Known for distinctive, large-scale tableaux of black-and-white, cut-paper silhouettes, African American Kara Walker challenges romantic views of American history in barbed and discomfiting commentaries on racial stereotypes. Her caricatured, exaggeratedly Negroid characters offer a visual jolt as they enact behaviors associated with black Americans or interact with white society. Amusing but biting, her broad satire challenges preconceptions and unexamined assumptions. The erotic charge that runs throughout her work points to the exploitation of blacks, especially women, sexually as well as economically. Her imagery characteristically suggests the folkloric 19th-century South, with women in billowing skirts, kids with kinky hair, men in top hats, and trees draped in Spanish moss. She has also made films, and in 2014 she created A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the Unpaid and Overworked Artisans Who Have Refined Our Sweet Tastes from the Cane Fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the Demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, a 40-foot-tall female sphinx with African American features and a bandanna on her head. Constructed entirely with blocks of sugar (supported by a solid core), it appeared for a few months in Domino’s decommissioned Brooklyn factory. Born in Stockton, California, Walker relocated to Atlanta with her family at 13. In 1991, she graduated from the Atlanta College of Art, then earned an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 and subsequently moved to New York. See also .
To many observers, American artist Andy Warhol remains the face of pop art—literally, as well as figuratively. He not only pushed the limits of art into unstable new territory imbued with the commercial environment of everyday life but also embodied a new type of celebrity artist, instantly recognizable to millions. With his supposed indifference, his calculated media image, and a market-oriented approach to art making, he seemed to fascinate almost everybody—and still does, to judge by his gold-chip position within the art market.
Born in Pittsburgh, Warhol studied art and design there at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). After graduating in 1949, he moved to New York, where he lived at first with fellow classmate Philip Pearlstein. His imaginative and formally elegant illustrations and department store window designs achieved such a level of success that his reputation initially proved a barrier to his entry into fine art circles. Admiring the work of such artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Larry Rivers, who incorporated commonplace objects in their 1950s work, in 1960 Warhol went a step beyond by adopting subjects from commercial art. In his earliest such efforts, drawing on comic strips and advertisements, his painterly handling derived from abstract expressionism. However, he soon adopted a more subversive approach, not only mimicking the subjects of commercial art but also their mechanical production. His Brillo boxes of 1964 epitomized this aspect of his work and provoked a theoretical uproar over their status as art. The wood boxes at a glance so closely resembled their industrially produced model that many refused to accept them as art. (Decades earlier, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades had instigated controversy centering on similar concerns. Exhibiting such items as a metal bottle-drying rack and a ceramic urinal within art contexts, he had made no effort to alter their mass-produced origins. Warhol changed the game, however. Unlike Duchamp, he fabricated the items he showed as works of art.)
Meanwhile, in 1962, Warhol settled on the technique that remained the mainstay of his art practice. By silk-screening photographic images onto a canvas, he depended upon a commercial practice—not just a commercial subject. In such works as his well-known Campbell’s soup cans, he seemed to relinquish art’s expressive capacity altogether by mindlessly replicating the grocery-store display technique of using repetition to grab the shopper’s attention. Some of his most powerful silk-screen works (usually colored with paint or the printing of multiple screens in differently hued inks) comment on issues and news events, often with disturbing or even tragic overtones, as in his treatments of Jacqueline Kennedy’s visage in the immediate aftermath of the president’s assassination and Marilyn Monroe in the wake of her suicide, as well as car crashes and ghoulish electric chairs. Others interrogate the nature of celebrity itself, as in portraits of Elizabeth Taylor or Mao Zedong. (In the 1970s, initiating a series of commissioned portraits, he elided the distinction between achievement and wealth as the basis of reputation.) As Warhol’s controversial art ignited attention, he simultaneously buried his individuality under an inscrutable persona buoyed by fame, social connections, and wealth. Though with time it became apparent that he did no such thing, in 1964 he appeared to relinquish artistic autonomy by establishing the Factory as his studio. Here, he realized his vision ostensibly by directing production along assembly-line techniques. Yet what emerged was recognizably “his,” an established brand. Moreover, in spite of his pronouncement that “everybody should be a machine,” he exempted himself. The silk-screen works remained handmade, individually distinguishable in their surface variability. Fame has its downside, however. In 1968, Warhol suffered grievous gunshot wounds at the hands of a disgruntled hanger-on.
In 1963, Warhol acquired a 16 mm camera, initiating a long involvement with film. For a couple of years, he concentrated on brief “interviews” with friends, celebrities, and others. Later he produced a few relatively well-known films that introduce boredom as an esthetic strategy. In the silent Empire (1964), for example, a stationary camera records an image of the Empire State Building over an eight-hour period. The more appealing and commercially successful Chelsea Girls (1966) uses unconventional production techniques to portray aspects of underground culture. For years, the artist obsessively filmed the often banal circumstances of his life (his own image rarely appears), seeming to prefigure a practice that much later became widespread among a generation equipped with cell-phone cameras and accustomed to such distribution formats as Facebook and YouTube. How- ever, Warhol’s overall contribution to film has yet to be clearly evaluated. He left behind hundreds of rolls, many of which have rarely been seen even by specialists, in part because of their “old-fashioned” technology. (A digitization project is in the works.) In addition to making art, Warhol engaged in a variety of other pursuits. These included amassing a huge collection centering on decorative arts (though not many paintings), managing the Velvet Underground band (for a time, something of a house orchestra for the Factory and for Warhol’s multimedia events), and publishing Interview, a celebrity magazine established in 1969.
Warhol’s widely familiar prediction that “everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” seems truer now than ever, with the increasing democratization of celebrity. As for the artist himself, he got more than his share, while his impact on contemporary culture remains pervasive—perhaps nowhere more so than in the intermingling of high art with fashion and money. For better or worse, every serious artist since his day has had to reckon with Warhol’s esthetic legacy. See also ; ; ; ; .
From the late 1950s into the 1970s, Washington, D.C., was home to a substantial group of artists enamored with the abstract functions of color. Related to both the color field and hard-edge aspects of the post-painterly tendency, the group first gained a distinct public identity in 1965 when “Washington Color Painters” opened in the capital before traveling to other cities. Exhibitors included Gene Davis (1920–85), Thomas Downing (1928–85), Morris Louis, Howard Mehring (1931–78), and Kenneth Noland. Sam Gilliam (1933–), Alma Thomas (1891–1978), and Anne Truitt (1921–2004), among others, also came to be associated with the school. Despite considerable variety in their individual styles, generally they favored grand scale and brilliant hues. Acrylic paints abetted their interests in non-gestural surfaces and eye-catchingly bright and clear effects. The most important painters, good friends Louis and Noland, visited Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio in 1953. Both found inspiration in her innovative method of staining canvases with acrylic paint, but their subsequent styles evolved in different directions, with Louis heading toward color field painting and Noland in the direction of hard-edge.
Other important participants mostly adhered to the hard-edge approach. Among them, native Washingtonian Gene Davis became the most widely admired for the signature format he adopted in the late 1950s. Contrived solely from vertical bands, usually deployed across broad horizontal formats, these offer rippling color sequences. In addition to large easel paintings and murals, he also fulfilled commissions for outdoor works on an environmental scale—such as Franklin’s Footpath (1972), painted on the broad avenue leading to the Philadelphia Museum of Art—and created miniature examples of his approach. Among Noland’s students, Virginia-born Thomas Downing and native Washingtonian Howard Mehring for a time shared a studio, as they developed individual variations on Noland’s central interests. Downing’s bright-hued work generally features hard-edge geometric elements, often circles, arranged in compositions of repeating forms. His flickering effects (which Noland tried to obliterate) give some works a kinship with op art. Mehring at first created painterly, impenetrable canvases with an over-all, nearly depth-free structure. Later work focused on large shapes in simple compositions, most distinctively in a series structured around enlarged letters of the alphabet.
Besides Louis, the most important contributors to the group’s color field tendency, both African Americans, devised singular variations on the approach. Born in Georgia but a Washingtonian from 1907, Alma Thomas did not become a full-time artist until she reached nearly 70, when she retired from teaching junior high school art. Over the next decade, she made her way toward vibrant color abstractions. Although her work remained modest in scale, her sophisticated vision stood its ground against the period’s fondness for epic proportions. Many of these works benefited from lifelong involvement in representational painting, tempered with influences from modern styles. In signature works, interest shifted from the pictorial to the optical as she created overall patterns of small, loosely expressive brushstrokes. Some of the paintings that appear completely non-representational nevertheless vibrate with their origins in the visual world, most often gardens or other light-filled scenes. Sam Gilliam, a Mississippi native, grew up in Louisville, where he earned bachelor’s and (after a two-year U.S. Army tour in Japan) master’s degrees at the University of Louisville. He settled in 1962 in Washington, where he too taught in the public schools. Within a few years, he began painting on unstretched canvas using unconventional techniques of folding, blotting, and hanging the works to dry. With these methods, he achieved richly chromatic, free-form abstractions, often on a huge scale. In the late 1960s, he further elaborated his approach as he mediated between painting and sculpture in works allowing the canvas to billow and fall serendipitously, without restraint. Since then, his experimental temperament has fostered a variety of approaches, including most notably collaged and hybrid three-dimensional works incorporating unconventional non-art materials. Often, these enormous works function as site-specific installations.
The only important Washington Color School participant who worked primarily as a sculptor, Ann Truitt nevertheless made color, rather than three-dimensional form, her central preoccupation. Her signature square wood columns interact very little with surrounding space, depending rather for their effects on painted surfaces. Her practice of sanding between applications of paint layers to achieve unvarying flatness produced a purity of vision that supports an ethereal esthetic. Most of these columns “float” above the floor on recessed supports that contribute to their sense of otherworldliness. Although in some respects her work anticipates minimalist sculpture, her personal and expressive intentions contradict that movement’s reductive formalism. Her intention, she said, was to “get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form.” A Baltimore native who grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, she graduated from Bryn Mawr College and turned to art in the late 1940s. While absent from the Washington area during the 1950s, she pursued figurative and expressionist interests. In 1961, the year after she returned to Washington, the work of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt inspired her creative breakthrough. The following year, when longtime friend Noland drew Clement Greenberg’s attention to her work, he responded enthusiastically, endorsing the revolutionary nature of her achievement.
Among the first Americans to internalize fauve and then cubist principles, painter, sculptor, and printmaker Max Weber numbered among leaders of the American avant-garde before World War I. His one-person exhibition at the Newark (New Jersey) Museum in 1913 ranks as the first museum show devoted to an American modernist, while a 1930 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art was the first for an American artist at that institution. Around the end of the 1910s, however, he switched to figurative expressionism. In the post–World War II era, he specialized in Jewish subjects. Admired for their mystical fervor, they number among the era’s relatively few serious attempts to give vital expression to religious impulses. In this respect, his intention parallels those of Marc Chagall and Georges Rouault. Other paintings of this era center on musicians.
Born in Poland (then part of the Russian Empire), as a child he arrived with his family in New York. After earning a teaching degree in 1900 at the Pratt Institute, he stayed on for a year to work with his mentor, the influential artist and theorist Arthur Wesley Dow, absorbing Dow’s ideas about the abstract elements of composition. After teaching in Virginia and Minnesota, Weber left for Paris in 1905. There he became acquainted with leaders of modernism, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. He also deeply admired the eccentric Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, whose work he introduced in the United States. After returning to New York in 1909, he became closely associated with Alfred Stieglitz, who first showed his work at the 291 gallery in 1911. (Nevertheless, they soon had a falling-out.) During the 1910s, Weber painted his most adventurous works, dynamic and colorful compositions employing cubist techniques to organize fragmented glimpses of modern experience in urban America. Among the best known, Chinese Restaurant (1915; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art) incorporates passages alluding to checkerboard floor, red walls, and decorative borders. Weber’s abstract sculptures of this period rank among the earliest American examples, while tiny, primitivizing woodblock images testify to considerable originality as a printmaker.
African American artist Carrie Mae Weems has worked with numerous media, including video, but remains best known for investigating black identity and heritage through photographs made in series. These often feature a semi-autobiographical figure, an alter ego (as she puts it), a witness as much as participant. Striving for universality, “It’s not about me,” she says. “It’s always about something larger.” Born in Portland, Oregon, she studied dance in San Francisco before earning a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1981 and, two years later, an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She divided her time between San Francisco and New York for some years before relocating permanently to New York. (She also resides part-time in Syracuse, New York.) In recent years, she has used her photographs and videos to construct powerful installations. See also .
Among few endearingly funny contemporary artists, photographer, video artist, and painter William Wegman remains best known for large, technically resplendent color photographs depicting his Weimaraner dogs posed to imitate people. Often in costume, they seem self-consciously disconcerted by their predicaments, yet stoic in their willingness to submit to their master’s silliness. Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Wegman earned a BFA from Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1965 and, two years later, an MFA from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His early career embraced a certain amount of esthetic hell-raising as he experimented with video, painting, drawing (often more like doodling), and installation art, as well as aspects of conceptual art. In the early 1970s, he pushed another interest, performance art, into new territory as he began an extended collaboration with Man Ray (named for the artist), his first Weimaraner. Investigating social roles as masks of selfhood—and anticipating Cindy Sherman’s markedly different approach to the same problems—he lightheartedly cast the mournful-faced dog as his alter ego. After Man Ray died in 1981, Wegman continued in this vein with Fay Ray and, later, her offspring. After reengaging with painting in the mid-1980s, he created imaginative, whimsical, and often complex fields of images. Since the 1990s, these have frequently incorporated mounted picture postcards, generally subsuming them in new contexts that subvert their original subjects. See also .
African American James Lesesne Wells, an important educator, taught for four decades at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and also led an influential summer workshop in Harlem during the 1930s. An Atlanta native who grew up in Florida, he graduated from Teachers College of Columbia University in 1925. He became particularly well known for prints drawing on precedents in African art as well as cubism and German expressionism. As a painter, he employed boldly unnaturalistic colors in semi-abstracted compositions that often feature religious themes. In the late 1940s, he worked for a year at the cutting-edge Atelier 17, expanding his technical fluency and exploring new expressive possibilities. See also .
Like his contemporary compatriot Xu Bing, Chinese artist Wenda Gu has focused on the perplexities of language. Reacting against the Chinese use of propaganda slogans to falsify political truths, he has subverted the classical Chinese devotion to calligraphy with meaningless imaginary scripts that scramble formal characteristics of written language. Born in Shanghai, as a young man Wenda served the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution by creating simplified “big character” posters to bolster government policies. Subsequently, he attended art school in Hangzhou, where he realized that his dawning interest in creating oppositional art forms required a thorough understanding of the past. In the 1980s, he began distorting traditional ideograms so that they became unreadable. He left China in 1987 and has since resided primarily in New York. In 1993, he embarked on his best-known endeavor, the ongoing United Nations Project, which features monumental installations incorporating human hair and imprinted with unreadable languages. In this and other language-based works, his goal has been to promote internationalism by fragmenting nationally divisive linguistic forms and stressing universal human connections.
In his best-known works, depicting female nudes posed within domestic settings, American pop artist Tom Wesselmann endorsed the potential eroticism of everyday life. Reflecting the techniques of advertising posters, his vivid two-dimensional patterns, sharp contours, and bright, flatly painted colors divest women of tactile sensuousness and psychological presence. Emblems of sexual desire, as they pose lasciviously in middle-class boudoirs, they produce the unsettling suggestion that intimacy has become just another commodity. Humorous, ironic, and playful, the paintings speak to a new era of sexual liberation that opened in the 1960s. Wesselmann’s still lifes and interiors also dwell on middle-class pleasure, centering as they do on the processed food and appliances (radios, refrigerators, and the like) that characterized the good life in the post–World War II era. Sometimes, complicating the relationship between reality and artifice, he appended such objects to speak for themselves in these settings. Further stressing the role of advertising in creating desire, he also often collaged colored photographs cut from magazine pitches into his compositions.
Born in Cincinnati, Wesselmann served in the U.S. Army before he completed his degree in psychology at the University of Cincinnati in 1954. During military service, he had taken up cartooning. Pursuing this interest, he studied drawing at the local art academy before enrolling in 1956 for three years at Cooper Union. Once acquainted with recent art in New York, his interests changed. Soon he was making colorful but softly rendered paintings and collages, inflected by his attraction to the work of Henri Matisse. A continuing interest, it explicitly informed the extended Great American Nude series (begun 1961), which first brought public notice to Wesselmann’s work. During the later 1960s, his emphasis on the depersonalized erotic body intensified in close-up fragments, notably, sensuous mouths, as in a series of Smokers. Cutout paintings led around 1980 to sculptures fabricated from sheets of metal. In later years, he reworked ideas that had percolated throughout his career, often with a greater emphasis on abstraction. Wesselmann also produced numerous prints in various media.
Inventor of the Clavilux to display his abstract visual music, Thomas Wilfred pioneered the use of pure light as an artistic medium. He also innovated with time and movement as elements of visual art. During the 1950s, his Lumia compositions were appreciated within the context of abstract expressionism and other advanced abstract painting, such as Roberto Matta’s. Later, artists interested in color field painting and psychedelic effects found inspiration in his vision. Born Richard Edgar Løvstrøm in Denmark, he studied in art and music in Copenhagen, London, and Paris. From around 1905, as he experimented with colored glass, he may have been the first to seize upon the possibilities of light as an abstract medium of expression. In 1916, he arrived in New York, where he associated with a transcendental group influenced by Theosophy. Following his quest for a spiritually enhancing art form, in 1919 he completed his first Clavilux—a mechanical contraption combining mirrors, colored discs, and lights—that displayed evanescent, ethereal patterns on a translucent screen as he performed on a keyboard. After offering its first public demonstration in 1922, he continued to refine the apparatus as he gave recitals. These occurred weekly at Wilfred’s own performance space, the Art Institute of Light, through the 1930s and early 1940s. After World War II, he concentrated mostly on producing automated versions of his compositions. New York’s Museum of Modern Art maintained his work on more or less continuous display from the early 1940s until around 1980. Although his relatively few works appear only rarely today, their silent progression of otherworldly veils produces an absorbing counterpoint to the clatter of contemporary life.
An important and innovative contributor to the tendency known as art autre, painter and printmaker Wols was born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze in Berlin but moved with his family to Dresden in 1924. Mostly untrained as an artist (he studied for a short time at the Bauhaus), he took up photography but lived a relatively undirected life, residing in several locations and accepting varied employment until 1936, when he settled in Paris. There, his reputation as a photographer grew and he became widely acquainted, while also starting to paint. During World War II, interned as an enemy alien and then on the run from Vichy authorities, he first gave his full attention to drawings and watercolors. In Paris toward the end of 1945, his first exhibition of these works, rooted in surrealist automatism and the example of Paul Klee, drew the attention of many in the art community. During the few years remaining to him, he solidified his reputation with relatively small and delicately gestural paintings invigorated by scratches, stains, and richly hued coloration. Sometimes these accommodated figurative elements, but most of his paintings remained non-representational, suggesting a miniaturized form of abstract expressionism. He also produced similar prints.
A free spirit who made the most of her 105 years, Beatrice Wood consorted with some of the most notable figures of early 20th-century modernism in New York. An actor as well as an artist, she pursued numerous outlets for her creativity. In her eighties and nineties, she made her most lasting contribution as a ceramic artist. Working mostly with functional forms, such as bowls, chalices, and other vessels, she developed a technically demanding and original luster glaze that gave her pieces lavish sensuous appeal. Linked to the renewed postmodern appreciation for the decorative and for what had been considered minor arts, the highly original sensibility of her work earned widespread appreciation. She also made small, often humorous figural works. Their deliberately unsophisticated style resonated with the period’s increasing appreciation for the non-academic work of untrained artists.
Born in San Francisco and brought up mostly in New York, she studied art and acting in Paris. Two years after returning to New York in 1914, she met Marcel Duchamp, with whom she collaborated on a number of dada projects as she produced drawings, watercolors, and collages. Through Duchamp, she also established a longtime friendship with the avant-garde collector Walter Arensberg and his wife, Louise. After following the Arensbergs to Los Angeles in 1928, she soon became devoted to the spiritual philosophy of Indian teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti. In the late 1930s, she began to study ceramics, soon fusing the discipline of craft with her own uninhibited flair. In 1948, she moved about 75 miles northwest, to the bohemian enclave of Ojai, where Krishnamurti numbered among her neighbors. There, working in her studio daily until the last two years of her life, she sealed her reputation as a leading contemporary ceramist.
Known particularly for one of the finest mural commissions of the 1930s and 1940s and, after World War II, for sophisticated abstraction, painter and printmaker Hale Woodruff numbered among leading African American artists of his generation. Born in Cairo, Illinois, he grew up in Nashville and studied at the John Herron Art Institute (now the Herron School of Art and Design) in Indianapolis and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before heading to Paris in 1927. For four years, he steeped himself in the work of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and other modernists. He soon adapted their formal inventions, along with precedents in African sculpture, to an adventurous engagement with modernism. Following his return, he taught in Atlanta and accommodated his style to the needs of African American themes. In 1936, he traveled to Mexico to study mural painting with Diego Rivera and also to observe the works of other Mexican muralists. Two years later, he embarked on a six-part mural commission for Alabama’s Talladega College. These forceful, brightly hued, carefully detailed, multi-figure compositions chronicle African American history. Three especially moving scenes focus on the story of the Amistad mutiny. When Woodruff relocated to New York in 1946, he quickly resumed his engagement with experimental modernism and soon moved on to abstract expressionist work, which sometimes incorporates African or pre-Columbian symbolic motifs. By this time, encouraging African Americans to participate in the mainstream, he had come to believe that “We cannot strive for integration on the one hand and then not integrate on the other.” See also .
American painter Andrew Wyeth’s sharply focused, sepia-toned realism offers credibility to nostalgic images of a mostly vanished rural past. However, the gloomy, vaguely mysterious mood of his figure studies, nature subjects, and interior views offers little to suggest that bygone days offered emotional balm or spiritual fulfillment. Rather, if his style and technique contributed little to prevailing issues in the art of his time, his work nevertheless suggests pervasive contemporary feelings of alienation, loneliness, and impotence. His best-known work, Christina’s World (1948; New York, Museum of Modern Art) depicts a disabled woman seated in the midst of an immense field; yearning, she looks away from the viewer, her gaze and straining body directed at a weathered farmhouse in the distance. Wyeth was the son of artist N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945), among the most prominent book and magazine illustrators of the early 20th century. His birthplace, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, remained his lifelong home and, along with the area around his summer home in Maine, provided the principal subjects for his paintings. He never attended art school but worked with his father and picked up from his brother-in-law Peter Hurd (1904–84), a painter of portraits and Southwest regional scenes, the tempera technique he favored. (He also made considerable use of a dry-brushed watercolor technique.) His son, Jamie Wyeth (1946–), continues his father’s devotion to objective realism but takes it into more ironic and psychologically complex territory.