A Spanish-born painter whose best work dates from her final decade in Mexico, Remedios Varo forged a personal, mysterious approach that brought together interests in Old Master and modern art, along with occult philosophies, mysticism, religion, psychology, and her experience as a woman. Her delicately painted imaginary scenes often recall the troubling Early Netherlandish art of Hieronymus Bosch no less than contemporary surrealism, which showed her a “way of communicating the incommunicable.” Often claimed as a precursor of feminist art, she nevertheless pursued inward rather than social freedom. A Catalan native, while yet a student in Madrid, she had already absorbed surrealist interests. During the 1930s, she lived in Barcelona and in Paris, where she came to know many of the leading figures of the movement, including Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, and André Breton, an enthusiastic admirer. With the onset of World War II, she fled to Mexico City, where she connected with such émigrés as Leonora Carrington (a good friend from her Paris days) and Wolfgang Paalen. Little appreciated at first, when the Mexican muralists held sway, she made her living as a commercial artist. After beginning to paint full time in 1953, she established an international reputation.
Widely regarded as the progenitor of op art, Victor Vasarely pioneered an abstract art devoted to tantalizing the eye. Often confounding his viewers with illusions and mind-bending patterns, he worked in both black and white and in color to create lively, eye-catching effects. Born in Hungary, Vasarely studied art and design in Budapest before moving to Paris in 1930. There, until the mid-1940s, he supported himself as a graphic designer while experimenting with varied modern styles as well as steeping himself in the effects of light, color, perspective, and texture. During the late 1940s, he worked out the basics of what would become his signature style, featuring sharp-edged geometric forms, now often brightly hued, arranged to excite the eye with exuberant and sometimes unstable effects. His best-known works include large constructions that produce an intriguing flux of shapes, as projecting strips alternately conceal and reveal the painting’s surface when the viewer moves laterally. Fascination with effects of movement also underlay these and other experiments with kinetic art. In addition, he worked with architects on projects to create environments fusing structure and decoration. This was but one aspect of his effort from the late 1950s onward to democratize art. He also issued affordable prints of his work while turning away from the high-end market of unique originals.
Capitalizing on a medium new to the late 20th century, video art quickly attained legitimacy within the art community and has increasingly come into common usage. Nam June Paik seized upon its artistic possibilities as soon as the video camera became available to consumers in 1965. A medium rather than a style or point of view, video art demonstrates relatively little consistency of approach, although its very newness as a medium lends to its products a postmodern gloss. In its early days, it drew the attention of conceptually oriented performance artists, such as Bruce Nauman and William Wegman. (Andy Warhol was already using film for similar ends.) Video art also could be adapted to documentary purposes to engage social and political questions. With time, production values became more important, and many artists achieved cinematic effects. Video art also encompasses creation of new forms of visual imagery made possible by its electronic—and increasingly computer-generated—nature. Many artists include video art as one approach within a range of interests, although others have specialized.
Among leading video artists, Bill Viola (1951–) has established a reputation for ambitious, theatrical installations addressing themes of spiritual and emotional resonance. Life-size figures appearing on enormous screens enact mysterious scenes that imply symbolic overtones. Focusing on universal human experiences, he incorporates his interests in Buddhist and Sufi, as well as Christian, traditions. Several of his pieces have appeared in churches. Also a musician, he has made sound an important part of his practice. Born in New York, he graduated from Syracuse University in 1973 and has lived in California since the early 1980s. Seattle-based Gary Hill (1951–), originally from California, follows a more conceptual approach. Working also with sculpture, performance, and installation art, he deals largely with issues of perception, language, and consciousness, as well as the physical body. His works often give visual expression to the postmodern notion of the decentered self.
Exemplifying yet another approach to video art, Dara Birnbaum (1946–) transforms preexisting mass media footage into visually dynamic works that interrogate the relationship between individual consciousness and contemporary commercial culture. Born in New York, in 1969 she received a degree in architecture from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, then earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute four years later. Often her provocative works invoke themes of interest to feminist art, and she sometimes exhibited in venues associated with East Village art. Among her best-known works, Technology Transfer: Wonder Woman (1978–79) centers on the comic book and television series superheroine to unmask issues of transformation and gender representation.
In a highly distinctive approach, Tony Oursler (1957–) achieves a personal and emotionally affecting, surrealistic tone by projecting videos onto installations. Born in New York, he graduated in 1979 from the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with John Baldessari and befriended Mike Kelley. In early works, he created room-sized environments including sound and painted backdrops as well as video. In 1991, he originated his singular practice of employing small video projectors to animate—usually suggesting themes of fear and suffering—the faces of soft, stuffed dolls. More recently, he has continued in this spooky vein by projecting eyes onto suspended fiberglass spheres; each reveals the object of its gaze in a tiny reflected image, picturing, for instance, horror movies or nature films. Since 2000, he has also created outdoor projects.
Extending interests dating to his student days in such artists as Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Nauman, and the fluxus participants, Christian Marclay (1955–) has created intricate experimental works, at first focused primarily on sound and later combining this interest with video. His tour de force, The Clock (2010), presents a 24-hour montage of film clips that relate to a specific time, usually by showing a clock but sometimes picking up dialogue. These thousands of brief excerpts coordinate with the actual time at the location where The Clock is being shown. Certain sequences roughly suggest narratives, as scenes derive repeatedly from a single movie. Born in California, Marclay grew up in Switzerland. Following initial studies in Geneva, he graduated from Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1980. He lived in New York for many years but in 2007 relocated to London.
Ryan Trecartin (1981–), perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, seems to have captured the aura of the millennials’ 21st-century world: digitized, virtual-ized, personality driven, consumerist, and beholden to the Internet’s pervasive presence. His madcap videos, at once challenging and entertaining, capture the fluid and fast-paced multiple narratives of mutable selves that reject rules and long-term commitments. Much of his work suggests an on-the-fly esthetic, but the final results nevertheless reflect Trecartin’s careful attention to writing, direction, and editing. He grew up in Ohio, earned a BFA in 2004 from Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design, and has since lived a nomadic existence, moving from city to city as he embarks on new projects. Of his intentions, he has explained, “I think we’re living in a time when you can use more than just words and how they’re strung together to express an idea. Because of the way people read, share and merge information now, the way something is contained and framed is just as valuable as the content inside.” Other important contributors to video art include Americans Matthew Barney (1967–) and Mary Lucier (1944–); Canadians Stan Douglas (1960–) and Rodney Graham (1949–); Swiss Pipilotti Rist (1962–); and Britons Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, and Sam Taylor-Wood. See also .
Portuguese-born French painter Maria Elena (or Marie-Hélène) Vieira da Silva charted an independent course through post–World War II abstract art. In characteristic works, small linear and geometric forms appear layered in shifting relationships. Urban vistas, architectural interiors, or landscapes often provide armatures for evocative, shimmering visions. Drawing on Paul Cézanne’s analytical style, cubism, and later approaches to non-illusionistic art, she sought in each work “a thought form rather than a realistic form.” Following early studies in her native Lisbon, in 1928 she moved to Paris, where she worked with Roger Bissière, Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, Stanley William Hayter, and Fernand Léger, among others. In 1930, she married Hungarian abstract painter Árpád Szenes (1897–1985). Soon after the start of World War II, they decamped for Rio de Janeiro. By the time they returned permanently in 1947, she had ventured beyond her earlier abstracted landscapes and surrealistic inventions to solidify her mature style.
Inspired largely by Piet Mondrian’s paintings and Tibetan Buddhist mandalas, American painter Charmion von Wiegand specialized in scintillating geometric abstractions. Her path to artistic prominence followed an irregular course. Born in Chicago, she grew up largely in Arizona and San Francisco, then lived for three years in Berlin. After finishing high school there, she studied at Barnard College and Columbia University but did not complete a degree. In the mid-1920s, she began painting casually, mostly landscapes, but remained self-taught as an artist. Von Wiegand worked in New York as a journalist and served as a foreign correspondent in Moscow for three years. Shortly after her return in 1932, she married leftist writer and editor Joseph Freeman. She then embarked on an active career as an art critic. In 1941, some months after his arrival in New York, she interviewed Mondrian and published the first important article on his work in an American journal. Through his friendship, she came to realize the spiritual potential of abstract art, while also becoming acquainted with John Graham, Carl Holty, and other avant-gardists. After Mondrian’s death in 1944, she began painting full time and soon began to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists. (She later served a term as president.) Despite her reverence for Mondrian, she opted for a less rigorous form of abstraction, at first often biomorphic but within a few years generally geometric. Before long, she also cobbled together collages suggesting admiration for Kurt Schwitters’s eclectic source materials. An intensive study of Buddhism during the 1960s deepened her paintings’ otherworldly intensity. Brilliant colors, inventive geometry, and predominantly symmetrical compositions reverberate with iconic power, revealing a pathway to transcendental experience through sensory stimulation.
A revolutionary force in ceramic art, during the 1950s Peter Voulkos almost singlehandedly transformed his craft medium into a voice within the period’s esthetic dialogue. Stimulated by abstract expressionist painting and sculpture, he abandoned the utilitarian goals of traditional clay work to align his pieces with the movement’s liberating expressive intentions. While later continuing bold experimentation, he inspired and trained two generations of ceramists.
Born in Bozeman, Montana, he served in the military during World War II before enrolling at Montana State College (now University) in Bozeman to study painting and printmaking. A required ceramics course changed his life, although he never entirely gave up working in other media. After graduating in 1951, he spent a year at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), earning an MFA. Admiration for his pottery brought him an offer to teach during the summer of 1953 at Black Mountain College. There and during a subsequent stay in New York, he came into contact with leading artists, notably abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline. Impressed with the scale, ambition, and spontaneity of their work, he redirected his own toward similar qualities, soon achieving unprecedented results. His pieces dispensed with function to feature vigorous, rough-hewn forms in hand-thrown constructions that sometimes reached six feet in height and 150 pounds in weight. In the 1960s, he cast work in bronze, but subsequently he concentrated once again on ceramics. Over the years, he restlessly experimented with glazes and firing techniques, bringing together craftsmanship and vision in a distinctive achievement.
A charismatic teacher, he passed on his approach from 1954 to 1959 at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) and subsequently for more than 25 years at the University of California, Berkeley. His influence changed the nature and goals of ceramics instruction and production throughout the nation. His students included Robert Arneson; Stephen de Staebler (1933–2011), also a sculptor in bronze, who often alluded to human or even landscape forms in powerfully unrefined works; Ron Nagle (1939–), known particularly for colorful, small-scale riffs on cups and other vessels; Kenneth Price (1935–2012), who created bright and witty sculptural objects; and Paul Soldner (1921–2011), noted for elegant but unconventional vessels and free-form sculptures fired with the Japanese raku technique he introduced to American ceramics.
An important conduit for the transfer of European modernism to the United States, painter Vaclav Vytlacil was born in New York. After training in Chicago and New York, he taught in Minneapolis for five years before heading in 1921 to Europe, where he traveled to study the Old Masters, as well as modernists, particularly the work of Paul Cézanne. He remained abroad most of the time until the mid-1930s. In Munich, he studied with Hans Hofmann and then became his teaching assistant. Later he resided in Paris and in Italy. Following his return to New York, he participated with others in founding the American Abstract Artists and spent more than three decades as an influential teacher at the Art Students League. Throughout his mature years, he painted abstractions, but this interest remained in tension with identifiable representation. His fairly controlled style of the 1930s gave way to much looser handling, suggestive of abstract expressionism, during the 1940s. He also produced a small number of highly original constructed sculptures. His students included such important artists as Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Tony Smith, and Cy Twombly. See also ; ; .