often incorporates collage elements into loosely brushed abstractions. Often found materials, sometimes photographic images or the fragmentary detritus of mass culture, these establish general affinities with Robert Rauschenberg’s multi-layered, evocative work. Born in Pittsburgh, Saunders earned a BFA there at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1960 and the following year received an MFA from Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts). He has spent most of his professional career in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a 1967 pamphlet, “Black Is a Color,” he disavowed the distinctiveness of black art, asserting instead that “racial hang-ups” only detract from free expression and unfairly pigeonhole the artist in critical appraisals of his accomplishments. See also .
A technique introduced by postminimalists to undermine the fixity of art objects, scatter art offers artists the opportunity to employ chance or randomness in the presentation of their work. As the name implies, the term suggests distribution of elements across a field that constitutes the work of art. As such, it may be regarded as a form of installation art. Robert Morris’s 1969 Untitled (Scatter Piece) set the pace. Its 100 hefty rectilinear metal elements and 100 pieces of heavy felt distributed intuitively around Leo Castelli’s New York gallery offered no single viewing point but instead forced the visitor to interact with the work by wandering through it. The scatter technique has continued to interest artists with widely varying intentions. Judy Pfaff has offered brilliantly decorative examples, while in his indeterminate conglomerations of commonplace materials (newspapers, hard candy, light bulbs, etc.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres directed his efforts toward cultural and political questions. Besides Mike Kelley, younger artists whose undisciplined, often wildly overstuffed installations employ scatter art include Rachel Harrison (1966–), Karen Kilimnik (1955–), Cady Noland, Jason Rhoades (1965–2006), and Jessica Stockholder (1959–).
A leading American art historian, Meyer Schapiro also maintained unusually close attachments to contemporary art and artists, particularly abstract expressionists and their avant-garde successors. Dan Flavin, Allan Kaprow, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and Lucas Samaras numbered among his students. In the early 1940s, as he became acquainted with European émigré artists escaping World War II—including André Breton and Fernand Léger—he facilitated interactions with American counterparts. Noted as a major scholar of medieval art, Schapiro brought to his work a fresh point of view as he accounted for social and economic factors in the formulation of style. Also much interested in modern art, he published articles on Arshile Gorky, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso, as well as introductory texts for books on Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. In addition, Schapiro deepened his understanding of the visual arts by painting—mostly landscapes and portraits—throughout his life. Born in what is now Lithuania (then part of Russia), he immigrated with his family as a small child to New York. In 1920, only 16, he entered Columbia University. After receiving his BA, he remained there to earn his PhD and teach until retirement in 1973. He also lectured (brilliantly, from all accounts) on occasion at other schools, perhaps most notably from 1936 until 1952 at the New School for Social Research (now New School), a magnet in those years for forward-looking artists and writers.
A German artist and writer, the multi-valent Kurt Schwitters began as a painter and sculptor, but by 1918 he had turned his primary attention to collages and, soon after, to room-sized constructions. Also a writer and typographer, he lived into the post–World War II era for only a brief time, but his example proved decisive for a number of younger artists, perhaps nowhere so much as in the United States. There he was much admired by those who turned to collage, assemblage, and junk art, particularly between the late 1940s and the 1960s. His radical individualism and freewheeling creativity continue to ramify throughout contemporary art.
Born in Hanover, where he resided until the final decade of his life, he studied at art schools there and in Dresden. Initially much taken with cubism and expressionism, after the disillusioning experience of World War I he adopted the dadaist embrace of nihilism, irony, and revolt against tradition. Nevertheless, the power and expressiveness of his art remained rooted in a sophisticated understanding of traditional and modern art, as well as a romantic attachment to nature. The collages begun in 1918 break with cubist precedents by incorporating all manner of non-art materials and detritus. While speaking to a sense of alienation from the values associated with high art, these also represent a search for meaning in shattered postwar Europe. The following year, he adapted the nonsense word “Merz” (it was a syllable detached from a printed word that he had scissored apart) as a unifying designation for Merzbilder (the collages) and Merzbau (architectural constructions). From 1923 until 1932, he published the handsomely designed magazine Merz, which attested to his interest in constructivism and De Stijl. During these years, he also altered a room in his home, making of it a sort of cave-like architectural sculpture filled with unexpected forms, objects, and even works of art. This initial Merzbau spread into other rooms of the house before 1937 when, as Nazis labeled him a degenerate artist and began to close in on his acquaintances, he fled to Norway (where he had often vacationed). Three years later, the Germans invaded Norway. Schwitters left behind another Merzbau and hurried to England. There he remained permanently, first (following nearly a year and a half interned as an enemy alien) in London and then in the Lake District. Besides a final Merzbau, which remained unfinished at his death, toward the end of his life Schwitters also produced collage works with a new tone—anticipating pop art’s fascination with consumerism and mass culture.
Irish American abstract painter Sean Scully combines minimalist compositional formats with warm, painterly surfaces in works of intellectual restraint and emotional resonance. Architectonic arrangements of chunky, single-hued, rectangular elements—sometimes separate canvases abutting each other—demonstrate to fine advantage the artist’s acute sense of color. While some works glow with rich vibrancy, others, more meditative, display solemn tones. Scully has noted that his art amalgamates his experience of “America, the land of Minimalism, and Europe, the land of Humanism.” Born in Dublin, Scully grew up in London and studied at art schools there before earning a BA degree at the University of Newcastle in 1972. He settled in New York in 1975. After previously working with hard-edge abstraction, he adopted his distinctive freehand approach in the early 1980s. His avowed spiritual intentions—“Catholic with a strong underpinning of Zen”—came to fruition in 2015 within a 10th-century monastery in Monserrat, Spain. This project, which he considers his most significant achievement to date, comprises canvases, stained-glass windows, metal candlesticks, and frescoes, as well as 14 small abstractions—his interpretation of the Stations of the Cross—set in a grand steel frame.
An American sculptor associated with pop art, George Segal situated ghostly plaster figures within environments of real objects, constructing meditations on human experience in the modern world. His attention to the inner lives of his subjects owes more to such predecessors as Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper than to the generally raucous atmospherics of the post–abstract expressionist ethos. As well, no other major pop artist expressed a social conscience with such thoughtful eloquence. In this respect, his art resonates with the then unfashionable social realism of the 1930s Depression years, while his figural style traces its lineage back through Edgar Degas to the ancient Greeks.
Born in New York, as a young teenager Segal moved with his parents to a New Jersey chicken farm. He studied at several schools, finally earning a BA in art education from New York University in 1949 and an MFA in 1963 from Rutgers University. While painting, teaching, and working on his own nearby chicken farm (where he lived for the rest of his life), he became acquainted with Allan Kaprow and other New York artists interested in new forms of expression. Together, they staged the first happening at Segal’s farm in 1958. In the late 1950s, Segal experimented with sculpture made from chicken wire and plaster. A new technique, devised in 1961, provided his breakthrough to a new sort of sculpture. By wrapping models in plaster-soaked medical bandages, he was able to capture lifelike but generalized physiognomies and postures. His static though graceful figures reflect the nature of the process, which required the subject to remain motionless for considerable lengths of time while the plaster dried. Man at a Table (1961; Mönchengladbach, Germany, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg), a figure seated at a real table below an actual window frame, represents his first success in this vein. With time, as he refined his procedures, he placed figures, singly or alone, in more complex situations. Their self-absorbed demeanor contrasted their humanity with the dispassionate contemporary environments they inhabit. From the late 1960s, he sometimes used the casts as molds, while also coloring some figures with a single hue. During the 1970s, he started casting whole vignettes in bronze (he often painted the figures white) to function as public sculptures in outdoor environments. Besides scenes of ordinary life, such as a bus interior, a gas station, or a movie ticket window, he drew respectful attention to the hardships of others in such works as The Breadline (1997; Washington, D.C., Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial). As well, he addressed tragic subjects, such as the Holocaust, or memorialized noteworthy events, including the Stonewall riot for gay liberation and the Kent State shootings. Also a masterful draftsman, Segal in addition produced accomplished photographs.
The youngest among well-known associates of the abstract expressionists, painter and printmaker Charles Seliger prolonged the values of that movement for more than 60 years. Never attracted to the large scale that marked most abstract expressionist work, he steadily produced intricate, almost miniature paintings known for jewel-like colors. Born in New York, Seliger began to paint as a teenager in Jersey City before dropping out of high school in 10th grade. In 1943, he met Jimmy Ernst, who introduced him to New York’s wartime surrealist milieu. Before he turned 20, in 1945 he had his first one-person show, at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century. The following year, New York’s Museum of Modern Art bought a painting, Natural History: Form within Rock (1946), which already demonstrates the fundamentals of the style he would elaborate with increasing freedom and delicacy for the rest of his life. Drawing on surrealist automatism, he invented forms that look vaguely biological or geological, combining them in insubstantial layers that suggest the continuous metamorphosis of nature. Throughout his career, he worked slowly, usually completing no more than 20 paintings a year, and thoughtfully. Widely read in literature, history, and science, he synthesized complex homages into microscopic visions of creation.
Known for massive, powerful, stripped-down forms made from steel plates, Richard Serra has occupied a central place in American sculpture since the 1960s. Heroically scaled, authoritative drawings share with the sculpture a similar grandeur rooted in simple but expressive means. Born in San Francisco, Serra studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he worked with Rico Lebrun. Early experience in West Coast steel mills introduced him to the properties of metal and honed his feeling for scale and structure. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in English in 1961, he continued his training at Yale University, earning an MFA in 1964. After subsequently traveling and working in Europe, he settled permanently in New York. There, in the mid-1960s, he abandoned painting to employ such unconventional materials as rubber and fiberglass in process-based, postminimalist works. More startlingly, he flung molten lead into corners, where it congealed into dense and formless masses. Before the 1960s ended, he concentrated on weighty materials, such as lead sheets and wood timbers, arranged in what appear to be precarious configurations, barely resisting gravity. Around 1970, he started to work with the large-scale steel plates that characterize his mature career. Although generally constructed from uncomplicated shapes, his work carries an expressive charge incongruent with the deadpan rationalism of minimalism. Curving forms, often positioned to appear somewhat unstable, come from intuition rather than reason, while irregularly rusted surfaces suggest contingency. The overbearing and implacable nature of some pieces has not found much favor with the public, despite admiration from the art community. In a highly publicized incident involving a federally funded outdoor commission, his 1981 Tilted Arc, a slightly curved form 120 feet long, 12 feet high, and 2.5 inches thick, received such bitter condemnation from many who worked in the area that it was—despite the artist’s protestations that as a site-specific work it could not be moved without destroying its integrity—dismantled and removed from New York’s Federal Plaza (also known as Foley Square) in 1989. Nevertheless, Serra has continued to receive important commissions from international patrons. With time, his work became more complex as he introduced intricate, sometimes interlocking curves that animate the space around them with baroque drama. As a draftsman, Serra is particularly known for employing a greasy crayon known as paintstick to define flat shapes in works that play austerity against warmly sensuous appeal. From 1965 to 1970, he was married to Nancy Graves. See also ; .
American painter, graphic artist, and photographer Ben Shahn maintained deeply humanistic intentions throughout his career. Often in support of left-wing or liberal causes, much of his work addresses such issues as social justice, racial equality, and union representation. Other, less pointed works underscore the dignity of ordinary life. A first-rate draftsman, he augmented line with patterning and decorative color to produce a legible personal style of considerable gravity and impact.
Born in Lithuania, then part of Russia, Shahn arrived in 1906 with his family in New York. As a teenager, he apprenticed with a lithographer, soon becoming skillful enough to finance college courses and art school. In the 1920s, Shahn twice went to Europe to study the works of Old Masters and modernists, and he also visited North Africa. Around 1930, he began to concentrate on socially oriented subjects while also bringing together the elements of his signature style. Tempera, particularly suitable to poster-like compositions of flat shapes bounded by expressive line, became his favored medium. In 1932, he made his mark with a narrative series detailing the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists whose 1927 execution on what many thought were trumped-up charges drew international criticism of the American justice system. These works also caught the eye of Diego Rivera, who hired Shahn to work on his well-known but ill-fated Rockefeller Center mural, an experience that initiated Shahn’s career as a prominent muralist.
After picking up the rudiments of photography in the early 1930s from his friend Walker Evans, Shahn recorded New York street life. Unlike his mentor, Shahn had little interest in technical expertise or fine printing. Mainly, he used photography as other artists rely on sketching, as a source of inspiration for paintings. However, between 1935 and 1938, Shahn worked as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, a federal agency that undertook to document suffering across the continent during the Depression. On this project, his casual approach yielded hundreds of arresting images, often both compositionally adroit and deeply empathetic to those he pictured.
After World War II, his art garnered wide admiration and an international reputation. In these years, as abstract expressionists pursued lofty esthetic and philosophical goals, Shahn, too, addressed larger concerns. Symbolic renditions of the human condition outnumbered subjects connected to current events. Combining the two interests, in the early 1960s Shahn created 10 paintings constituting a powerful narrative allegory protesting American nuclear testing based on a 1954 incident. Those aboard the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese fishing boat inadvertently showered with radioactive fallout, had afterward endured immense suffering. Much of the work from the final decade of his life drew on religious and spiritual themes inspired by his Jewish heritage. In 1935, Shahn married American painter, graphic artist, and illustrator Bernarda Bryson (1903–2004), who collaborated with her husband on two important mural projects. During 35 years of widowhood, she continued to work productively and saw her own reputation grow. See also .
Works sidestepping the traditional rectangular painting surface in favor of irregular shapes were not entirely new at the time, but the term took on enhanced meaning during the 1960s and 1970s. Hard-edge painters, in particular, favored shaped canvases. The new formats contributed to an important discussion of the time: Had painting exhausted its possibilities in the wake of abstract expressionism and color field painting? Many artists and observers thought that only sculpture could rescue art. But shaped canvases, like painted reliefs, seemed to open a new path. Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella figured importantly in popularizing them. Within the ethos of the time, shaped canvases played an important role in emphasizing the “objecthood” of art works as independent of illusion or metaphor. The subject gained visibility in 1964 when New York’s Guggenheim Museum presented “The Shaped Canvas,” organized by Lawrence Alloway. See also ; ; .
American painter Charles Sheeler, also a masterful photographer, found in the clean lines of architectural and industrial subjects a classic and timeless poetry. He also admired the radical simplicity of early American furniture, crafts, and architecture. Through much of his career, he pursued painting and photography as complementary projects, nearly identical in subject matter and close in sharply focused style.
A Philadelphian by birth and training, on three early trips to Europe, Sheeler enlarged his appreciation for more advanced art than that of his impressionist teacher William Merritt Chase. In particular, he admired Paul Cézanne’s structured work. While concentrating on the architectural and still life subjects that preoccupied him for the rest of his career, until the early 1920s he also tried his hand at abstractions. Photography became a serious interest around 1910, and he soon numbered among originators of sharp-focus, formally rigorous expression. In 1913, he exhibited paintings in New York’s landmark Armory Show, which introduced modern art to a general American audience, and was subsequently regarded among the leading artists of the younger generation. After moving to New York in 1919, Sheeler joined the avant-garde circle—including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia—around adventurous collector Walter Arensberg (1878–1954) and his wife, Louise (1879–1953). Friendship with photographer Paul Strand led to collaboration on a notable experimental film, Manhatta (1920). Sheeler’s paintings of this time emphasized flattened, semi-abstracted architectural forms, often observed from unnatural viewpoints and dynamically arranged. Meantime, he was also becoming a highly regarded freelance and magazine photographer. In 1927, on commission from the Ford Motor Company, he photographed its River Rouge plant in Michigan. Unpeopled, the better to celebrate factory buildings and mechanical equipment, these emblems of American industrial power present a consummate vision of technological grandeur. During the next few years, paintings derived from these photographs showed a new level of commitment to visual exactitude. A vision in industrial tones, largely sober grays and browns, American Landscape (1930; New York, Museum of Modern Art) offers a man-made vista that almost obliterates nature. But not quite. Reflective water in the foreground and wind-blown smoke from a distant stack remind viewers of contingent natural forces and perhaps betray the artist’s ambivalence about mechanistic control.
From the mid-1940s, as abstract expressionism and other forms of abstract art almost overwhelmed interest in realistic treatments of the American scene, Sheeler ditched literalism for more allusive and even symbolic territory. In these late, semi-abstract but still precise works, compositions recall superimposed photographic negatives. From the mid-1920s onward, Sheeler lived outside New York City, in semi-rural New York and Connecticut locales. When a stroke ended his career in 1959, he numbered among the most revered American artists of the era.
A Pictures Generation photographer, Cindy Sherman has specialized, with verve and imagination, in staged self-portraits. These suggest a fluid conception of self, as they also examine the mass media’s stereotypes of women. Although her works usually derive from commercial imagery, Sherman’s personal inflection communicates every woman’s anxiety about her place in contemporary society. The viewer senses, after all, that there is a “real” Cindy Sherman who exists under the strain of accommodating so many social roles. The artist has generally shrugged off interpretation of her work in terms of postmodern theories, preferring instead to claim its originating impulse in her childhood’s innocent dress-up fantasy life and, as her work became more complex, in responses to contemporary experience.
Sherman was born in suburban New Jersey and grew up on Long Island. In 1976, she graduated from the State University College at Buffalo, and the next year she moved with her boyfriend, Robert Longo, to New York. Between 1977 and 1980, she created the Untitled Film Stills, which made her reputation. In this extended series of black-and-white photographs, she portrayed herself in the guise of the movie industry’s common female clichés, from teenage runaway to carefully dressed office worker, from ingénue to temptress, housewife, and battered woman. An early 1980s self-portrait series in color, scaled up to as much as 8' × 4', resonated with the ambitions of neo-expressionist painting. During the mid-1980s, she temporarily turned away from self-portraiture to photograph mannequins, dolls, and toys in repulsive, abject situations, creating nightmarish images. In the subversive 1989–90 History Portraits, she reimagined herself in the guise of well-known Old Master paintings. Later, she used prosthetic body parts to envision Sex Pictures that comment on pornography, created a Society Portraits series that explores women’s efforts to cope with expectations to remain youthfully attractive, and produced huge multi-figure installations as well as films. In the mid-2010s, she returned, after a five-year hiatus, to self-portraits; now in her sixties, she reconceives herself in the guise of aging film stars. See also ; .
Particularly in France, the left-wing situationist movement of the countercultural 1960s desired to upend prevailing bourgeois assumptions and practices. Inflected by Marxist and surrealist thought, it aimed to resist the coercive power of the state and the hegemony of capitalism, as well as the alienation produced by consumerism and the materialistic “spectacles” of mass media. The primacy of the “situation” mandated living freely and independently within the moment while responding directly to the immediate environment. Although not exclusively an art movement, it drew interest from post–World War II artists who sought to destroy barriers between art and life. In this respect, it overlapped with such other tendencies as fluxus, happenings, junk art, and pop art. More politically motivated than most strictly artistic movements, situationism played an important role in the evolution of French politics in the years leading up to the student revolts of 1968.
Under the leadership of Guy Debord, the Internationale Situationniste (Situationist International) came into being at a 1957 meeting in Italy and subsequently, under Debord’s direction, published a journal (1958–1969) of the same name. The most important situationist text, his 1967 La Société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle; English edition, 1970), gained widespread attention for its ringing condemnation of mass society’s corruption of the very psychology of individual experience. Although the organization itself remained an exclusive coterie of radical writers, intellectuals, and artists, it numbered among leading factors motivating student uprisings the following year. Subsequently, the situationist group deflated and then disbanded in 1972. The most prominent artist directly involved with the movement, Asger Jorn, numbered among the founders and worked to incorporate its attitudes in his work. Others, including Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke, seized on situationist ideas in their critiques of society. At greater remove, appropriationists and other later artists who foregrounded issues of the role of advertising in the social construction of meaning drew on aspects of the earlier movement’s more nuanced analyses. See also ; .
Often regarded as the leading American sculptor of the 20th century and unquestionably the most important sculptor associated with abstract expressionism, David Smith not only gave authoritative form to the common aspirations of that group but also redefined sculptural practice so thoroughly that the very notion of sculpture came under pressure. Nearly all artists of the next generation—and indeed beyond—have had to reckon with his example, even if their esthetic intentions depart from his. Aspects of Smith’s practice provided jumping-off points for assemblage and junk art, for minimalism, for hard-edge abstraction, and for process art. Like other abstract expressionists, Smith drew on both surrealist and constructivist sources. By doing away with pedestals to “frame” his sculptures and instead situating them within the viewer’s own space, he enhanced their immediacy. A pioneer in the use of welded metal, he reconceived sculpture as an aggregation of parts rather than a molded or carved object and firmly situated his sculpture within the American industrial-technological ethos. Non-traditional materials and techniques underscored the modernity of his vision and his creative independence from earlier fine art practice, although he often achieved a distinctive elegance.
A midwesterner, Smith grew up in Indiana and Ohio, where he studied for a year at Ohio University. In 1927, soon after arriving in New York, he began to study painting and drawing at the Art Students League, where Jan Matulka proved particularly important, introducing him to the work of the great European modernists, especially Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso, who were to remain his lodestars. Another early contact in New York, John Graham, not only enlarged his knowledge of modernism—most importantly, he drew Smith’s attention to Spanish artist Julio González’s innovative welded sculptures of a few years earlier—but also introduced him to leaders among the progressive art community, including Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky. Although he never abandoned painting and remained an active draftsman throughout his life, Smith gradually drifted toward sculptural expression as he assembled small constructions from varied materials. In the upstate studio he had established at Bolton Landing on Lake George, in 1933 he produced what are thought to be the first welded sculptures made in the United States. After an extended 1935–36 visit to Europe, responding to the rise of Fascism and later in that decade to the outbreak of war, Smith fashioned his first coherent group of sculptural works, 15 large bronze medallions that he exhibited as Medals for Dishonor in 1940. Their vivid expressionistic imagery, in tune with left-wing social consciousness of the time, marked Smith’s last significant engagement with representation. The same year, he moved permanently to Bolton Landing, where he dubbed his studio the Terminal Iron Works, in homage to a commercial Brooklyn establishment of that name, where he had picked up technical skills. Metal being hard to come by during World War II, he honed his proficiency by working as a machinist (in his youth, he had worked in an automobile factory) but also learned to carve marble while working part-time at a funeral monument facility.
With a 1950 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship affording a new level of economic security, Smith entered into the breathtakingly productive and creative period of his maturity. Among his early masterpieces, the expansive welded-steel Hudson River Landscape (1951; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art) offers a sculptural equivalent of abstract expressionist painting. Its free-flowing linearity draws on surrealist precedents, while the lyrical composition evokes through entirely abstract means the softly dramatic landscape of the Hudson River valley, a quintessentially American subject. Its open composition offers more void than solid. Perhaps only Alexander Calder had previously so dented notions of sculpture’s structural logic. Smith initiated his subsequent practice of working in series, conceiving works as variants to be read within larger wholes, with the Agricola sculptures (1951–57) incorporating farm machinery. In the mid-1950s, he began installing works—now becoming more volumetric—outdoors on his Bolton Landing property. Eventually numbering in the dozens, they mediated among art, technology, and nature. Around this time, he also began painting the surfaces of some of his steel sculptures, exploring the role of color in three-dimensional art. In his final and best-known series, the 28 stripped-down Cubis of 1961 to 1965, heroically scaled geometric shapes, their stainless steel surfaces burnished by hand, balance provisionally in exuberant testimony to their maker’s distinctive and potent synthesis of modern ideas and personal expression. Like Jackson Pollock—though at the height of his powers—Smith died as the result of a car crash. See also ; ; .
From 1927 until 1952, Smith was married to painter and sculptor Dorothy Dehner (1901–94). Born in Cleveland, as a young teenager, she moved to California. Intending an acting career, she relocated to New York in 1922, but after meeting artists in New York and seeing examples of modern art on a 1925 trip to Europe, she enrolled at the Art Students League to study with Matulka, among others. During her marriage, she continued to paint and draw. After her divorce and return to New York, she continued these activities but also branched into printmaking after working at Atelier 17. Her talent for sculpture emerged a few years later and sustained a productive career for another four decades. Starting with small, surrealistic bronzes, she went on to work in varied media and, eventually, on a large scale. During the 1970s, particularly, she worked extensively with wood. Generally, her imagery remained linked to biomorphic, mythically charged surrealist and abstract expressionist precedents.
American architect-turned-sculptor Tony Smith bridged the transition from the romantic expressionism of the New York School to the interests of impersonal minimalism. His monumental Die (1962; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art), a seven-foot steel cube, offered an uncompromising statement of new directions in American abstraction. Nevertheless, despite severity, it transcends the intentionally deadpan affect of more rigorously minimal works. A sensuously oiled surface counteracts its industrial fabrication, while a slender hidden base provides lightness to the entire form, which seems mysteriously weightless despite its bulk. While similarly marked by classical order, most of Smith’s sculpture offers greater complexity, with ample architectonic shapes often conceived as units assembled for maximum articulation of the surrounding space. His most elaborate pieces, such as the 24' × 48' Smoke (1967; original wood sculpture cast in aluminum in 2005; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art), verge on installations affording viewers the opportunity to “enter” the sculpture by walking beneath constituent elements. Whether constructed of plywood or metal, Smith generally painted the characteristically planar, straight-edged surfaces of his work in a single color, most often a matte black.
A native of South Orange, New Jersey, as a young man he took classes at New York’s Art Students League but remained directionless for some time. In 1937, he moved to Chicago to enroll at the Bauhaus-oriented Institute of Design but left after a year to work with Frank Lloyd Wright for two years. Although never licensed as an architect, in the 1940s and 1950s he designed several homes while also working in New York as a painter allied with the goals of his abstract expressionist friends. In the late 1950s, he turned his attention to sculpture but did not exhibit it publicly until the following decade. See also .
New York artist Kiki Smith (1954–), a daughter, works in several media but remains particularly known for prints and drawings. Her figurative work addresses themes related particularly to the politics of the feminine body, to nature, and to routes of transcendence. Kiki’s sister, Seton Smith, is known as a photographer.
Widely known for the iconic 1970 Spiral Jetty, American Robert Smithson, who integrated his activity as an earth artist with gallery-based projects, offered an esthetically provocative and intellectually sophisticated approach. A fluent writer, he illuminated his own and other artists’ work in perspicacious and engaging commentaries. His thought reflected a marked engagement with the concept of entropy, the natural process of devolution toward disorder, as he grappled with the era’s nascent pessimism about the limits of industrial civilization. Other artists of this postminimal time also employed photography to document remote or ephemeral works, but Smithson came to view the documents themselves as art, in his view as “non-sites.” The site/non-site duality further pervaded his gallery work as he brought indoors such materials as rock, sand, or mud to betoken specific outdoor sites, often identified in accompanying photographs and/or topographical maps. Usually presented within containers suggesting minimal sculptures or strewn on the floor and partially fenced with mirrors, the formless detritus contrasted uneasily with these sleek reminders of the technological ethos of our time.
A New Jersey native, Smithson received relatively little training as an artist. While still in high school, he worked at the Art Students League in New York and studied privately with figurative painter Isaac Soyer (1902–81), best known as a social realist. A brief stint at the Brooklyn Museum’s school completed Smithson’s formal education. His early work drew not only on abstract expressionism and early pop art, but also science fiction, Byzantine religious art, and other offbeat interests. Around 1964, he turned instead to mathematically based minimal sculptures and experiments with the visually destabilizing effects of mirrors. Soon, aspects of conceptualism and process art also informed his thinking. Interested since childhood in science and natural history, perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, he internalized the deeper meanings of scientific thought in formulating his distinctive approach.
To construct Spiral Jetty, Smithson worked with a contractor to bulldoze rocks and dirt into an audacious spiraling walkway extending into the pinkish waters of the Great Salt Lake. Fifteen feet wide and 1,500 feet long, it coiled with geometric precision, setting up a tension with the barren, unmanicured site he chose. At the end of the walkway, the visitor stands suspended between nature and art. Reminiscent of prehistoric attempts to shape the natural landscape, Jetty also resonated with poetic and metaphorical associations. Its form suggests the mythical whirlpool said by some to exist within the lake, while also symbolizing growth and alluding to regular structures that underlie nature itself. In a film—another non-site—that accompanied the work, Smithson documented its construction while also linking his intent to geological time. He expected the work to decay and eventually be subsumed by natural forces. Had he lived, he would have seen his prediction borne out, as the lake rose within a few years, completely submerging the jetty. More than three decades later, in 2002, the work reappeared, as the lake level receded, and since then has come in and out of view intermittently.
Subsequently, a less pessimistic Smithson came to believe that his work could help to heal the earth through land reclamation projects, with the artist serving as mediator between environmentalists and industrial forces. His Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971) in an abandoned quarry in Emmen, Netherlands, remains the only project of this sort he finished. Two years later, at 34, Smithson died in an air crash while inspecting progress on Amarillo Ramp in Texas. His widow, sculptor Nancy Holt (1938–2014), completed the work, with the help of Richard Serra and other friends.
Preoccupied with questions of perception and the human connections to space and time, Holt specialized in outdoor works, often public commissions. Sun Tunnels (1973–76) remains her best-known accomplishment. Nine feet in diameter and 18 feet long, facing each other in pairs in a roughly X-shaped formation on the Utah desert, four enormous concrete tubes capture the sun’s direct rays on the summer and winter solstices. Piercings draw attention to certain constellations in the night sky. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Holt grew up mostly in New Jersey and studied biology at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. After graduation in 1960, she moved to New York, where she soon became acquainted with leading minimal and postminimal artists. She worked at that time mainly with photography and video, which remained among her interests. She and Smithson married in 1963. From the mid-1990s, she lived in Galisteo, New Mexico.
Precociously talented and the youngest of the major first-generation abstract expressionists, Theodoros Stamos was born in New York to Greek immigrant parents. While still in his teens, he studied sculpture, visited Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery to peruse earlier American forays into abstraction—including the work of Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe—and began to make the acquaintance of European émigré and American artists interested in surrealism. The avant-garde dealer Betty Parsons staged his first one-person exhibition when he was only 21.
Stamos’s work of the 1940s featured biomorphic shapes devised under the influence of surrealism but also indebted to the artist’s interest in nature as a source of spiritual enrichment. Stylistically, his work of this time often recalls William Baziotes’s organic abstraction. From the late 1940s, Stamos traveled widely, motivated in part by an interest in forms of transcendental experience and their esthetic expression. By the time he was about 30, he had left behind his 1940s biomorphism to open out his canvases and capture more expansive moods—an interest that he shared with color field painters. In the Tea House paintings of the early 1950s, he used calligraphic markings to accommodate a new interest in Asian art. Subsequently, the general direction of his work pointed to increasing simplification, although both imagery and highly activated, brushy surfaces occur. At the outer limit, during the 1960s, some of the works comprised nearly featureless canvases. These were elaborated after 1970 in the Infinity Field series of lyric color abstractions.
Mark Rothko’s death in 1970 put in motion a sequence of events from which Stamos’s reputation as an artist never entirely recovered. Rothko’s will named Stamos, along with two other friends, as executors of his estate, which they put in the hands of the Marlborough Gallery. In a lawsuit filed the next year, they were accused of defrauding the estate as the gallery reaped large profits while disposing of Rothko’s paintings at lower prices than might be expected. Meanwhile, Stamos had apparently received favorable treatment from the gallery in sales of his own work. The case dragged on for years. Although eventually convicted, it was never entirely clear whether Stamos intended malfeasance in failing to live up to his fiduciary role, or whether he gullibly took his responsibilities too lightly. In any event, he afterward had difficulty finding representation at a top gallery, and his artistic reputation dwindled. For the next quarter century, he spent much of his time on the island of Lefkada, off Greece’s western shore. Much admired in his adopted homeland, he died in Ioannina, the mainland city nearest his refuge. See also ; .
American sculptor Richard Stankiewicz ranks as the most significant figure in junk art’s early history. He conceived not only a technique for fashioning three-dimensional works but also endowed such works with new forms of expressive significance. His relatively complex accretions of scrap metal disavowed prevailing high-minded abstract expressionist esthetics and legitimized such lowly materials as suitable for serious approaches to art making. Many early observers saw his work as neo-dadaist, an attempt to challenge the very notion of art through disreputable gestures. In fact, however, his purposes were quite different. He wished to draw attention to the potential esthetic power of detritus, which he selected with great discrimination.
Born in Philadelphia, Stankiewicz grew up in Detroit and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1941. While serving for six years, he tried his hand at art and, during shore leaves, visited museums. In 1948, he moved to New York to study with Hans Hofmann. Subsequently, in Paris for a year, he studied with Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine. At the time of his return in 1951, he fashioned lightweight sculptures of wire and plaster, their insect-like shapes suggesting admiration for Alberto Giacometti’s work. The decision to dig a garden in the courtyard of his studio building proved fateful. In the process, he unearthed pieces of metal, which at first he tossed aside. But, as he told it, suddenly inspired by their appearance, he immediately bought welding equipment and a how-to book. During the winter of 1951–52, he combined these and other discards into sculptural assemblages. At first, their vaguely animal or human forms suggested surrealist overtones, but before the end of the decade, most had become entirely abstract. In 1962, as pop and minimal tendencies replaced the more psychologically complex and poetic interests of his approach, Stankiewicz moved permanently to rural western Massachusetts. There, out of the public eye, he turned his attention to other forms of metal sculpture, later often much larger—sometimes massive—in scale.
Success came early to Frank Stella, who startled the art world at 23 when his “pinstripe” paintings appeared in a group show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This series, initiated the previous year, offered configurations of narrow, black enamel stripes separated by slim interstices of raw canvas. To many, these seemed to assault not only the period’s New York School expectations but also the basic tenets of Western painting. Devoid of illusion, depth, relational composition, and overt emotion, these “cool,” proto-minimalist works seemed to have no meaning. “What you see is what you see,” the artist later quipped. After continuing the stripe paintings in metallic paints, he worked his way through other formats elaborated in series. Brightly colored bands dominated his work of the 1960s, when he numbered among the inventors of the shaped canvas and exploited its possibilities with masterful élan. In the Protractor series of 1967 to 1971, colorful arcs describe patterns based on circular elements and move toward a more decorative esthetic. Since that period, he has also produced prints, primarily lithographs. In spontaneously conceived, three-dimensional sheet-metal reliefs of the 1970s, he left behind a previous adherence to flatness, as well as his formal rigor. Eventually, these became freestanding, exuberant aluminum and stainless steel sculptures, no longer restrained by geometry, while surfaces sported glitter and other ornamental flourishes. In a 1980s sculptural series, he deemphasized such surfaces in works that depend instead on the interaction of unadorned metal forms. His 1986 book, Working Space, reflected the progression of his art since the 1970s in calling for more expressive and visually provocative uses of abstraction in the spirit of baroque theatricality. Throughout his career, Stella has maintained an independent path, not much affected by esthetic dialogues of the moment, as he has generally discounted prevailing assumptions about methods, meaning, and purpose.
Born in a Boston suburb, Stella was educated at an elite New England prep school, Phillips Academy—where he formed a friendship with Carl Andre—and at Princeton University. There he majored in history but studied also with Stephen Greene (1917–99), an undogmatic painter known for sensuously colored figurative and abstract works, and with William C. Seitz (1914–74), also a painter, but more importantly an art historian with expertise in abstract expressionism and, from 1960, an innovative curator at the Museum of Modern Art and, later, elsewhere. Already impressed with Jasper Johns’s impassive early work, after graduation in 1958, Stella settled in New York to continue his move away from an early attachment to abstract expressionism. Johns’s Flag paintings, in particular, proposed a mode of art making demonstrating that paintings could function as self-referential objects independent of illusion or metaphor. Despite their differing goals, these achievements inspired Stella’s breakthrough black-stripe paintings. Stella’s subsequent adoption of more eye-catching hues and designs contributed to 1960s enthusiasm for hard-edge painting, while his later incorporation of tasteless, non-art materials suggests affinities with pop art, with the pattern-and-decoration esthetic, and, ultimately, with postmodern enthusiasm for vulgar excess as an antidote to tastefulness. Since the early 2000s, he has devoted nearly all of his attention to large public sculptures and to designs for architectural projects. Stella continues to work in series, as he always has. During the 1980s and 1990s, he spent years on dramatic Moby Dick variations. In 2014, he embarked on a light, often lyrical Scarlatti series, named for the 18th-century Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti, known especially for harpsichord sonatas. To achieve their complex, whirling designs, he relies on computer drawings that are then fabricated in a white resin that his assistants spray with color, often automotive paint. Although his art has encompassed unusual diversity, nevertheless—throughout a career of more than half a century—abstract formalism, untainted by illusion or allusion, has remained central to his pursuit. From 1961 until the mid-1970s, Stella was married to American art critic and historian Barbara Rose (1937–). See also .
American abstract expressionist Clyfford Still devised a signature style marked by awesome scale, heavily applied paint, simple color combinations, and large, ragged shapes. Black is often the dominant hue. An impression of overwhelming materiality, along with disdain for compositional niceties, gives his work dramatic force. The only major abstract expressionist to mature as a painter outside New York, until he was approaching his fifties he lived in the West (except for visits to New York and two years in Virginia). Born in North Dakota, he grew up in Washington State and in Canada. In 1925, he enrolled at New York’s Art Students League but returned home after the first day, asserting that instruction there was a waste of time. Following his graduation in 1933 from Spokane University (now defunct), he earned a master’s degree in 1935 at Washington State College (now University). In 1941, Still moved to San Francisco, where he exerted an important influence on Bay Area art.
Until the end of the 1930s, Still painted expressionistic representational work. In San Francisco, he evolved his unique form of abstraction, which had from the start a confrontational tone. Unlike most of his abstract expressionist colleagues, he had no use for surrealism or the techniques of automatic drawing, nor for the elegance of cubist space. During the immediate post–World War II period, he began to frequent New York, where he lived through most of the 1950s. Although Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons showed his work, the ornery artist became increasingly disenchanted. In 1961, he moved his studio permanently to a farm in Maryland and more or less stopped exhibiting his work, except when honored—which was rarely—by museum retrospectives. Giving himself over to romantic alienation and visionary ambitions (which some thought pretentious), his paintings took on even larger dimensions, reverberating with the wide-open spaces of his early years and suggesting natural forces at their most melodramatic. At his death, his estate held the vast majority of Still’s hundreds of paintings, as well as works on paper. His will specified that the entire inventory should go to a city that would build a museum to honor his legacy. Eventually, Denver agreed. The Clyfford Still Museum opened in 2011. See also ; .
Known for brightly painted, exuberant, even playful sculptures, George Sugarman found a path distinct from—and yet not unrelated to—prevailing minimalism and pop art. Like the minimalists, he had little use for sculpture that promotes symbolic interpretation or sits on a pedestal. Like pop artists, he challenged the serious demeanor of abstract expressionism with an insouciant tone suggesting the vitality of contemporary urban experience. His interest in color and in the interaction of mass and space reveal an admiration for the work of Alexander Calder and suggest he had an eye on John Chamberlain’s recent accomplishments. The magisterial late Henri Matisse cutouts also informed his sensibility. Working with wood during the 1960s, Sugarman often innovatively dismantled component parts to spread them across the floor in a sequence of related shapes, each usually painted in a different bright color. At least partially because of his interest in creating works for outdoor, public spaces, in the 1970s he adopted metal as his primary medium. Generally he cut shapes—often intricately elaborated—from flat aluminum sheets. These usually fit together in a single unit, their brightly painted surfaces creating eye-catching effects as the viewer looks through interstices or circles around the work. Born in New York, Sugarman graduated from City College and served in the U.S. Navy for four years before his education as an artist began in earnest. In 1951, nearing 40, he went to Paris, where he studied for less than a year with Ossip Zadkine. There he met other American artists, most importantly Al Held, who remained a close friend, but also traveled in Europe, finding particular appeal in the baroque architecture and sculpture that provided antecedents to his sense of three-dimensional form. In 1959, four years after his return to New York, he began to assemble the signature painted shapes constructed from laminated wood. The colorful, quirky individualism of Sugarman’s work resonates in Frank Stella’s 1970s sculptures, in the work of pattern and decoration artists, in Judy Pfaff’s airy constructions, and in many later installations. Sugarman also created paintings, prints, and collages.
A term describing highly realistic art, particularly of the late 1960s and 1970s, it has sometimes been used interchangeably with photorealism. However, its more general purview takes in other aspects of an impulse to reckon with the world in a more or less deadpan form of exact representation. Pop art’s embrace of the commonplace and banal formed the backdrop of superrealism, which flourished particularly in the United States and Great Britain. British American painter Malcolm Morley named the tendency in 1965. Major American practitioners include Alfred Leslie and Philip Pearlstein, as well as Jack Beal (1931–2013), Gabriel Laderman (1929–2011), and others whose gimlet-eyed analysis of visual reality did not depend on photographs.
The superrealist impulse also attracted sculptors. The most accomplished, Duane Hanson (1925–96), created eerily lifelike representations of ordinary American types, such as tourists, shoppers, hard-hat workers, and diners, generally absorbed in unremarkable activities. Not a few museumgoers have been initially fooled by his guards or other unobtrusive figures. The impact of Hanson’s work, however, transcends social observation and attention to detail, for he captured something of the inner life of his subjects, giving them an affecting psychological presence. Born in Minnesota, in 1946 he graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul and, in 1951, earned an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit. His distinctive approach emerged in the mid-1960s, when he began painting and accessorizing figures cast in fiberglass and vinyl. Until around 1970, he generally grouped these in tableaux accentuating themes of violence and social conflict. Subsequently, he concentrated on single figures engaged in everyday pursuits, capturing an inherent poetry in the mundane. Denver artist John De Andrea (1941–), who earned a BFA at the University of Colorado in Boulder, also produces intensely realistic, individualized figures. However, he specializes in nude female subjects, whose physical allure offers sensational effects at some remove from Hanson’s. In a more recent variant of superrealism, Ron Mueck (1958–) creates startlingly realistic but out-of-scale figures. Sometimes miniaturized, more often gigantic, they unhinge viewers’ assumptions, but their empathy invokes a touching intimacy. An Australian native, Mueck worked there as a maker of models and puppets for film and television before continuing this profession in London. After he transitioned to sculpture in the mid-1990s, he quickly gained recognition as a fine artist and was included in the 1997 “Sensation!” exhibition of Young British Artists. Dead Dad (1996–97; London, Saatchi Gallery) depicts his father’s nude corpse lying on his back at two-thirds size, while Big Man (2000; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden) presents a bald, overweight, middle-aged, nude man huddled in a corner. The seated figure’s bulk, at roughly twice life size, seems to enlarge also his human predicament.
By 1945, surrealism as an avant-garde practice had mostly spent its force. Yet its incalculable influence on the genesis of abstract expressionism had just begun to bear fruit. Growing out of dada’s taste for ironies and absurdities, and founded in 1924 by André Breton in Paris, the movement stimulated widespread creative activity, especially among writers and visual artists. In the wake of psychoanalytic theories set forth early in the 20th century by Sigmund Freud and others, surrealism promoted the unconscious as the source of more profound truths than those available to the rational mind. Breton defined surrealism as “purely psychic automatism through which we undertake to express . . . the actual functioning of thought, thoughts dictated apart from any control by reason, and any moral or aesthetic consideration.” The visual imagery of surrealism ranged from complete abstraction, based on automatist methods, to a pictorial approach in which recognizable—although often distorted—objects and spaces offer phantasmagoric effects, as in the paintings of Salvador Dalí. In the United States during the late 1920s and 1930s, artists drawn to its promise of liberation generally adapted illusionistic surrealism to envision fantasies or dreamlike states. Surrealism’s influence in this period extended even to fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture.
In the early 1940s, however, a profound shift took place, stimulated by the arrival in New York of a number of prominent surrealist artists fleeing World War II. Finding a ready audience among young progressive artists searching for new and more meaningful forms of expression, the Europeans championed automatism as a tool for creating completely abstract works, while also stimulating Americans’ interest in biomorphic forms that allude to, but do not represent, visual reality. Roberto Matta played a particularly important role in this process. Others included Max Ernst, Gordon Onslow Ford, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy.
In landscapes and religious works, British painter and printmaker Graham Sutherland emphasized the mystery of existence as he moved from visionary etchings of pastoral subjects in the 1920s to a surrealist-tinged style in the 1930s and, ultimately, to deeply felt interpretations of his subjects in the post–World War II era. He also numbered among distinguished portraitists of the period. Born in London, he entered art school there in 1921. He made his early reputation with richly toned, black-and-white intaglio landscape prints that owed much to the example of William Blake and, more closely, Samuel Palmer. He experimented with painting in the early 1930s but did not turn his full attention to the medium until the middle of the decade, following a sojourn in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where he was much taken with the landscape. His freely abstracted approach to this subject, colored by his awareness of surrealism and Pablo Picasso’s contemporary work, recalls also the idiosyncratic landscapes of English painter Paul Nash (1889–1946), who infused British affection for landscape with unsettling overtones. During World War II, while rendering scenes of devastation as an official war artist, Sutherland received a commission for a Crucifixion (1946; St. Matthew’s Church, Northampton). His graphic expression of Christ’s anguish harkens back to Matthias Grünewald’s early 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece. Sutherland’s landscapes of this time also took on an alienating character, filled as they are with cruel, thorny shapes. After 1947, he lived much of his time in the South of France, which fostered a somewhat less tortured but no less peculiar attitude, as he turned often to vaguely humanoid inventions composed of biomorphic forms. A second significant religious commission arrived in the early 1950s from Coventry Cathedral, then in the process of rebuilding. His design for the nave’s central feature, a monumental tapestry behind the altar, centers on an iconic Christ in Glory (installed 1962), now a man of peace who has transcended suffering. During the postwar period, he also produced distinguished portraits of well-known figures, Somerset Maugham (1949; London, Tate) being perhaps the best known. In 1967, Sutherland returned to Pembrokeshire, which again provided inspiration for some of his most compelling landscapes, pulsing with emotional energy, although no longer so influential, as had been the case earlier, on the decade’s new generation of artists. In his final years, Sutherland reengaged the printmaking process, now usually in color, to concoct the most lighthearted work of his career, especially in illustrations for a bestiary.
A term describing art that reflects a predetermined, methodical ordering, systemic (or systems) art emerged as a category in the 1960s. Although most often applied with reference to minimal art, its originator, Lawrence Alloway, included also hard-edge painters in his 1966 exhibition “Systemic Painting.” Usually systemic art involves geometric forms that are repeated, arranged in a series, or arrayed in some form of progressive variation. The work of such minimalists as Carl Andre and Donald Judd exemplifies the tendency. The term also crops up in discussions of conceptual art.