Born in a village not far from Warsaw, Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz first made her reputation as a fiber artist. After World War II, seeking better opportunities under Soviet domination, the family moved to the Gdansk area, where Abakanowicz began her training as an artist. Upon returning permanently to Warsaw in 1950, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. Subsequently, she produced large-scale biomorphic gouaches and watercolors before absorbing a more disciplined, geometric approach. Along with paintings, her first exhibition, in 1960, included weavings that soon led to international recognition as she began to work on a monumental scale with coarse fibers. During the 1970s, she transitioned to sculpture, at first by soaking in a stiffening resin three-dimensional sackcloth forms she sewed together. Soon, the human figure became her primary concern, as she developed her characteristic approach. Generally, her works comprise ensembles of only slightly differing figures. Typically, their interiors are hollowed out, as if excavated, and they often lack heads, suggesting anonymous but poignant beings constrained by their social identity. Incomplete and disfigured, shells of humanity, they resonate with the 20th century’s history of violence, warfare, and suffering, as well as its psychological disquiet. Yet, the artist has explained, they also speak to dignity and courage. By the 1980s, she had begun to use more durable materials, such as wood or, more often, the cast metals that allow her to site works outdoors, in public spaces.
More nearly a sensibility than a style, abstract expressionism retrospectively describes work that first emerged in New York during the 1940s and 1950s among a loosely interconnected cohort of American artists. Although it encompasses a range of formal approaches, abstract expressionist work generally features grand scale, non-geometric abstract form, and emphatically individual voices. As well, reflecting their shared desire directly to respond to inner promptings, abstract expressionists emphasized process over intellection, characteristically leaving on their canvases evidence of the physical act of painting. In its radical dependence on the self and disdain for received ideas, it suited the postwar mood of existential doubt and alienation. Its adherents nevertheless harbored idealistic, even heroic ambitions. The question of content preoccupied these artists, despite rejection of descriptive illusionism. Perhaps Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko put the matter most poignantly in a 1943 statement calling for a “timeless and tragic” art.
Besides its leading lights Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, principal abstract expressionists include William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, and Rothko. In addition, certain sculptors also participated in abstract expressionist practices. They include Herbert Ferber, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, Reuben Nakian, Theodore Roszak, and David Smith. The term “New York School” is sometimes used as an alternative to “abstract expressionism.” However, this more properly denotes a larger phenomenon, of which abstract expressionism signaled the opening gambit.
The movement’s origins were complex. Its originators, born (except for Hofmann, who was older) during the first two decades of the 20th century, came of age during the socially conscious 1930s, a period dominated by forms of representational art that drew attention to American life. This experience predisposed them to believe in art’s seriousness of purpose, as well as to visualize the feasibility of an art rooted in American experience. On the other hand, it was possible during the same period in New York to see important examples of European and American modernism at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (forerunner of the Guggenheim Museum), Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place gallery, exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists, and New York University’s Gallery (later, Museum) of Living Art—which displayed the collection of painter and critic A. E. Gallatin (1881–1952)—as well as, from time to time, other venues. Younger artists thus became familiar with the traditions of cubism, constructivism, and De Stijl, and with Wassily Kandinsky’s non-geometric abstraction. But surrealism, with its interests in the unconscious, automatism, and biomorphism, provided the most potent catalyst. Opening at the Museum of Modern Art in late 1936, a major survey, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” drew attention to forms of art that had until then remained relatively uncongenial to American artists. During World War II, surrealists themselves fled Paris for New York, propelling a transformative moment. Besides their leader, André Breton, other émigré surrealists included Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Stanley William Hayter, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, and, most importantly, Roberto Matta. Nearly all the originators of abstract expressionism experimented with surrealist techniques. More as a theorist and writer than as an artist, the eccentric painter John Graham—who traveled often between New York and Paris—also informed young Americans about the latest developments. In particular, he facilitated discussions about subconscious impulses, about the virtue of “primitive” art from tribal or archaic societies, and about the role of self-expression in art. Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung’s theories concerning myth and the collective unconscious also began to circulate. Under these circumstances, when American and even the European art with which they were familiar began to seem inadequate, young Americans devoted much thought to what they should paint. Along with their immersion in surrealist methods, they turned to generalized signs or symbols to convey profound human content. Often, they found inspiration in “primitive” precedents, which they believed to express fundamental human emotional or spiritual meaning.
In the early 1940s, these historical threads began to weave an original fabric in New York. Pollock stands as the first to achieve an unprecedented and powerful synthesis, in 1943. Soon, others pushed the limits of their previous work into new territory. Although the term had cropped up occasionally in previous years (especially with respect to Kandinsky’s work), in 1946 “abstract expressionism” first appeared in print with reference to the group today so identified. By about 1950, it was in wide circulation, although the artists themselves never constituted an organized group, and some even rejected the name.
In 1942, when Peggy Guggenheim opened her Art of This Century gallery, she provided an interactive forum for the emerging art. Not only was she personally acquainted with nearly all the important European artists of the day (she was married to Max Ernst), but also she put their work on permanent display. Her sympathy for new American work seemed prescient; after staging Pollock’s first one-person show in 1943, she soon also introduced other up-and-coming talents, including Gottlieb, Motherwell, Reinhardt, and Rothko.
Recognition came relatively quickly to abstract expressionism. The Museum of Modern Art bought a Pollock painting in 1944 (his first work to enter a museum), while Gorky and Motherwell appeared there in a group show in 1946. The honor of the first one-person abstract expressionist museum show went to Hofmann in 1948. (Although this event took place in Massachusetts, a catalogue provided documentation for New Yorkers who could not attend.) After Guggenheim left town in 1947, Betty Parsons (1900–1982), a practicing artist, promoted abstract expressionists in her gallery, and other commercial venues soon followed. Two formidable critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, validated abstract expressionism in print, although from very different points of view. Greenberg championed its formal purity, while Rosenberg took a more broadly philosophical view. In 1952, he also coined the term “action painting,” which gained wide currency. However, although a useful phrase to describe methods of some painters, most notably de Kooning, Kline, and Pollock, it fails to characterize the achievements of others, including Reinhardt and Rothko.
Abstract expressionism not only changed American art but also its place in the world. Unwieldy to be sure, it nevertheless constituted the first American art movement to break decisively with European taste and to achieve international stature. Within a few years, New York had ousted Paris as the most vibrant artistic center. As well, if only briefly, abstract expressionism lent painting a primacy among the arts. Its energy and emphasis on the liberated self almost immediately inspired developments in music, photography, dance, theater, and other forms of creative expression. See also ; .
In its most literal sense, African American art denotes work by Americans of African descent. In the contemporary era, the term often suggests art that carries political and/or social content related to African American experience. Since their earliest days on the North American continent in the 17th century, despite the enslaved condition of most, residents of African heritage contributed to the cultural life of what would become the United States. Although little such work survives and nearly all of it remains anonymous, many blacks became craftsmen and builders. Most worked for white owners or patrons, but they also produced for their own use decorated objects sometimes inflected by memories of African precedents. During the 19th century, blacks increasingly enriched the fine arts of painting and sculpture, as they also continued production of ceramics, furniture, and other forms of functional art. Through the early 20th century, nearly all African American artists adopted the prevailing modes of Euro-American art; if their own identities sometimes affected their expression—as it inevitably did—its manifestations generally remained oblique, coded, or at least subdued.
That changed with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, as many artists eagerly and openly embraced their black heritage as a cornerstone of their creative missions. African American culture, including music and literature, became for the first time fashionable among white audiences, and new debates arose, among both blacks and whites, about the desirability of a separate African American esthetic. The movement’s principal theorist, philosopher Alain Locke (1886–1954), urged artists to look to their African heritage but also to ground their work in Euro-American modernism. His widely influential point of view stimulated a sophisticated contemporary sensibility that also expressed racial pride. During the Harlem Renaissance era and since, some blacks have preferred to position their work within mainstream tendencies without overt reference to race, but most have consciously wrestled with the question of what it means to be an American of African descent. Their art not only reflects but also often comments on the particular nature of black experience within American culture.
During the post–World War II period, African American artists fall into three loosely defined and somewhat overlapping chronological groups. The first, born roughly around the turn of the 20th century, came of age during the Harlem Renaissance and continued as leaders into the postwar era. Although issues of racial injustice never run far from the surface in their work, they generally avoided direct confrontation, preferring instead to emphasize the dignity and value of black life. A younger cohort that matured in the 1950s and 1960s brought new concerns to their art, sometimes becoming involved in action for social and political change. A third group represents artists who have contributed since the 1970s to the pluralistic atmosphere of postmodern, post-movement, and multicultural art forms. Notably, all three groups comprise artists of considerably varying approaches, negating any suggestion that there has evolved a distinctive black esthetic or even broad agreement about the aims of African American expression. Similarly, black art has continued to evolve in dialogue with the goals of the art community at large.
Prominent artists of the first group include Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Hale Woodruff, as well as Alma Thomas, who avoided racial content, and Horace Pippin, a self-taught artist who worked outside the mainstream but whose art nevertheless speaks forcefully about African American life. Although circumstances limited her attainments as an artist and much of her work has been lost or destroyed, as a teacher, arts administrator, and community activist, sculptor Augusta Savage (1892–1962) played an instrumental role during the period in Harlem’s black community. Born in Florida, she moved to New York in 1921 to study at Cooper Union. In 1923, many in the art community protested when her application for French government support to study in Europe was turned down solely because she was black, but their arguments were to no avail. Eventually, in 1929 she was able to depart for Paris, thanks to a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation. Upon completion of two years of study there, she returned to Harlem and in 1932 opened an art workshop. When a Depression-era federal art project established the Harlem Community Art Center in 1936, she was appointed its first director. She also participated actively in other Harlem artists’ organizations and galleries. Although she took on other subjects, her art centered on sensitively modeled African American portrait busts. She produced her best-known work, Lift Every Voice and Sing (1939; destroyed)—inspired by the 1899 James Weldon Johnson poem of that title—when commissioned as the only minority artist to contribute a sculpture to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The 16-foot work depicted African American musicians in a harp-like composition. Sadly, discouraged by financial hardship, lack of further recognition, and personal difficulties, in the early 1940s she left the city for near seclusion in the Catskill Mountains near Woodstock, where, eking out a living, she was unable to devote much time to art making. Near the end of her life, she returned to New York.
Also from the first group, figurative artists who focused explicitly on African American life, often employing expressionist styles, include painters Beauford Delaney, Palmer Hayden, William Henry Johnson, Archibald Motley, and Dox Thrash, as well as sculptors Richmond Barthé, Selma Burke, and Sargent Claude Johnson. Other artists of the same generation showed relatively less interest in reporting directly on African American life. They, too, addressed racial themes but also investigated aspects of experimental modernism. Often, the mood of their art reflected a more somber, introspective point of view. Besides Lois Mailou Jones, the most accomplished African American woman artist of her generation, they include Eldzier Cortor, Norman Lewis, Hughie Lee-Smith, and James Lesesne Wells.
A younger group that matured after World War II reflected not only new concerns expressed in American art more generally but also the changing attitude of American blacks increasingly distressed by second-class citizenship. While some distanced their art from overt political and social content, most directly or obliquely responded in their work to changing circumstances. Collective action to advance their art or their racial situation became more common, and black art indeed gained a level of visibility that has since receded. Spiral, a group founded in 1963, ranks among the most important efforts of the period. Though short-lived, it set vigorous discussions in motion. Including Alston, Lewis, and Woodruff, the group assembled in Bearden’s studio “for the purpose,” as he noted, “of discussing the commitment of the Negro artist in the present struggle for civil liberties, and as a discussion group to consider common aesthetic problems.” Though laudable, these broad aims proved unsustainable. The group held an exhibition in 1964 but did not outlast the following year, as the membership splintered over vexing issues concerning the nature of black art, if indeed it should exist at all as a separate category, and the social role it should play.
In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a well-intentioned but ill-conceived blockbuster exhibition that inadvertently provoked a firestorm of protest from the black art community and its supporters. Hoping through a photographic survey to recognize the neighborhood’s cultural vitality, “Harlem on My Mind” included no organizational input from African Americans and no representation of black art. Photographs by the distinguished Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee appeared only as documents, rather than as works of creative art. Unintentionally, the show increased black solidarity in support of recognition for their achievements as artists. Figurative painter and collagist Benny Andrews (1930–2006), whose work incorporates expressionist, surrealist, and folk art elements to focus primarily on issues of contemporary and historical injustice, formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, active during the following two years in pressuring New York museums to open their doors to African American art. Though often supported by the Art Workers Coalition and other lobbying groups, the effort met with only limited success. The Chicago AfriCOBRA collective, founded the previous year (and still in existence), pursued similar ends in calling for increased respect for black art. In 1971, attempting to rectify inattention to African American art, the Whitney Museum mounted a major show, “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” but this only created another firestorm. Because no African Americans had participated in organizing the exhibition, some artists protested by withdrawing their work. Since the 1970s, painter and collage artist David Driskell (1931–) has served, more than any other advocate, through his activities as an art historian, curator, and educator, to promote recognition of past and present achievements among African American artists.
For all their devotion to the cause, nearly all African American artists nevertheless continued to focus on the esthetic quality of their work. As painter Robert Colescott put it when asked about his obligation to serve the black community, “The way that one serves is to serve art first.” Chicago-born Charles White (1918–79) did both, in serious, even sorrowful, deeply humanistic images. Trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and also a painter and muralist, he excelled as a graphic artist, producing many prints, but more importantly, meticulous drawings that place him among the finest draftsmen of 20th-century American art. Sometimes he distorted form for strong, expressive meaning. During the civil rights era of the 1960s, his drawings reached the height of their emotional power. His sympathetic responses sidestep discontent and rage to concentrate on his subjects’ inherent dignity and strength, as he inscribed their plight within a universalizing context. In the early 1940s, White was married to Elizabeth Catlett, who shared his esthetic and social values.
Certain artists of this generation—including Sam Gilliam, Martin Puryear, Richard Hunt, Raymond Saunders, and James Weeks—chose to participate in the evolution of contemporary art without much overt regard for their African American heritage. Sharing this indifference to socio-political content, painter and collage artist Al Loving (1935–2005) made his early reputation as a painter in the late 1960s with crisp geometric compositions. In the 1970s, he developed a distinctive and more expressive method of layering pieces of canvas or heavy paper into complex, large-scale fluid works. Born in Detroit, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963 and earned a master’s degree at the University of Michigan two years later.
On the other hand, such blacks as Barbara Chase-Riboud, Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, and Betye Saar more strongly voiced dissatisfaction with the plight of African Americans in post–World War II American society, as did Emma Amos (1938–). “For me,” she has stated, “a black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.” Further, she has explained that her brightly colored and joyous figural paintings intend to “dislodge, question, and tweak prejudices, rules, and notions relating to art and who makes it, poses for it, shows it, and buys it.” In homage to her heritage, she has regularly used African textiles to frame her work. At home with many media, she also has produced tapestries, prints, and public works of art, which often incorporate mosaic. An Atlanta native, she graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1958; pursued additional training in London (where she had spent a year abroad as an undergraduate); moved to New York in 1960; and, in 1966, received a master’s degree in art education from New York University. Recognition for her talent came early when she was invited to join Spiral as its youngest participant and only woman.
Vincent Smith (1929–2003) painted expressionistic representations of African Americans and their experience within glowing settings that can call to mind Georges Rouault’s jewel-like hues. A versatile artist, he also created dramatic woodcuts, faux-naif drawings that often pointedly comment on political and social situations, book illustrations, and murals. A Brooklyn native, he dropped out of high school, served in the U.S. Army, and worked at post office and railway jobs before turning full time to art in the early 1950s. Eventually, he attended art school and earned a college degree when he was 50. Widely conversant with traditional and modern European art, contemporary American precedents, African art, and the work of Mexican muralists, he synthesized these influences into a vivid approach all his own.
Although older than most of those who matured in the post–World War II period, California artist Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) was nearly 40 before he graduated from art school, and almost 50 when he embarked on his signature assembled sculptures, a form of junk art. Among his early notable achievements, a number feature charred debris from the 1965 Watts riots. Also an activist and educator, Alabama native Purifoy graduated from Alabama State Teachers College in 1943 before earning a master’s degree in social service administration at Atlanta University five years later. After relocating to Los Angeles, in 1956 he earned a BFA from the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in nearby Valencia. In 1989, he moved to Joshua Tree in the California desert, where he created more than 100 works—many resonant with black experience—for his own quirky, 10-acre sculpture park.
Artists who have matured in the postmodern era generally tend to accommodate their African American identity more comfortably within a wide range of practices, less concerned than their elders about deciding whether racial issues or esthetic imperatives should prevail. In this regard, they share in the general assumption among artists of all backgrounds in their age group that art and life are not mutually exclusive categories. Since the 1980s, when identity politics first ranked among burning issues in the critical dialogue, black artists have numbered among those who had plenty to say. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems number among the most outspoken.
Fred Wilson (1954–) has become best known for installations that reveal unspoken erasures of black life and servitude. Often staged within art museums, they foreground African American art and artifacts within the museum’s historical narrative, non-didactically revealing the impact of context on the meaning of objects. A New York native, Wilson earned a BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1976.
Also a New Yorker, Glenn Ligon (1960–) graduated in 1982 from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Besides painting, he has worked in a wide range of media, including film, photography, neon, and installation, as he grapples with his personal and social identity as an African American gay man. In his most distinctive works, paintings that repeat phrases (usually gleaned from literary sources) in overlapping layers to create dense, meditative webs, somber in tone and color, he addresses issues related to language, race, and desire.
Born in Jamaica, New York artist Nari Ward (1963–) graduated in 1991 from Hunter College and the following year earned an MFA at Brooklyn College. He makes use of found materials, the detritus of urban life, to assemble evocative sculptures and installations. Usually ambiguous in meaning, they suggest commentaries on race, immigration, poverty, citizenship, consumer culture, urban blight, and other concerns. Some of his more recent work, crafted rather than cobbled together, demonstrates a fine eye for abstract effects.
Chicago sculptor, installation artist, and performance artist Theaster Gates (1973–) spearheads a socially responsible form of transactional art in the city’s mostly black South Side. He uses art, architecture, and urban planning to build community, encourage the arts, and preserve the African American past. In this ongoing pursuit, the Dorchester Projects, he has established Archive House, a library and artifacts collection, and Listening House, which preserves old records and material related to the history of black music. For his most ambitious project to date, he has renovated a dilapidated former bank into a cultural center. In 1996, Gates graduated from Iowa State University with a major in urban planning and two years later earned a master’s degree from the University of Cape Town, where he studied fine art and religion.
Other younger African Americans who have made important contributions include Chakaia Booker (1953–), Ellen Gallagher (1965–), Maren Hassinger (1947–), Martha Jackson-Jarvis (1952–), Kerry James Marshall (1955–), and Lorna Simpson (1960–).
For Chinese multimedia artist Ai Weiwei, art involves provocation and political dissent as much as it does esthetic issues. He has leveraged his celebrity as an artist to bring international attention to China’s repression of personal freedom and sometimes paid a price for doing so. Yet, even at home, his talents as a designer have not gone unnoticed in official circles. Most notably, he collaborated with an architectural firm on the design of Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium erected for the 2008 Olympics. Son of a prominent poet, Ai Qing, he grew up in a labor camp, where his family had been exiled shortly after his birth because of his father’s “rightist” tendencies. In 1976, the family returned to Beijing, where he had been born. He studied filmmaking there before relocating in 1981 to New York, where he took classes at the Art Students League and became familiar with the work of pop and conceptual artists, as well as an important forebear, Marcel Duchamp. He also observed and photographed life on the streets. Upon returning to China in 1993, he assumed an oppositional position that has repeatedly gotten him into trouble with authorities, who have detained, harassed, and arrested him on numerous occasions. Through it all, he has continued to run his studio, travel when allowed to do so, maintain contacts throughout the world, annoy officialdom with blog and Twitter postings, and generally remain unbowed. As a versatile and prolific artist, he has particularly focused on installations, which usually incorporate sculptural components, but he has also turned his attention to video, photography, and freestanding sculpture, as well as architectural design and music. Ai’s stylistically varied art generally engages, if often only obliquely, themes related to individual freedom and to relationships of past and present. His sculptures produced from wood salvaged from houses torn down to make way for the Olympic park offer a case in point, highlighting the cost to traditional values of China’s drive to modernization and world eminence. Among his best-known and perhaps most poetically resonant works, Sunflower Seeds (2010), which appeared in the vast atrium of London’s Tate Modern, resembled a sea of ordinary sunflower seeds, a ubiquitous Chinese snack treat. However, Chinese craftsmen produced the more than 100 million tiny porcelain sculptures, painstakingly painting each individually. Playing on the relationship between art and nature, Sunflower Seeds also invokes the individuality that lies beneath apparent conformity, as well as the viability—in the face of mechanization to serve a global market—of a medium historically central to the country’s artistic reputation. Ai originally intended for visitors to walk across the work’s surface, emphasizing the strength of the supposedly delicate material and bringing the audience into a more intimate relationship with his creation. However, museum officials refused, fearing that porcelain dust stirred up by footfalls could pose a health risk. Since 2015, Ai has worked primarily in Berlin.
As an artist, best known for abstract compositions of nested squares in exquisitely calibrated hues, painter, printmaker, and designer Josef Albers also numbers among pivotal educators. His teaching affected a generation of post–World War II American artists during a period of exceptional creative experimentation. Notably, he introduced Bauhaus pedagogy to American art education, first at Black Mountain College and then at Yale University. Under his direction, both flowered into powerhouse art schools.
Born in Bottrop, in Germany’s Ruhr district, Albers developed slowly as an artist. While teaching in local public schools as a young man, he pursued training in Berlin, Essen, and Munich, and first earned his reputation as an artist with stained-glass works. In 1920, at 32, he enrolled at the Bauhaus, where until 1933 he subsequently remained as a teacher, working alongside such eminent artists as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. During this period, he continued to work with stained glass, anticipating his interests in the luminosity of color as a prominent feature of his paintings. He also pursued other endeavors, including photography, the design of furniture and typefaces, and a distinctive group of etched (sometimes sandblasted) constructivist abstractions on glass. When the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazi government, Albers accepted an invitation to head the art program at Black Mountain and moved permanently to the United States. Extending the Bauhaus approach, he focused his teaching on the principles of visual expression, such as color and design, rather than on style or theory. During this period, he also took up painting in oil, a practice that came to fruition in his extended Homage to the Square series, begun in 1950, the year after he had moved to Yale. Within a stripped-down compositional format of three or four superimposed squares, he demonstrated, as if with a scientist’s experimental precision, the range of effects that could result from adjustments to color and scale. Despite their conceptual austerity, these glow with poetic reverberations, due mainly to deftly orchestrated hues. While engaged with this series through the rest of his career, he also completed a number of public commissions for murals or architectural sculptures. After retiring from Yale, in 1963 he published Interaction of Color, a highly influential distillation of his teaching. As might be expected, Albers’s vision proved important to subsequent forms of abstraction, such as hard-edge painting, op art, and even color field painting, but his broad-minded, foundational teaching also stimulated artists of very different persuasions, including Robert Rauschenberg. See also .
His wife, Anni Albers (1899–1994), ranks among leading textile artists of the period. Born Annelise Fleischmann in Berlin, she met Albers after enrolling as a Bauhaus student in 1922. Following their marriage in 1925, she, too, taught at the school. She continued throughout her life to create pacesetting weavings, some on a monumental scale. While most display geometric patterns, she also effectively adapted the pre-Columbian motifs that she and her husband encountered during many sojourns in Mexico. Her books, On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965), engage matters of both practice and esthetics. During the 1960s, she enlarged her practice to include printmaking, which emerged as her primary pursuit after 1970.
Working outside the mainstream, Chicago painter and printmaker Ivan Le Lorraine Albright created excruciatingly detailed, hyper-realistic images of melancholy and horror. His exaggerated or distorted forms and lurid colors serve a nearly hallucinatory vision, related to aspects of expressionism and surrealism. Tense, agitated surfaces suggest instability and turmoil. Themes of death, decay, loss, and bewilderment serve as mainstays. Evocative, often lengthy poetic titles reinforce the impact of his paintings. Born near Chicago, he studied architecture for two years before serving in France during World War I as an army medical illustrator, an experience that shaped his sensibility and technique. Subsequently, he trained as an artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at art schools in Philadelphia and New York. Heavy the Oar to Him Who Is Tired, Heavy the Coat, Heavy the Sea (1929; Art Institute of Chicago) represents the signature style he honed during the 1920s. A weary, aging fisherman in waterproof work clothes poses with implements of his trade against a maritime background. Besides figural works such as this, Albright often couched his pessimistic vision in still life arrangements. Arguably the most forceful of these, the life-size That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (1941; Art Institute of Chicago) shows a forbiddingly closed door bearing a funeral wreath. A hand, presumably belonging to the “I” of the title reaches just into the picture space, emphasizing a sense of regret. During the 1960s, Albright moved permanently to Woodstock, Vermont. There he created many landscapes, as well as, in his final years, a compelling series of self-portraits, constituting a final meditation on the mysterious interface between life and death. Albright’s national reputation faded during the 1950s and 1960s, when abstraction dominated critical opinion, but in his hometown he remained a potent source for the Chicago Imagists, and later his work once again drew wider interest.
An important voice for avant-garde art, particularly from the 1950s through the 1970s, London-born Lawrence Alloway came to prominence there as a leading member of the Independent Group. Reflecting his interest in the relationship between high art and mass culture, he is generally credited with recognizing the validity of pop art and, later, junk art before most other critics did. In 1961, he relocated permanently to the United States, where he wrote perceptively about new art, organized exhibitions, and taught at colleges and universities. As a curator at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, he organized such important shows as “The Shaped Canvas” (1964) and “Systemic Painting” (1966), again popularizing terms that gained wide currency. His seminal articles appeared mainly in The Nation or Artforum. His books include Violent America: The Movies, 1946–1964 (1971), American Pop Art (1974), Topics in American Art since 1945 (1975), and Network: Art in the Complex Present (1984).
In 1954, Alloway married painter Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010), who later numbered among leading New York artists of the feminist art movement. Born in Wales, she met Alloway in London. In the 1970s, while participating actively within New York’s feminist art circles, she became known particularly for nude male portraits, delicately rendered riffs on Old Master paintings of female subjects. She also painted many less controversial portraits, as well as groupings of friends and artists.
Painter and muralist Charles Alston played a particularly important role in New York’s African American community as an educator and mentor. He taught, along with Augusta Savage, at the Harlem Community Art Center, organized other classes on his own, and served as a supervisor for a federal WPA project. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, a cousin by marriage of his lifelong friend Romare Bearden, in 1915 he moved with his family to New York. He graduated in 1929 from Columbia University and earned a master’s degree there in 1931. The first black instructor at the Art Students League, he later served as a full professor at the City College of New York. Alston’s art demonstrated considerable flexibility and variety, as he drew on traditional, modernist, and African sources. A number of mural commissions indicate the strength of his reputation, while also demonstrating his admiration for the accomplishments of the Mexican muralists, particularly Diego Rivera. In the best known, a pair for Harlem Hospital illustrating modern and traditional medicine (1936), classically organized compositions symbolize the two approaches through representation of appropriate figures and objects. Always remaining open to new approaches, the versatile Alston responded to abstract expressionism during the 1950s with sophisticated non-representational works, while the 1960s brought civil rights issues into his repertoire. He also worked from time to time as a sculptor. See also .
An organization founded in the face of public preference during the 1930s for regionalist and other American scene work, the American Abstract Artists functioned as an important nexus for artists interested in maintaining and developing an internationalist modern art. It reached the peak of its activity and influence during the 1940s as abstract expressionism came to the fore in New York, but it remains in existence today.
In January 1937, after many months of planning for a democratic, artist-run society, 22 artists adopted a charter and elected Balcomb Greene (1904–90) its first president. That spring, the organization staged its first annual exhibition, which included work by Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Byron Browne (1907–61), Burgoyne Diller, Carl Holty, Alice Trumbull Mason, Ad Reinhardt, and David Smith. At this point, most of the artists associated with the group practiced various forms of geometric abstraction, derived from cubism, constructivism, and/or Piet Mondrian’s example. Generally, the early adherents showed little interest in surrealism or expressionism. Soon, however, this began to change, as interest grew among members in a wider range of abstract approaches. Other early participants during the 1940s and 1950s included Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Fritz Glarner, Karl Knaths, Lee Krasner, Irene Rice Pereira, Jackson Pollock, Charmion von Wiegand, and Vaclav Vytlacil.
Ghanaian-born El Anatsui has generated international acclaim for monumental, curtain-like installations created from found and recycled materials. Visually rich, formally complex, and allusive, they combine aspects of painting and sculpture in their vivid coloration and three-dimensional construction. Anatsui trained as an artist in Ghana but since the mid-1970s has lived mostly in Nigeria. He drew on African motifs for early sculptural works but soon moved on to distinctive wall pieces made of wood, often gouged, painted, scorched, or combined with clay. The subsequent wall hangings generally use small metal scraps, normally detritus such as bottle caps, woven into grandiose draperies. While dazzling to the eye, their resplendence nevertheless reverberates with issues of consumer culture, the legacy of Western colonialism in Africa, and the regenerative nature of existence.
A leading minimal sculptor, American Carl Andre created some of the most reductive works associated with that movement. Particularly known for modular elements, such as prefabricated thin metal plates or ordinary bricks, temporarily arranged in simple geometric designs on the floor, early in his career he endured vituperative accusations that his work failed to qualify as art. Also a poet, he has brought to his literary work the same stripped-down sensibility, often expressed in the form of concrete poetry.
Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, he graduated in 1953 from the Phillips Academy preparatory school, where he met Frank Stella. (In the late 1950s, the two shared a New York studio.) After serving in the U.S. Army, he moved to New York in 1956. There he became acquainted with Constantin Brancusi’s work, which influenced the development of early rough-hewn wood sculptures. During a hiatus in his artistic development between 1960 and 1964, he continued to write poetry while working as a blue-collar railroad employee. On the job, he absorbed an appreciation of industrial materials, along with no-nonsense, workmanlike attitudes that he later brought to his creative life. Around 1965, his first austere floor pieces appeared. Later, he deployed somewhat more complicated arrangements of form but remained committed to a stringently uncompromising esthetic. Outdoor sculptures fashioned from unadorned natural boulders connect with his admiration for Stonehenge and other prehistoric monuments. The death of his wife, Ana Mendieta, in a 1985 fall from their New York apartment window led to a murder indictment for Andre, but he was subsequently acquitted of all charges.
A multimedia artist whose work overlaps several categories, Eleanor Antin may best be regarded as a performance artist whose work is known through video, film, and photography rather than live appearances. Much of her work also relates to feminist art themes. Between 1971 and 1973, she incorporated a whimsical tang within a conceptual art project, 100 Boots, a sequence of 51 images mailed as picture postcards to friends and members of the art community. For these, Antin photographed 50 pairs of identical rubber boots “performing” in varied situations suggesting narratives of daily life and on vacation. The boots go to the park, to the bank, to a ranch, to church. They visit a meadow, cross a busy downtown street, march single file through a eucalyptus grove. Soon, anticipating Cindy Sherman’s role-playing investigation of the self, Antin began photographing and videotaping herself in varied guises. Her notable personas include the fictional black prima ballerina Eleanora Antinova and historical personage Eleanor Nightingale, who tends the wounded at Sebastopol. Antin’s efforts since around 2000 center on elaborate, highly detailed, sharp-focus photographs—mimicking a style popular among late 19th-century history painters—depicting scenes from Greek and Roman mythology, but interpreted with witty, distinctly contemporary irony. A New York native, she graduated from City College of New York in 1958, married poet David Antin in 1961, and moved to San Diego a few years later.
Among the earliest artists to recognize the esthetic potential of neon light, Stephen Antonakos eventually took his medium into a spiritually inflected realm of pure radiance. Born in Greece near Sparta, he moved as a small child with his family to New York. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1945 until 1947, he studied commercial art and worked as an illustrator. During the 1950s, he worked with found objects to make assemblages and junk sculptures. Along with other pioneers, notably Chryssa and Dan Flavin, he realized the possibilities of neon lighting in the early 1960s. Experimenting with various arrangements of tubes, around 1967 he began relating them to architectural forms and room-sized environments. Later, he fulfilled numerous commissions for indoor and outdoor works in public spaces. From the late 1980s, he primarily used the colored neon indirectly to provide glowing auras around opaque geometric forms, creating abstract equivalents to the Byzantine icons that had caught his attention at an early age.
Any art that freely incorporates, adapts, or cannibalizes preexisting images or objects may be considered appropriation art, but the term gained currency in the late 1970s and 1980s as the practice became popular among postmodern artists. Artists who used the technique most frequently borrowed from mass media sources, such as advertising and film, in order to deconstruct meanings in social, economic, and political terms. It also appealed as a mechanism for responding to a consumer society awash in reproducible images. Appropriation has played an important role in the work of John Baldessari, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and David Salle. Appropriation’s tangled historical roots can be traced from cubism through Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau constructions to junk art and pop art. It appeals to viewers’ understanding of the essential role that context plays in meaning; as an appropriation moves from its original circumstances into a work of art, the new setting transforms its significance. See also ; ; ; .
Sculptor and graphic artist Alexander Archipenko numbered among the earliest artists to apply cubist principles to sculpture. After he resettled in the United States in 1923, he served as an important force in promoting modernist art there. The abstracted female nude provided the theme for much of his work. Born in Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, he received most of his artistic training there. After about two years in Moscow, he moved to Paris in 1908. There, in contact with the avant-garde around Pablo Picasso, including cubists and futurists, he developed a form of cubist sculpture and soon became its most enthusiastic and accomplished practitioner. His works break forms into planes, incorporate voids and concavities, and employ unusual materials, such as sheet metal. In 1914, he introduced sculpto-paintings, as he called them, relief-like works featuring sculptural elements protruding from a flat ground. In these unprecedented works, non-descriptive color enlivens compositions and clarifies the interaction of planes. Many also incorporate unconventional, non-art materials, such as mirrors, photographs, and movable parts. Archipenko rode out World War I in Nice, and by 1920, when he was honored with a retrospective at the Venice Biennale, he was frequently regarded as the period’s leading sculptor. He lived in Berlin for two years before heading to New York. After about 1920, as many Western artists reconsidered the classical tradition, some of his work turned toward an elegant naturalism, but he also elaborated creatively on innovations dating to his cubist years. In the late 1940s, he introduced ingenious plastic sculptural works lit from within. Archipenko’s continuing experimentation with non-traditional sculptural media anticipated interests of young 1960s and 1970s sculptors, as they found time-honored marble and bronze unsuitable for their expressive purposes. For many years a summer resident of the Woodstock, New York, artists’ colony, he pursued an active teaching career there in nearby New York City, in Chicago, and elsewhere. In later years, a number of large works were installed outdoors as public sculptures. He also maintained an active involvement in printmaking. See also ; ; .
An Alsatian born in territory contested by France and Germany, painter and sculptor Arp gave his name as Hans when he spoke German, but Jean in French. Following his training in Strasbourg; Weimar, Germany; and Paris, Arp contributed to successive avant-garde movements, while at the same time refining a signature style of abstract biomorphism. Following several years in Switzerland, in Munich Arp participated in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912, after coming to admire Wassily Kandinsky and his spiritually oriented theory of art. In 1915, he moved to Zurich, where he numbered among the founders of dada the following year. Shortly after the end of World War I, he continued the group’s activities with Max Ernst in Cologne. Although dada expressed a nihilistic revolt against the social order that had led to war, and the empty rhetoric that had supported it, Arp sought in the operations of chance a method of circumventing the individual ego in hopes of renewing meaning within some previously unperceived moral order. For collages of this period, he dropped rectangles of colored paper onto blank backgrounds, then pasted them where they fell. (Or so he said.) Painted wood relief sculptures consisting of layered biomorphic forms assembled by a carpenter also bypassed ego involvement (and, incidentally, prefigured the hands-off industrial manufacture of minimal sculpture decades later). In other works, he reduced his personal involvement by collaborating—most notably with his talented wife, Sophie Taeuber-Arp. In 1920, he moved to Paris, where he played important roles in the surrealist and constructivist movements. In the early 1930s, he turned for the first time to sculpture in the round, developing toward what became his best-known post–World War II achievements. Often commissioned for prominent public venues, these sleek marble or bronze organic forms pulse with the vitality of living things. During World War II, he lived in the South of France, then in Switzerland. After another period of residence in Paris, in 1959 he moved permanently to Locarno in Switzerland.
A relatively elastic term proposed by French critic, curator, and collector Michel Tapié (1909–87) to designate forms of art that reflected the European post–World War II mood of crisis, art autre (“other art”) embraced freedom, authenticity, individuality, and non-rational forms of expression. At the same time, it rejected not only tradition but also prior forms of modernism. “Today art must stupefy to be art,” he wrote. The movement embraced both abstract and figurative tendencies. The interests of abstract artists, the larger number of those Tapié had in mind, overlap with those of American abstract expressionists. Their approach also has been designated tachisme or art informel. The smaller group retained a representational foundation but subjected visual reality to distortion, exaggeration, and expressionistic manipulation of technique and media. Tapié introduced these ideas in Un Art autre (1952), usually translated as “Art of Another Kind.” An international activist on behalf of new art (he organized Paris’s first Jackson Pollock exhibit), he proposed a theoretical approach that not only supported radical abstraction and expressionism but also soon reverberated in the motivations of the Gutai and fluxus groups.
Principal contributors to art autre include Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, and Wols. However, broadly defined, art autre claimed a large number of post–World War II European artists, such as Alberto Burri and Antoni Tàpies, as well as Austrian painter and printmaker Arnulf Rainer (1929–), known for technically and emotionally unfettered semi-abstraction. Despite Tapié’s rhetorical claims, however, the art autre painters rarely equaled the abstract expressionists’ raw audacity. Consequently, their more refined work might more comfortably be compared to color field painting than to the more daring first-generation American abstract expressionism. On the other hand, these artists generally should not be regarded as imitators of the new American painting. Rather, their related interests paved the way for Europe’s embrace of American painting in the 1950s.
Among other important figures associated with the movement, in his best-known works, painter, printmaker, and draftsman Hans Hartung (1904–89) featured slashing brushstrokes bundled in abstract arrangements against generally monochrome grounds. Born in Leipzig, he studied philosophy and art history at the university there before enrolling at the art academy in Dresden. Drawn to various forms of modernism and already experimenting with free abstraction, in the mid-1920s he moved to Paris, which then remained his home except for intermittent interludes. While serving in the French Foreign Legion during World War II, he endured amputation of a leg. Once back in Paris, however, he rapidly moved toward his vigorously gestural signature style much acclaimed in the 1950s. During the 1960s, the work gained amplitude, with sonorous coloration, more ambiguous forms, and less aggressive brushwork.
Georges Mathieu (1921–2012) developed a showy form of gestural abstraction. His tangled filaments bring to mind Pollock’s works, but Mathieu’s lines compose themselves into controlled designs that rest on the painting’s surface and steer clear of its edges. They nevertheless demonstrate a spirited and often appealingly pictorial approach. Born in the northern French city of Boulogne, Mathieu moved to Paris as a young man but remained essentially self-taught as a painter. With time, he broadened the painterly markings to include patches or straight lines, but his fundamental esthetic remained unchanged. Regarding his work as an abstract continuation of traditional French themes, he often bestowed titles referring to epic events in history.
Canadian-born Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923–2002), who spent most of his career in France, ranks within the European context among those artists closest in spirit and ambition to the American abstract expressionists. In his most powerful work, large, colorful, all-over compositions demonstrate an energetic commitment to gestural painting. Born in Montreal, he first painted abstractions while studying with Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–60), leader of Les Automatistes, a surrealist-influenced group. After settling in Paris in the mid-1940s, Riopelle soon developed a signature style featuring heavily impastoed, vigorous abstractions. He emphasized materiality by using a palette knife or trowel to apply paint in bright patches or lines. Other works are looser, featuring tangled skeins of color. In the mid-1950s, he and Joan Mitchell embarked on a 25-year relationship, but they never married. In the early 1970s, he reconnected with his roots in Canada, where he subsequently resided much of the time. During the following decade, he produced an innovative sequence of paintings executed with aerosol sprays. Only an occasional sculptor, he nevertheless designed a fountain that ranks among the most dramatic of its era. La Joute (1969; Montreal, La Place Jean-Paul Riopelle) features a circular arrangement of figural and abstract bronze elements. Its watery, kinetic choreography culminates in a natural-gas-fired ring of flames at the surface level.
Pierre Soulages (1919–) made his reputation with large canvases featuring bold black markings against a light ground. Although less structural and more calligraphically conceived, these paintings inevitably call to mind those of Franz Kline; however, their styles emerged independently and contemporaneously. Born in the South of France, Soulages moved to Paris in the late 1930s but remained mostly self-taught as an artist. World War II interrupted his development; following military service, he lived in the countryside. His signature approach appeared in the late 1940s, soon after his return to Paris. From the 1950s onward, his work evolved toward patchier, flat compositions, but he remained fascinated with the uses of black paint, now in relation to color. Since the 1980s he has often employed gestural brushwork to articulate completely black surfaces. He also has worked as a printmaker, sculptor, and stained-glass window designer.
Nicolas de Staël (1914–55) followed a middle path between pure abstraction and representation. His lyrical compositions often lack identifiable subject matter, but they nevertheless invoke the rhythms and structure of landscape or, less often, figural groupings. Most of his work makes use of roughly rectangular blocks of bright, unmodulated color, often defined with sensuous impasto. De Staël’s aristocratic family abandoned his native St. Petersburg when, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they found themselves no longer welcome. Soon orphaned in Poland, he grew up with a Russian family in Brussels, where he trained as an artist in the early 1930s. After travels through Europe and Morocco, brief study with Fernand Léger in Paris, and World War II military service, he lived for about two years in Nice, where he turned to abstraction. In 1943, he settled in Paris. There he met leading artists, most importantly Georges Braque, and by the end of the decade, de Staël’s personal approach to painting had brought recognition. Depressed despite success, in the early 1950s he relocated to the French Riviera, where he committed suicide in Antibes.
Other significant participants included painter Jean Bazaine (1904–2001), known also for stained-glass window designs and mosaics; painter Roger Bissière (1886–1964), also known for stained glass, most notably the abstract windows of Metz Cathedral (1960–61); painter Maurice Estève (1904–2001), who specialized in brilliantly colored arrangements of discrete shapes; religiously inspired painter Alfred Manessier (1911–93), also known for theater design, stained-glass windows, and tapestries; Belgian-born poet and critic Henri Michaux (1899–1984), who turned to drawing as a means of expressing what was, for him, beyond words; leftist painter and ceramist Édouard Pignon (1905–93), who evolved an abstracted form of figuration and remained close to Pablo Picasso; and Moscow-born painter Serge Poliakoff (1906–69), known for bold compositions of large shapes rendered in bright colors.
An influential Italian response to the widespread 1960s impulse to recalibrate the purposes, forms, and materials of art, arte povera championed closer relationships between art and the commonplace, resistance to commonly accepted esthetic norms, respect for nature, and direct, unmediated experience. Its name, literally poor (or impoverished) art, points to the movement’s embrace of worthless materials and to its moral and political opposition to consumerist society. Identified as a tendency in 1967 by Germano Celant, it overlapped with such others as fluxus, junk art, postminimalism, process art, conceptual art, and Zero, as well as aspects of pop art and Joseph Beuys’s example. Exceptionally, however, it cherished the distinctive European provenance of its deracinated adherents and often incorporated direct or indirect historical references. Alberto Burri, Antoni Tàpies, and others identified with art autre paved the way for arte povera’s emergence within a context of late 1960s radicalism, social upheaval, and romantic anarchism. Some decades on, despite stated intentions, it is apparent that much arte povera work maintains an unstated allegiance to elegant Italian style.
Most of the art povera artists specialized in three-dimensional works, ranging from constructed sculptures to installations. Among these, the igloos produced by Mario Merz (1925–2003) remain among the most memorable. Archetypal forms, they invoke the purest idea of human dwelling. In their execution with technologically up-to-date materials, however, Merz embraced dissonance. Rubbing uneasily against the mythic connotations of his subject, glass, neon lighting, and metal rue the demise of pre-industrial values. Born in Milan, Merz grew up in Turin and landed in prison for anti-Fascist activities during World War II. His early paintings responded to art autre. After working with aggregations of commonplace objects for a few years, in 1968 he hit upon the igloo as a device for expressing his anti-capitalist orientation and respect for traditional forms of social organization. Around 1970, he began to use the Fibonacci series (in which each successive number is achieved by adding the previous two—thus 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.), a mathematical formula expressing endless growth, as an armature for works in neon and other materials. In later years, he continued to experiment widely, while also returning to painting. Sculptor Marisa Merz (1926–), his wife, also works within the arte povera context. She ranks as the only woman to exhibit with the group—and then on just a single occasion, in 1968.
Greek-born Jannis Kounellis (1936–) similarly intermingles the natural and industrial, but with a darker tone. He began his art studies in Athens and continued in Rome, where he moved permanently in 1956. Before long, he interrupted the painterliness of his canvases with stenciled letters and numbers that acknowledge the power of popular culture while also undermining its potency by emphasizing private response. Soon he began to incorporate found objects into works of art that increasingly mingled assemblage, painting, sculpture, installation, and, from time to time, elements of performance art. In the late 1960s, he introduced live plants and animals into arrangements that contrasted minimalist organization with the unruliness of nature. In one dramatic 1969 piece, he “parked” a dozen horses within a capacious, garage-like gallery space. (Recreated several times in Europe, it appeared most recently in New York in 2015.) Fire also intensified the symbolic overtones of many installations. Five decades on, he continues to toy with civilization’s discontents in works that aim to recuperate some element of wholeness from a dehumanized world.
Throughout his career, Giuseppe Penone (1947–) has produced sculptures, installations, collages, and prints examining relationships with nature. In 1968, for his earliest important work, he situated his activity in a forest, where he transformed trees and other features into works of art by interrupting their integrity with evidence of human intervention. In the early 1970s, he also contributed to body art in works that subjected his physical being to natural forces. In the 1980s, he made use of farm implements and other objects that indicate man’s interdependence with nature. With trees as his principal interest, he devised all manner of approaches to enhance their esthetic appeal while respecting their natural state. More recently, he has created effective amalgams of nature and art in life-size bronze castings of trees, which have adorned numerous public spaces.
Like Penone, but evidencing a more restrained sensibility, Giovanni Anselmo (1934–) has also based his practice largely on evocations of nature. In the late 1960s, he devised pieces that revealed its processes, such as gravity, magnetism, and organic decay. His gallery installations typically involve stone but also incorporate earth and other natural materials.
Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933–) remains best known for an extended series of works begun in 1962. In these, he explored relationships between art and its immediate environment by combining photographs of life-size figural images—or, less often, uninhabited landscape or interior settings—with reflective surfaces. The spectator who views the image cannot avoid entering it. Later in the 1960s, a notable series featuring casts of classical sculpture juxtaposed with rags drew attention to the contrast between the historical past and the degraded present, as well as between artifice and direct sensory experience. In the same years, he also created performance pieces. Subsequently, he has worked in a considerable variety of modes as a painter, sculptor, and installation artist.
Among the several arte povera artists who made use of classical statuary, sculptor, painter, photographer, and installation artist Giulio Paolini (1940–) became particularly identified with this theme, which he has supplemented with references to other historical periods. As he reproduces or dissects earlier masterpieces or art-historical texts, the heart of his project comprises a conceptual examination of the nature of Western art and its relevance to the present. More recently, he has also addressed the material basis of art making or the cultural meaning of exhibitions.
Also manifesting a conceptual orientation, with a particular interest in language and other forms of signification, the work of Alighiero Boetti (1940–94)—who sometimes signed his works Alighiero e Boetti—explored a variety of arte povera strategies but eventually became most widely known for designing embroidered maps reflecting changing geopolitical circumstances. Flags of the component individual countries characteristically determine the nations’ appearance on the maps. From the early 1970s, he delegated execution of these works to a women’s embroidery school in Kabul, Afghanistan. See also .
Among other prominent artists of the movement, Gilberto Zorio (1944–) has founded his art particularly on investigations of transformative processes, alchemical mysteries, cosmic events, and the release of energy—all metaphorically referring to artistic creativity. Installation and performance have undergirded his career. Luciano Fabro (1936–2007) became best known during the 1970s and 1980s for simulating the Italian map in an extended series of sculptural reliefs in varied, sometimes unorthodox materials. Often hung from the ceiling (and sometimes upside down), they comment elliptically on his interests in perception, illusion, and meaning. Among arte povera artists, he showed an unusual interest in working with traditional marble, sometimes in combination with other high-end decorative materials, and may have been the group’s most prolific writer and lecturer. See also .
An American sculptor and painter whose work straddled aspects of minimalism, pop art, and conceptual art, Richard Artschwager remains best known for boxy painted sculptures that “represent” furniture and for monochrome depictions of architectural interiors painted on Celotex, a rough-surfaced industrial material. However, as he also engaged other approaches, his career overall reflects varied responses to questions of perception, meaning, style, and context. Born in Washington, D.C., Artschwager moved with his family to New Mexico in 1935. His schooling interrupted by military service during World War II, he earned a BA in science and mathematics at Cornell University. Deciding to become an artist, he studied in New York with French émigré Amédée Ozenfant. Throughout most of the 1950s, he worked as a furniture maker. Early in the 1960s, he embarked upon the sculpture and paintings that signaled the emergence of his best-known work and soon earned representation at Leo Castelli’s gallery. Such peculiar works as the formica-on-wood Table with Pink Tablecloth (1964; Art Institute of Chicago) mediate between sculpture, painting, and furniture. Riffing on a pale, wood-toned Parsons table, black indicates the empty space “underneath,” while bright pink defines the tablecloth hanging diagonally across its surface. Crisp and simple forms relate to minimalism, while the commonplace subject suggests pop art, and the whole suggests a conceptual artist’s mind at work.
As a general term, assemblage pertains to works of art that have been wholly or partially cobbled together from preexisting or “found” objects. When two-dimensional, they are usually known as collages. As a practice, assemblage has enjoyed intermittent popularity since the early 20th century. In mid-century, it took on particular importance as artists sought new ways to reengage with common experience while seeking to move away from earlier forms of pure abstraction, as well as the prevailing abstract expressionism. An important 1961 exhibition, “The Art of Assemblage,” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art legitimized recent developments by revealing their historical roots.
Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Dove, Max Ernst, Anne Ryan, and Kurt Schwitters, as well as Jean Dubuffet, who coined the term, number among many whose work offered precedents. Joseph Cornell, Alfonso Ossorio, and Richard Stankiewicz contributed more immediately. The authoritative achievements of Mark di Suvero and Robert Rauschenberg drove the practice forward in the 1960s. Junk art represents an aspect of the interest in assemblage. On the West Coast, Bruce Conner and Edward Kienholz moved assemblage into potent, semi-surrealist territory, often identified as funk art. Europeans of the period who made use of assemblage include the insolent—and often humorously high-spirited—Italian avant-gardist and social critic Enrico Baj (1924–2003); Romanian-born French surrealist Victor Brauner (1903–66), also a painter; and many associated with nouveau réalisme, including Arman, César, and Daniel Spoerri. The practice has flourished into the early 21st century, with many artists using preexisting objects, especially in constructing installations.
A technique associated particularly with surrealism, automatism frees artists to create, particularly through drawing, without the control of the conscious mind. In theory, at least, the unconscious directs movement of the hand. By eliminating rational intellection from the creative process, artists felt they could tap into the psyche to reach not only personal feeling but also more profound and more deeply human expression. Because there is no predetermined imagery, chance and accident are often important to the process. In the early 1920s, André Masson led in developing and refining the technique. Most of the first-generation abstract expressionists experimented early in their careers with surrealist approaches at least inflected by automatism. Among them, Jackson Pollock in part achieved the dazzling personal style of his “drip” paintings by enlarging the scale of automatic drawing. See also .
An imprecise French term, avant-garde denotes creative, intellectual, or political efforts to pioneer an anti-traditionalist future. The concept derives from military usage, meaning the “advance guard” (or vanguard) in fighting formations. Its metaphorical usage dates into the early 19th century but is now commonly reserved for late 19th- and early 20th-century innovative, experimental, or non-conformist modern expression. In the visual arts, as in music, literature, and other pursuits, this period saw a succession of movements, each building on achievements of its predecessors. Art-historical accounts commonly interpret this sequence as one of evolutionary, future-oriented development. Recent reconsiderations of the period, however, have tended to complicate this notion, as modernism itself has come to be seen as multi-faceted. In recent decades, the term has fallen into near irrelevance with respect to contemporary art, as artists no longer share communal goals and the very notion of progress has fallen into disrepute. Moreover, the romantic artistic persona of alienation—virtually integral to the notion of an avant-garde artist—has also diminished. However, plenty of today’s new art continues to embrace the once avant-garde value of shock.
Painter Milton Avery charted an independent but highly respected course through the most advanced currents of mid-20th-century American painting. In his mature work, harmoniously hued, flat, and delicately brushed representational shapes bounded by incisive contours offer refined tranquility. Reminiscent of Henri Matisse’s simple shapes and masterful control of color, Avery’s more meditative, even melancholy paintings nevertheless sidestep imitation. Also well aware of Pablo Picasso’s linear and compositional techniques, Avery proved an important conduit for European modernism into New York. Early in their careers, several abstract expressionists—most notably Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko—learned much from his example. As later currents replaced abstract expressionism, Avery’s newly enlarged scale and stripped-down compositions resonated with the interests of color field and even minimalist artists.
Born in the upstate New York hamlet of Sand Bank (now Altmar), in 1898 Avery moved with his family to the Hartford, Connecticut, area. As a young man, he received some instruction there but remained mostly self-taught as a painter. His development proceeded slowly until the mid-1920s, when a move to New York positioned him in a more esthetically sophisticated milieu, while marriage to painter Sally Michel (1902–2003) enabled him to paint full time. (Her sideline as an illustrator kept them afloat financially.) In the late 1920s, he concentrated on scenes of city life, paralleling the work of many contemporary urban realists but already uncommonly attentive to compositional issues and color harmonies. His work of the 1930s evolved methodically toward his signature style. Subsequently, Avery limited his subjects to landscapes, portraits, and domestic scenes. He thinned his color while also reducing spatial depth and dependence on naturalistic color. By the late 1950s, many works approached abstraction as observation merged seamlessly with esthetic considerations. In the large Sea Grasses and Blue Sea (1958; New York, Museum of Modern Art), only three shapes predominate: roughed up with black spots, a dark blue “sea” cuts diagonally across a pale blue shore, while above the “horizon,” an undifferentiated strip of medium blue stands for sky. Also active from the 1930s as a printmaker, around 1950 Avery initiated a notable series of monoprints, supplementing his work in intaglio and other relief techniques. Trained by her father, his daughter, painter March Avery (1932–), offers a variation on his sensibility.