Although Philip Taaffe first came to attention within the context of neo-geo, even then his primary interest lay in pictorial experience. Theoretical and political concerns never topped his agenda. Nevertheless, like other young artists of that era, he felt free to borrow from earlier works of art and to focus on results rather than media-specific purity. Although he has always employed collage and other forms of mixed media within his painting process, in the end he generally overpaints, giving the final work the appearance of painting. Since the early 1980s, he has evolved into one of the most fluent and absorbing painters of the generation that came to maturity in those years. Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Taaffe graduated from New York’s Cooper Union in 1977. Within a few years, he produced highly varied and striking abstractions boldly investigating the history of abstract painting and sometimes directly adapting the styles of such predecessors as Paul Feeley, Barnett Newman, and Myron Stout. These paintings established his continuing practice of deploying designs across flat color fields. If less obviously, the work of Henri Matisse also provided useful lessons. As Taaffe’s painting progressed toward more complex compositions and lusher color in the late 1980s, he moved closer to pattern and decoration work. Widely traveled over the years, he has enriched his work with adaptations of natural forms such as plants and corals, as well as cultural references including architectural ornament, Islamic and Indian motifs, and prehistoric glyphs.
A preeminent Mexican modernist whose influential career spanned decades, Rufino Tamayo synthesized contemporary styles and indigenous Mexican forms into a distinctly personal approach. His Zapotec origins and fondness for the pre-Columbian and folk art of his native country inculcated a deep respect for Mexican culture. At the same time, a lengthy engagement with Western modernism enriched his practice. A younger contemporary of the leading Mexican muralists, he remained aloof from their ideological nationalism, preferring instead to emphasize individual autonomy, psychological identity, and formal concerns in pursuit of universalizing intentions. Born in Oaxaca, as a teenager Tamayo studied art in Mexico City, where he also became familiar with the country’s historical accomplishments. During two years in New York in the mid-1920s, he absorbed the lessons of cubism, surrealism, and other modern approaches. With this experience, his expressionist renderings of native themes gave way to exploration of the inner life. After another period in Mexico City, in 1936 Tamayo moved to New York, where he remained (except for annual summer visits to Mexico) through the end of the 1940s. Here, his art flowered. Much of it relates directly to aspects of abstract expressionism, although he remained tethered to surrealist figuration, as seen in the examples of such artists as Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. Tamayo’s imaginative imagery, rendered in glowing, richly scumbled, and sensuous color, earned an international reputation. Later, Tamayo paid extended visits to Paris, but he resided permanently to Mexico from 1964. Remembered also as a leading 20th-century printmaker, Tamayo occasionally painted murals and took up the practice of sculpture in his later years. See also .
In French surrealist Yves Tanguy’s characteristic paintings, unbounded, bleached-out vistas harbor crisply delineated imaginary objects. These are sometimes biomorphic, sometimes geological, but most often an unsettling, even threatening combination of the two. After military service during World War I, in 1923 a Giorgio de Chirico painting so impressed him that he determined to become an artist despite lack of formal training. In 1925, Tanguy met André Breton and signed on to his surrealist movement. During the next few years, his art proved influential on the development of younger visionary painters, including Roberto Matta, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Wolfgang Paalen. Breton himself came to regard Tanguy as the consummate, uncompromised surrealist after Tanguy developed his singular approach in the late 1920s. When American surrealist Kay Sage returned to the United States at the outbreak of World War II, Tanguy followed. They married in 1940. Tanguy soon numbered among the large contingent of European artists who took refuge in New York. The first among his fellow surrealists to arrive, like others among them he provided a model for nascent abstract expressionists. In the early 1940s, Tanguy and Sage moved permanently to rural Woodbury, Connecticut. There, in relative isolation—excepting his partnership with Sage—he achieved larger, more concentrated, somewhat more colorful, yet also more anguished work than previously. See also .
A versatile American artist, Dorothea Tanning made her reputation as a mainstream surrealist but later ventured into new forms of expression. Similarly, she worked in numerous media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, collage, and theatrical design. Particularly later in life, she also wrote poetry, fiction, and autobiography. During a long career, while maintaining her lifelong goal of suggesting “that there is more than meets the eye,” she adapted to changing times by reinventing her means. A small-town Illinois native, she lived in Chicago before heading to New York in 1935. There she soon encountered surrealist art and began to develop her own variant. Before long, she also made the acquaintance of émigré surrealists, among whom Max Ernst became her romantic partner around the time she completed one of her best-known paintings, Birthday (1942; Philadelphia Museum of Art)—a bare-breasted self-portrait, standing in an unsettling interior, furry winged creature at her feet. During this decade and into the 1950s, she continued to work with enigmatic imagery painted in a clear, crisp style. As orthodox surrealism began to seem dated, in the mid-1950s she switched to more abstract works that characteristically feature biomorphic—or sometimes outright human—forms drifting in ambiguous spaces. Between 1969 and 1973, Tanning turned out a startling series of soft sculptures that reflect interests of burgeoning feminist art in women’s bodies and psyches. Some appeared in installations that were more or less unprecedented at that time. After their marriage in 1946, Tanning and Ernst lived in the Arizona desert and then in France, but following his death in 1976, she relocated to New York. After the mid-1980s, she focused much of her creativity on writing, publishing two memoirs, a novel, and, until her final days, poetry that appeared in prestigious journals.
A Catalan from Barcelona, Antoni Tàpies ranks as Spain’s most important post–World War II abstract painter. Reflecting the interests in free or informal abstraction seen also among the artists of abstract expressionism and art autre, Tàpies developed a personal approach that emphasized materiality. Often heavy with paint, but also scraped, scarred, and scratched, his surfaces carry with them intimations of existential disquiet and defiance of conventional good taste. Subdued in color, these impenetrable, tactile works offer a sober and meditative grandeur. By emphasizing the relation of his art to people’s everyday experience, he intended them also to offer an oblique protest against the political and cultural repression of the Spanish government. At the same time—and somewhat paradoxically—the materiality of his work reflects an understanding of matter as the essence of being, and therefore spiritually potent.
In the mid-1940s, inspired particularly by surrealism and the work of Paul Klee, Tàpies abandoned the study of law to concentrate solely on his art. He remained largely self-taught. As he pursued forms of abstracted symbolism, in 1948 he numbered among a like-minded group of young artists and writers who founded Dau al Set (also the name of their publication) to explore new forms and new psychologies of art. While living in Paris (to which he later often returned) in the early 1950s, Michel Tapié offered encouragement, and by the end of the decade, Tàpies had begun to achieve recognition for his personal vision. Later, responding to currents associated with pop art, in the 1970s Tàpies sometimes embellished his surfaces with ordinary objects. Subsequently, he also incorporated spray-painting and, reflecting a long-standing interest in aspects of Zen Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, elements of Asian calligraphy. An occasional sculptor, Tàpies completed an extensive body of graphic work as well. See also ; ; .
A groundbreaking fiber artist, Lenore Tawney merged her training in sculpture and weaving to create completely unprecedented works of three-dimensional art, challenging the notion that craft materials could not contribute to the artistic dialogue of the moment. Often, she incorporated found objects, such as feathers or shells, into her works, which ranged from miniaturistic to monumental. Many are designed to hang freely in space. She found in her labor-intensive work a form of meditation, congruent with a mystically tinged desire to invoke the unity of all things. Born in Lorain, Ohio, she trained primarily in Chicago at the Institute of Design, principally with Alexander Archipenko, but also with László Moholy-Nagy and the Chicago-born abstract expressionist painter Emerson Woelffer (1914–2003), later a leader of Los Angeles modernism. After beginning to learn weaving there, she studied briefly with Finnish tapestry artist Martta Taipale (1893–1966) at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. In 1957, already middle aged, she moved to the lower New York neighborhood of Coenties Slip, where she associated with Agnes Martin, soon a close friend, as well as Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and others interested in moving beyond prevailing abstract expressionist conventions. Her signature approach quickly coalesced. From the 1960s, she also made collages and assemblages—some constructed on postcards—and in the 1990s produced tiny but evocative web-like aggregations encased in plexiglass. Like the weavings, these respond to wide-ranging sources that reflect extensive travel abroad, particularly in Latin America and Asia.
As California’s best-known pop artist, in the 1960s Wayne Thiebaud offered an ingratiating mix of wit, zest, and hedonism, a combination that differentiated his work from New York pop’s sleeker and more ironic tone. His notable arrays of lusciously painted, mass-produced food—cakes, pies, pastries, ice cream cones, hot dogs, and other commercially prepared delectables, presented with a wink and a nod to their unwholesome qualities—reflected America’s mid-20th-century affection for high-calorie abundance. By the 1970s, landscape had edged out the pop elements in his paintings and prints. He has also produced many portraits and figure groups. Whatever his subject, Thiebaud’s long career reflects preoccupations with effects of light, interactions among colors, compositional strategies, and sensuous brushwork. He has remained indebted to Old Master traditions, as well as such modern exemplars as Richard Diebenkorn and Giorgio Morandi.
Born in Mesa, Arizona, Thiebaud grew up in Southern California. After working as a commercial artist and serving in the military during World War II, he graduated from Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento) in 1951 and earned a master’s degree there the following year. In the 1950s, he briefly flirted with abstract expressionism, but his attachment to commonplace subjects soon won out. In 1960, he launched an influential teaching career of three decades at the University of California, Davis, participating in the formation of a powerhouse art department that included Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, and William T. Wiley. The vertiginous hills of San Francisco dominated his early landscape views, but in more recent years he has conceived equally dramatic and colorful interpretations of the seemingly featureless California Delta, where he continues to make his home in Sacramento.
Also a painter but known particularly for masterful prints, African American Dox Thrash left his Georgia birthplace as a teenager to support himself with varied jobs in the North and to glean what scraps of art education he could. After fighting in the U.S. Army for the final year of World War I, in 1920 he entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for three years. In the mid-1920s, he settled permanently in Philadelphia, where he soon began to specialize in printmaking. He served as head of the city’s federal WPA graphics project from the mid-1930s until 1942. His subjects give dignified voice to African Americans’ personal and social lives in rural, urban, and domestic settings. Powerful images of African American workers suggest their heroic perseverance and forbearance, as well as physical strength. See also .
Allied with nouveau réalisme but very much an independent spirit, Swiss-born Jean Tinguely created a high-spirited form of kinetic art. Cobbled together from industrial discards and scrap metal and unable to function efficiently, his junk sculptures satirize modern technology. As they move, they shake, shudder, and wheeze. Presented to an audience in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, his most famous work, the 23' × 27' Homage to New York (1960) overlapped in spirit with happenings of the day. Intended to self-destruct, it failed to fall apart completely before the fire department intervened to bring the performance to an end, perhaps only amplifying the artist’s dadaist objectives. (A surviving piece of the construction remains in the museum’s collection.) A native of Fribourg, Tinguely grew up in Basel, where he trained as an artist. In 1952, he settled in Paris, where he soon exhibited the first of his characteristic works good-humoredly pointing to the enigmatic and purposeless aspects of existence. His marriage in 1971 to Niki de Saint Phalle ratified a frequent artistic collaboration of some years’ standing.
American painter Mark Tobey pioneered a distinctive form of abstraction in the early 1940s. These paintings, characterized by his unique “white writing,” made his reputation and remain his best known, although he often deviated from this mode—indicating a congenital independence of mind. Born and reared in the Midwest, later for many years a Seattle resident and an inveterate traveler, Tobey achieved his signature synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions in art and philosophy only in his fifties. Partially inspired by his interest in Zen Buddhism, this work anticipates aspects of abstract expressionism—notably in its all-over composition, fluent brushwork, and serious ambitions—but in general remains smaller in scale, more delicate, and less emotionally aggressive.
Except for Saturday classes as a teenager at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tobey never pursued formal art instruction. As a young man, he worked in Chicago and New York as a fashion illustrator, portraitist, and interior designer while also experimenting with modern styles. In 1918, he converted to the Bahá’í faith, which shifted his art toward spiritual concerns. In 1922, Seattle became his home base, although after 1925 he traveled extensively and lived abroad for periods of varying duration, including in the 1920s two years in Paris and several years in England during the following decade. Tobey’s first visit to Asia, in 1934–35, marked a decisive moment. Deepening his familiarity with Chinese and Japanese art, he embarked on the gradual evolution toward the totally non-representational paintings of a few years later. His thinking was reinforced in the late 1930s by a friendship in Seattle with John Cage, whose ideas about chance, egoless expression, and philosophical engagement caught his attention. At the same time, Tobey’s study of music affected his awareness of time and space. Gradually, calligraphic markings, most often white, moved from representational overlay into principal design elements.
Although recognized—even lionized in New York, and more so in Europe—Tobey’s continuing presence in the Seattle area helped to crystalize like-minded nature-based expressionists into a loosely identified Northwest School. In 1960, Tobey moved permanently to Basel, where he continued longtime investigations into a humanistically oriented form of visual expression. See also .
An American abstract expressionist, Tomlin invented a refined, even elegant personal idiom. His characteristic abstract paintings feature calligraphic marks, delicate color harmonies, and more lyrical expression than was common among his colleagues. Although his earlier work similarly reflects a thoughtful and sophisticated understanding of modern art, his most original work was truncated by a relatively early death.
Tomlin graduated from Syracuse University, in the city where he was born, and studied art in Paris. Before he could afford to paint full time in the 1940s, he worked as a commercial illustrator and teacher. During these years, however, he absorbed the lessons of cubism and, from the mid-1930s, adapted surrealist elements as well. These came together in such accomplished works as Still Life (Inward Preoccupation) (1939; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art), which incorporates vestiges of representation into an arrangement of planar forms rendered in resonant hues. In the mid-1940s, he gravitated into the circle of nascent abstract expressionists, and by 1947 he had devised a singular mode of abstraction. Although not present in all paintings, often white lines or bands inflect veils of color, producing a sense of movement across the surface. Of generally modest size and less marked by the belligerence and angst of some abstract expressionist work, Tomlin’s paintings often bring to mind the painterly and poetic qualities seen in contemporary works by Mark Tobey and Philip Guston. See also .
American painter and printmaker George Tooker’s themes of loneliness, alienation, and despair captured with particular urgency the existential psychology of the post–World War II era. Unease in the midst of plenty, the rise of the bureaucratic state, and dread in the face of modernity fueled his imagination. In his most widely recognized painting, The Subway (1950; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art), anxious, middle-class pedestrians move through a subterranean space as though expecting doom. However, over the course of his career, Tooker also explored other less pointedly pessimistic—though equally enigmatic—themes, including grief and joy, homosexual love, and spiritual enlightenment. A New York native, in 1942 Tooker graduated from Harvard with a degree in literature. While subsequently studying art in New York, he became acquainted with Paul Cadmus and Jared French (1905–1988), who remained lifelong friends. They sparked his interest in the painstaking early Renaissance technique of tempera painting, which Tooker adopted as his own. In addition, the solemn, symbolic tone of that period’s religious painting, as seen in works by Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, affected Tooker’s formulation of characteristically generalized and often static figuration. The softly smoothed and immobilized forms effect a universal, even mythic aura. Tooker’s commitment to social justice—he supported Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and marched with him in Alabama—also found reflection in his art. In 1960, he moved to Vermont, but he continued to spend considerable time in New York while also soon wintering in Spain. After Tooker converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1970s, he became increasingly dedicated to religious concerns. Some paintings overtly engage Christian themes, but more often they suggest the presence of the spiritual in the midst of daily life.
An important modernist conduit from Europe to Latin America, Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García also was active as a writer, theorist, and teacher. Drawn to toy making to make ends meet early in his career, he found the process to his liking and continued to design toys for many years. This practice illustrates but one aspect of his belief in the unity of the visual arts, crafts, and architecture, a point of view he enthusiastically promoted in his native land.
Born in Montevideo, he moved as a teenager to Spain, where he trained in Barcelona. Remaining there until 1920, he played an active role in the art life of that city, along with Pablo Picasso and other progressive young artists. (He also worked for a time as a designer for architect Antoni Gaudí.) During the subsequent two years in New York, he befriended Marcel Duchamp and leading American artists. Returning to Europe, he lived at first in Italy and the South of France. From 1926, he spent most of his time in Paris, where he met Piet Mondrian and constructivist artists, but he eventually came to believe that purely abstract art could not convey timeless values. During these years, he produced a series of painted wood relief constructions, an experience that later informed some striking architectonic paintings that suggest the illusion of reliefs. Also becoming interested in “primitive” art forms, by 1929 he had formulated a hybrid approach (which he called constructive universalism), fusing irregularly gridded abstract design with pictographs or allusive signs, often derived from pre-Columbian sources. Many of these paintings prefigure similar tendencies in early abstract expressionism. After moving permanently to Montevideo in 1934, Torres-García’s work, teaching, and writing proved instrumental to the development of Latin American modernisms. He encouraged artists not to renounce their New World heritage but rather to meld it with recent international currents in order to create a distinctive South American art. See also ; ; .
The prestigious and heavily publicized Turner Prize for British achievement in the visual arts has often ignited controversy among professional critics and the public alike. Its spotlight on younger British artists who practice new forms of expression ensures that established, traditional forms of art will not be represented. Named for 19th-century British landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, the prize is administered by the Tate in London, with financing from outside sponsors. Candidates are selected by a committee of experts, and in early December of each year the winner is announced with much fanfare at a televised ceremony.
Instituted in 1984, the prize originally went to the person judged to have made “the greatest contribution to art in Britain in the previous twelve months.” In 1991, the prize adopted a more stringent format. Artists, who must be under 50 years of age, are now specifically recognized for an outstanding presentation of work during the previous year. The short-listed candidates are limited to four, and each presents a substantial representation of recent work in an autumn exhibition in advance of the awards ceremony. Until 2007, this show always appeared at Tate Britain, but more recently it has occasionally been staged at other venues. Following the initial award to Malcolm Morley in 1984, the chronological roster of prizewinners has included Howard Hodgkin, Gilbert & George, Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, sculptor Grenville Davey (1961–), Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Douglas Gordon, Gillian Wearing, Chris Ofili, filmmaker Steve McQueen (1969–), German-born photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–), installation artist and musician Martin Creed (1968–), ceramist Grayson Perry (1960–), video and installation artist Jeremy Deller (1966–), conceptual installation artist Simon Starling (1967–), German-born abstract painter Tomma Abts (1967–), multimedia artist Mark Wallinger (1959–), and Assemble, an architectural and design collaborative.
At once of his moment and outside it, in his work American painter and sculptor Cy Twombly acknowledged abstract expressionism, minimalism, and the innovative work of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. At the same time, he remained largely aloof, living in Italy from the late 1950s and almost never speaking about his work. Almost uniquely among artists of his generation, he sustained an intense engagement with literary and mythic themes. His characteristic paintings feature large fields of pale, sometimes monochrome hue broken by poetic markings and scratchings that mediate between abstraction and representation as they evoke intimate acquaintance with the grand themes of human experience. Matters of memory, nostalgia, regret, and transcendence appear frequently.
Born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. in Lexington, Virginia, he studied there and in Boston before enrolling at New York’s Art Students League in 1950. He also studied at Black Mountain College, where Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell numbered among his teachers. In 1952–53, traveling with Rauschenberg in Italy, Spain, and Morocco, he became enamored of the classical past and its Mediterranean aftermath. Following subsequent military service in 1953–54, he lived in Virginia and New York while working out his elegant, idiosyncratic approach that soon included texts, along with scribbled pictorial allusions. In the late 1970s, he returned to sculptural endeavors that had briefly interested him much earlier. Most of these works assemble found materials into abstract compositions painted white. From 1993, he divided his time between Lexington and Italy. He died in Rome. See also ; .
American abstract expressionist Jack Tworkov worked in a more deliberate and controlled manner than most of his colleagues in the movement. His freest works, dating to the 1950s, feature clusters of rapidly moving, almost vertical linear elements. About 1960, he adopted a more structured method. Strong horizontals and verticals restrain active brushwork. Around the middle of the decade, he moved toward increasingly minimalist interests. From the 1970s, his paintings usually offered patterned areas contained within a visible grid. Color in these works also became restrained and subtle. Equally interested as a young man in writing, he remained an articulate commentator on art.
Born in Poland, Tworkov arrived in New York as a young teenager in 1913. Hoping to become a writer, he studied at Columbia for three years but then decided to make a career as an artist. He studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, as well as in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where he regularly summered for the rest of his life. His important teachers included the widely respected figurative painter Charles Hawthorne; Guy Pène du Bois (1884–1958), who painted portraits and genre scenes in a style simplified by modernism; and Boardman Robinson. Friends Willem de Kooning, Lee Gatch, and Karl Knaths also aided his development as an artist. During the 1930s, Tworkov worked in the prevailing social realist mode for a federal art project. By the mid-1940s, he was experimenting with abstraction, but his mature style coalesced only after he had turned 50, most decisively during a teaching stint at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1952. From 1963 until 1969, he led Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, extending Josef Albers’s legacy in turning the school’s MFA program into an academic powerhouse. Painter Janice Biala (1903–2000) was his sister. Over the years, she moved back and forth between New York and Paris while producing gently abstracted representational works in a style sometimes reminiscent of Milton Avery’s. See also .