Los Angeles muralist Judy Baca emphasizes feminist themes within an overall concern for social justice. Born in Los Angeles to Mexican American parents, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1969 and 1979, respectively, at California State University, Northridge. Influenced by the Mexican muralists, she has specialized in public murals in order to bring art to people—such as her own family and neighbors—who do not frequent galleries and museums. She hopes “to use public space to create public voice,” she says, “and consciousness about the presence of people who are often the majority of the population but may not be represented in any visual way.” About half a mile long, her best-known work, the Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976), executed with assistance from community volunteers, displays the history of California from the perspective of its minority inhabitants. See also .
The most powerful painter of post–World War II England, Francis Bacon created deeply disturbing images that excavate the 20th century’s haunted, irrational psyche. Physical distortions mirror his subjects’ inner turmoil, while the discontinuous spaces they inhabit metaphorically suggest the rationally inaccessible context of their lives. Along with such contemporaries as Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti, he extended the lessons of surrealism into expression of the existential crisis of meaning reflected in much postwar thought. With a freely handled paint technique, Bacon countered repulsive imagery with seductive colors and sensuous surfaces, setting up a tension between the two and augmenting the indeterminacy of his images. Favoring series of variations on a theme, he created numerous portraits and figure studies, but otherwise he often reinterpreted well-known works of art or images from popular culture.
Born in Dublin, Bacon grew up in Ireland and England. He received little formal education and virtually no training as an artist. Before he became a serious painter, for nearly two decades he drifted, gaining some success as an interior decorator, but also gambling, reading, and traveling a bit. In the late 1920s, a year and a half in Paris spurred an interest in art, particularly the work of Pablo Picasso. In 1929, after settling permanently in London (save for the years 1946–50, when he lived in the South of France), he tried his hand at painting, experimenting a bit with cubist and surrealist modes, but later disavowed his limited production of all work created before 1944. In that year, his triptych Three Studies for the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (London, Tate) introduced the shocking sensibility that marked his subsequent career. Against a vivid red background, three contorted beings—neither quite animal nor human—writhe in anguish, offering to the viewer an unsettling, even sacrilegious riff on Christianity’s central event. In the monumental Painting (1946; New York, Museum of Modern Art), a trapped, dark-suited man cowers beneath a black umbrella before a splayed beef carcass echoing the format of a Crucifixion; unredeemed, this symbolic modern soul is lost in terror before the unresolvable dualities of flesh and spirit. In the early 1950s, cowering animals and distorted figures, often screaming or trapped, made his international reputation. In high-impact reinterpretations of Diego Velázquez’s 1650 portrait, the seated Pope Innocent X now screeches as he faces the abyss. In late work, more ambiguous figures—deformed, fleshy, and allusive rather than representational—prevailed. Triptych (1991; New York, Museum of Modern Art), Bacon’s monumental final work—measuring six and a half feet high and nearly 15 feet wide—again employs the traditionally ecclesiastical three-panel format, and with continuing subversive intent. On each panel, a distorted, fleshy, male lower body emerges from a darkened square into a brightly lit foreground that illusionistically extends the viewer’s space. Realistic portrait heads—the one on the right an image of the artist’s own face—loom in the outer panels, further confounding meaning. Always a difficult artist, Bacon continued to repel many observers while nevertheless fascinating an international public.
The 1978 exhibition “‘Bad’ Painting” at New York’s New Museum grouped together 14 artists whose varied forms of representational painting defied conventional good taste and emphasized personal vision. The badness of “Bad” painting ironically characterizes the artists’ refutation of commonly held critical notions about serious art, not their technical deficiencies or lack of originality. Like concurrent New Image painting, “Bad” painting signaled a rejection of prevailing abstraction, particularly recent minimal and postminimal approaches, but from a more aggressive, humorous, and sometimes vulgar point of view. The participants admired comic books, commercial art, thrift-store finds, and other forms of popular culture. For precedents, “Bad” painters looked to pop art, funk art, Chicago Imagism, Red Grooms’s sculptural installations, and Philip Guston’s recent paintings. The high-spirited embrace of kitsch among some pattern and decoration artists also offered a spur to their interests.
In the end, the provocative name and the raucous sensibility of “Bad” painting proved more enduring than the endeavors of most of the show’s artists. Today, Joan Brown, Neil Jenney, and William Wegman rank as the best-known of the exhibitors. Among others, only William Copley (1919–96; also known as Cply), Charles Garabedian (1923–2016), and Judith Linhares (1940–) went on to receive much critical attention. See also .
Devoted to Old Master and early modern painting, adolescent girls, and, to a lesser extent, cats, Balthus made his mark with imagery so peculiar and sexually charged that many paintings to this day carry a transgressive jolt. Lolita comes to mind, as do the psycho-sexual nightmares of Henry Fuseli and other early Romantics. Reactions to Balthus’s art vary widely, and critical opinion has never solidified concerning his accomplishment. Some regard him as a master of psychological insight; others as a voyeuristic pedophile. Born Balthasar Klossowski (he later added an aristocratic “de Rola” after his surname) in Paris to widely connected, artistically minded parents of mainly Polish and German extraction, Balthus came to attention at an early age. At 13, he published Mitsou, a collection of 40 drawings relating the story of a beloved cat. An introduction by his mother’s lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, no doubt helped to attract a publisher, but the graphically arresting, black-and-white images speak to his preciosity. Unschooled as an artist but nevertheless encouraged by such painters as Pierre Bonnard and André Derain, as a young man he traveled to study the art of museums, particularly in Berlin and Tuscany. At his first exhibition in Paris, in 1934, he exhibited Guitar Lesson (1934; private collection), among his most powerful works. A girl, her skirt pulled above her navel, lies arched in a mannered pose across a woman’s lap. With half-closed eyes and parted lips, she appears to swoon. As she reaches tentatively toward the “teacher’s” exposed breast, the woman—whose eyes also are nearly closed—with one hand pulls the girl’s hair and, with the other, strokes the inside of her thigh. The now irrelevant guitar lies on the floor. The painting responds to surrealist interests in violating taboos to stimulate the unconscious mind, although Balthus did not participate in the group. It also reflects the artist’s nuanced assimilation of interests seen in work by Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and other recent masters. This painting, and others that followed (they include also landscapes, interiors, and several distinguished portraits), drew admiration from many important contemporaries, such as André Breton, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso. During World War II, Balthus lived in rural France and in Switzerland. Subsequently, although his work could on occasion seem contrived—melodramatic or sentimental—his reputation grew and he became widely acquainted among artists, writers, and intellectuals, while also wrapping himself in mystery. In 1961, the acclaimed novelist and French minister of culture André Malraux named him to head the venerable French Academy. He remained in Rome until 1977, when he permanently relocated to Switzerland. His later paintings continued to focus largely on teenage girls, but—partly in response to a new interest in Japanese art—his mood tended toward more enigmatic expression, and the harsh focus of his earlier work also softened. His brother, the writer and translator Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001), also worked as an artist whose work often echoes Balthus’s themes, though in a more delicate and fanciful mode.
The first African American sculptor to receive substantial critical attention, Richmond Barthé developed a dynamic expressionism suited to suggesting movement and heightened emotion. A Mississippi native, he worked at menial jobs there and in New Orleans before gaining admittance in 1924 to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Five years later, he moved to New York, where he became acquainted with leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. However, he chose to live in bohemian Greenwich Village. Besides sensitively modeled portraits and Catholic religious subjects, he most notably produced figures, such as athletes and dancers, in action. Mostly male and often nude, these Rodinesque bronzes displayed for that era a uniquely sensuous appreciation for the black body. After he moved to Jamaica, his career continued to flourish through the 1950s and 1960s as he turned to West Indian subjects. Later, he lived for some years in Europe before settling permanently in Pasadena, California, in the 1970s. See also .
A pioneer of neo-expressionism, painter and printmaker Georg Baselitz ranks among its dominant figures. Born in East Germany, he trained in East Berlin and then in West Berlin after his arrival there in 1958. Much of his early work presented raw sexual imagery that was widely regarded as morally repugnant. Soon, however, he became known for aggressive, although not necessarily nihilistic, figural and landscape imagery. In some works, such as Die Grossen Freunde (The Great Friends) (1965; Cologne, Museum Ludwig), two awkward but heroically scaled figures in a semi-abstracted space littered with references to wartime destruction evoke the need for Germany to reckon with its past and move forward in search of spiritual redemption. Later, however, some saw neo-Fascist tendencies within his work in what they read as attempts to glorify German history. From 1969, Baselitz showed his images upside down, adding a confounding element to a confrontational and now less poetically resonant approach, but also drawing attention away from subject and toward the painterly surface. In 1979, he branched into sculpture, hacking rough-hewn, distorted (but right side up) figural works.
By combining vigorously expressionist representation with radical formal simplifications, American graphic artist and sculptor Leonard Baskin sustained respect throughout the mid-20th-century period dominated by abstraction. Although he disapproved of their work, he shared with abstract expressionists a dedication to art as a serious pursuit informed by moral and ethical concerns. Inspired particularly by the German expressionists Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz, he became known for prints, especially monumentally scaled woodcuts, and book illustrations. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he grew up mostly in Brooklyn. While yet a student at Yale University, in 1942 he founded the long-lived Gehenna Press to promote the production of fine books. After World War II military service, he continued his studies in New York, Paris, and Florence. Subsequently he taught for two decades at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1974, he relocated to England for nine years before returning permanently to the Northampton area. In his prints, notable bird imagery metaphorically emblematizes the vitality and vulnerability of human experience. Typically representing life-size male figures, his often mythically themed sculptures generally evoke anguish or despair. Throughout, his art interprets life as a tragic but heroic undertaking.
The star of the East Village art scene, Jean-Michel Basquiat progressed within a few years from spray-painting designs on New York subway cars to the height of art world chic before his death at 27 from a drug overdose. Born in New York to middle-class Haitian and Puerto Rican parents, and the lone significant minority participant in his milieu, he ranked also as one of very few who attracted much interest in the 1980s. He played on his African American status to foreground the young, black, male experience in the United States, but in fact his art connects only superficially with traditions of African American art or the heritage of African tribal art. Mostly untrained as an artist (he quit school at 17), in the late 1970s he and a friend spray-painted graffiti on streets and subways using the “tag” SAMO (“same old”) as a signature. By the end of the decade, while also playing in a rock band and filling notebooks with poetry and aphorisms, he ranked as a central participant in East Village culture. Soon gaining recognition for diaristic paintings, at 20 he had his first one-person gallery show. He rocketed to fame over the next two or three years, with support from Larry Gagosian’s blue-chip operation and other prestigious galleries responding to his self-aggrandizing and primitivizing atmospherics. In this hothouse atmosphere, he painted with frenetic intensity, mixing texts with expressionistic drawing to create compositions of great complexity and no little sophistication. His multifarious subjects mixed high and low in a mélange of graffiti art, neo-expressionism, allusions to African tribal art and Old Masters, racial epithets, musical references, historical events, dreams, and more. Through it all run currents of self-discovery and a relentless quest for knowledge. In the mid-1980s, he and Andy Warhol became close friends, often working collaboratively until Warhol’s death in 1987. Subsequently, although his art continued to mature, Basquiat increasingly suffered from depression and heroin addiction until his own death not much more than a year later. Nearly all of his important work dates to a period of about five years. Alternately lionized as a genius and deprecated as a careerist, he remains to many an exemplar of authenticity and creative élan, but to skeptics, he is a symbol of esthetic incompetence and sly manipulation. See also .
Centered in San Francisco, Bay Area figurative art evolved during the 1950s as local abstract expressionists incorporated recognizable subjects into their paintings without relinquishing the movement’s gestural brushwork, large scale, or warmth of feeling. In their quest for a more widely accessible form of art, the artists turned to unremarkable subjects, including still lifes, interiors, and figures. The movement’s origins may be traced to the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) where Richard Diebenkorn, David Park (1911–60), and Elmer Bischoff (1916–91) also met Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, instructors there at the time. “Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting” at the Oakland Art Museum (now Oakland Museum of California) first brought widespread attention to the tendency in 1957.
In 1950, Park provided the spark for the movement. His painting of a jazz band included in a group exhibition startled San Francisco’s art community. Some even thought it a joke. Born in Boston, in 1928 Park headed to art school in Los Angeles, but he remained for less than a year. He moved to San Francisco in 1929, then back to Boston in 1936, and again to San Francisco in 1941. During the 1940s, he worked within the prevailing abstract expressionist esthetic. Much of his subsequent representational work centers on generic single figures or pairs, brightly painted with a loaded brush. In these, extreme simplification of form (a single slash of red may stand for a mouth, for example) produces an exaggerated, even cartoony effect. But at his most effective, more complex compositions, spatial effects, and painterly techniques invoke a tender regard for his subjects’ inner lives.
Born in Berkeley, Bischoff earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, at the University of California, before serving for four years in the U.S. military during World War II. Afterward, he painted lyrical abstract works featuring flat patterns of irregular forms in glowing colors. His last two decades offered an enriched reprise of these works, now more complex and sophisticated. In the figurative works dating from the early 1950s to the 1970s, broad brushwork situates subjects within spatial environments. Admiration for the work of the impressionists Edvard Munch, Pierre Bonnard, and Edward Hopper undergirded his unerring sense of color, sensitivity to effects of light, and longing to merge the real and ideal.
In addition to these three leaders, others contributed importantly to the Bay Area figurative movement. James Weeks (1922–98) became interested in landscape painting before the end of the 1940s. In the early 1950s, he developed a personal approach to semi-abstracted still lifes suggesting admiration for Henri Matisse’s palette. Later interior scenes and the landscapes for which he became particularly known offer careful construction and controlled but still painterly brushwork. Born across the Bay in Oakland, before and after U.S. military service in 1944–45, he trained at the California School of Fine Arts. He subsequently remained in San Francisco but left in 1967 for three years in Los Angeles before finally settling in Boston. See also .
Nathan Oliveira (1928–2010), also born in Oakland, trained there at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where he earned his bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in 1952. During the summer of 1950, he studied with Max Beckmann at Mills College, also in Oakland. Treated with various degrees of abstraction—sometimes to the degree that the subjects are not immediately apparent—the human body remained his favorite subject, although landscapes remained important as well. His characteristically muted palette of softly brushed pale tans and grays, sometimes punctuated by brighter passages, creates a dreamy atmosphere that enhances the gentle, slightly idealized tenor of most subjects. While informed by his appreciation for the Old Masters, his paintings also reveal a debt to such contemporary artists as Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, and Alberto Giacometti. A masterful printmaker, Oliveira also extended his practice into sculpture during the 1980s. He taught at Stanford University for three decades.
Although primarily a sculptor, Manuel Neri (1930–) also worked as a painter and printmaker. Born to Mexican parents in the Fresno area, he studied at the California School of Fine Arts with Bischoff and Diebenkorn. An abstract expressionist painter at first, he joined the early movement toward figuration in the 1950s. His characteristic sculptures, life-size female nudes (or bodily fragments), roughly parallel Oliveira’s preference for slightly abstracted and idealized figures. He has worked mostly in plaster—sometimes tinted with colors—giving figures slightly roughened, “painterly” surfaces, but he also produces works in bronze and marble. He taught at the University of California in Davis for more than 30 years. In 1962, he married Joan Brown, but they divorced four years later.
Wide-ranging painter, sculptor, and architect Herbert Bayer nevertheless rightly remains best known as a graphic artist and typographer. Born in Austria, between 1921 and 1928 he studied and then taught at the Bauhaus, where he outgrew an early decorative style to forge an objective approach to art and design as modernizing endeavors, often undertaken in conjunction with industrial or corporate clients. Subsequently, he worked primarily as a graphic designer, first in Berlin and then in New York. Also an influential photographer over several decades, he stressed formal invention as a sign of modernity. In addition, during the 1930s he created innovative surrealistic photomontages. In 1946, eight years after his arrival in the United States, enticed by the idealistic industrialist Walter Paepcke, head of Container Corporation of America, he moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he designed facilities for Paepcke’s pet project, the Aspen Institute, as well as poster designs promoting Aspen as a vacation destination. He served for two decades as Container Corporation’s design director and became widely known through his educational Great Ideas of Western Man series, published in popular magazines to burnish the company image. Bayer also oversaw development of oil giant Atlantic Richfield Company’s distinguished art collection, which grew to 15,000 pieces, the world’s largest corporate trove. (It was sold and dispersed three years after BP took over the company in 2000.) The handsome modernist residence he built for himself in the 1940s near Aspen served also to attract architectural clients.
In the early 1960s, Bayer renewed his commitment to fine arts practice. In painting, for the most part he continued to pursue varied approaches to abstraction, but in later years he often incorporated allusions to landscape. He also produced pioneering site-specific sculptures, some of which contributed to interests in environmental art. He moved permanently to Montecito, California, in 1976. At his death, the last of the prominent Bauhaus masters, he had preserved its integrative vision regarding fine and applied arts for half a century.
An American abstract expressionist, William Baziotes is remembered for evocative abstractions featuring indeterminate biomorphic shapes. Often reminiscent of body parts, aquatic life, or plant forms, these flattened allusions frequently float within fields of exquisitely modulated color. Remaining more directly tied to surrealist precedents than many of his fellow abstract expressionists, he found inspiration also in French Symbolist poetry and in the mythic ethos of ancient Greek art.
A Pennsylvania native, Baziotes studied from 1933 until 1936 at the National Academy of Design in New York. By the time he graduated, he had assimilated aspects of the work of Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, among others, into a highly original, colorful, and even manic style of abstracted figuration. In the years around 1940, he became personally acquainted with émigré European surrealists, as well as with other nascent abstract expressionists. Sharing their interests in the unconscious, automatism, and universal forms, he developed the more restrained sensibility evident in the mature style that coalesced in the mid-1940s. His organic imagery also benefited from close study of fossils and other aspects of natural history. During the final decade or so of his life, Baziotes worked deliberately, producing relatively few paintings as he layered gorgeously hued, thinned paints upon his canvases. Although a meditative tone prevails, certain works recalling the sharp edge of his early work offer a mood of disquiet, acknowledging the darker side of human experience. See also ; .
Remembered particularly for collages fusing abstract composition with representational subjects, African American Romare Bearden emphasized a broadly humanistic outlook while giving special attention to black themes. As he commented in 1946, “The true artist feels that there is only one art—and it belongs to all mankind.” Although no other American artist surpassed his achievements with collage, he also created paintings, prints, tapestries, illustrations, and murals. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, he grew up in New York and Pittsburgh. Following studies at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, and at Boston College, he graduated in 1935 from New York University. At that point, he abandoned his plan to become a medical doctor and turned his full-time attention to art, continuing his education at the Art Students League. His early paintings focused on African American life in the South, but he later found an exclusive concentration on black subjects and African precedents too confining. After serving in the U.S. Army for three years during World War II, he abruptly retooled his approach. Returning to New York in 1945, he adopted the aims of the young avant-garde seeking to express universal human emotions encoded in myth and religion. Unlike the central figures of abstract expressionism, Bearden never entirely dispensed with representational elements, although some works come close to doing so. In Paris during 1950–51, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and enlarged his grasp of European art history there and in other art centers. During the mid-1960s, he discovered that collage offered the perfect technique to create boldly patterned, abstract compositions that nevertheless incorporate subject matter by means of pasted photographs or magazine clippings. Their jazzy rhythms not only testify to Bearden’s involvement with music but also demonstrate his esthetic roots in cubism, dada collage, Henri Matisse’s cutouts, and other modern precedents. To increase their impact, sometimes he had them photographed and blown up to monumental size. He drew largely on his own experience, especially impressions of black life in the South and in Harlem. In a period of agitation for African American civil rights, he declared that he had “not created protest images. The world within the collage, if it is authentic, retains the right to speak for itself.” Instead, his black subjects stand with all of humanity, embodying fortitude, beauty, and vulnerability. Bearden also made use of primordial tales from literature, notably the Bible and ancient Greek sources. See also .
German painter and printmaker Max Beckmann created a powerful and highly distinctive form of representational modernism. His ambiguous, morally forceful, and often allegorical mature works confront realities deeper than mere appearance. As an intermittent visitor to Paris, he responded to its experimental modern forms and color schemes, but he preferred to remain in dialogue with Old Master precedents. Born in Leipzig, he studied art in Weimar before moving to Berlin in 1904. After serving in the army medical corps in 1914–15, he relocated to Frankfurt. His earlier work had combined impressionist and expressionist elements to depict scenes from everyday life or literary subjects. In the wake of World War I’s horrors, however, he employed violently distorted forms to address pessimistic and socially critical themes. Thereafter, a dark and brooding mood remained the bedrock of his art, but in congruence with a new respect for classical order in European art during the 1920s, he moderated his forms toward simplicity and stability. In The Departure (1935; New York, Museum of Modern Art), the first of 10 allegorical triptychs that rank among his most impressive works, regal figures make a dignified exit by boat in the central panel, while the side panels show images of torture and torment. Figures, bounded by dark lines, now display the hard solidity within compressed, sometimes claustrophobic space characteristic of his individual style. The ensemble’s meaning remains indeterminate, but surely it reflects the painter’s preoccupations at that time with exile and evil. Dismissed from his Frankfurt teaching position in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, he returned to Berlin but in 1937 fled to Amsterdam when his work was labeled “degenerate.” Ten years later, he accepted an invitation to teach at Washington University in St. Louis. At the time of his death, he lived in New York. Motivated by philosophical ruminations on the human dilemma, in both its specifically contemporary and timeless manifestations, Beckmann used realism emblematically to address his belief that “nature is chaos; it is our duty and our task to order this chaos, to perfect it.” Among his strongest works are many self-portraits, in which the artist as Everyman confronts his existential situation.
American painter Jake Berthot achieved a distinctive meditative integrity in nearly abstract landscapes or, less frequently, other subjects. Born in Niagara Falls, New York, he grew up on a central Pennsylvania farm. Although he studied art in New York in the early 1960s, he remained largely self-taught as a painter while responding to abstract expressionism, particularly the work of Milton Resnick. Subsequently attracted by the minimalist grid as a compositional method, he adopted geometric forms while at the same time retaining a painterly touch. This approach, in turn, gave way by the late 1970s to freer compositions, but grids consistently inhered in the structure of his paintings. Little interested in theory, after relocating to the Catskills in the mid-1990s, he interpreted Hudson Valley scenery in impalpable, barely representational works that resonate with Resnick’s somber, almost hermetic, yet affirmative sensibility, as well as with the works of earlier landscape painters he admired, including George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and J. M. W. Turner.
German sculptor, installation artist, performance artist, and self-described shaman Joseph Beuys promoted a challenging but highly influential view of the nature of artistic activity and of the role of the artist in society. Over time, he became not so much a maker of objects as a self-mythologizing conduit between the facts of experience and the metaphysics of existence. Despite the extreme subjectivity of his practice, however, by defining politics as “social sculpture,” he promoted art’s wider relevance. A pacifist, environmentalist, and anti-nuclear activist, Beuys situated his creative activity squarely, if romantically, amid humanistic discourses.
Born in Krefeld, he grew up in nearby Kleve, in the industrial lower Rhine region. Interested in his youth in both natural sciences and art, events demanded that he put his studies on hold to serve in the German military from 1941 until his country surrendered in 1945. Wounded in action several times, he drew on his remembrance of being shot down in a fighter plane in 1944 as a pivotal autobiographical moment. Others have challenged his version of events, but the story he told nevertheless provided important fuel for his artistic career. In his version, he survived only because Crimean Tatars removed his unconscious body from the snow to one of their tents, where they aided his recuperation by covering his body with fat, to retain warmth, and then wrapping him in felt. He never forgot the life-giving properties of these materials.
After the war, Beuys studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts (where he was later to hold forth as a prominent teacher). Gravitating from sculptural objects to happening-like performances, Beuys first came to widespread attention with the 1965 How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, an evocative if startling event. Slathered in honey and gold leaf, an iron slab attached to one boot, Beuys mumbled comforting words to a dead hare held tenderly in his arms. The alchemical and symbolic properties of the materials and his affectionate regard for an insignificant deceased animal seemed to suggest the artist’s magical power to divine and transmit secret knowledge.
I Like America and America Likes Me put Beuys on the international map in 1974. Swathed in felt (by now, among his regularly used materials), he arrived from the airport by ambulance at a New York gallery. There, remaining on the stretcher or moving onto a bed of straw, he shared the space for eight hours, over a period of three days, with a wild coyote. He left as he had come, by ambulance, without ever setting foot in the United States except at the gallery. Mystification, audacity, and self-aggrandizement mingle in this highly unconventional work that tests the limits of art but nevertheless sacralizes its symbolic powers. In subsequent installations and performances, Beuys continued to stress integration of human experience with nature, liberation of the individual from social expectations, the necessity for art to advance a more peaceful and integrated world, and the unassailability of symbolic communication. See also ; ; ; ; ; .
American painter, sculptor, and theorist Charles Biederman remains most admired for colorful, abstract, modestly scaled aluminum reliefs featuring rectilinear projections. He described these works—which occupy a middle ground between painting and sculpture—as structurist, in the belief that their abstract geometry parallels the structural formations of nature. His most influential theoretical work, Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (1948), argues that such art has no need for illusion, a point of view that found resonance among younger artists of the 1960s and 1970s who took an interest in creating self-sufficient three-dimensional objects. Born in Cleveland, Biederman trained as an artist there and in Chicago before moving to New York in 1934. From the outset, he found inspiration in Paul Cézanne’s analytical approach to nature, even as he also absorbed the lessons of cubism and biomorphic abstraction. During a Paris sojourn in 1936–37, he met many leading artists, but the work of De Stijl artists, especially Piet Mondrian, and constructivists most appealed to him. After this interlude abroad, he soon abandoned conventional painting to experiment with sculptural approaches. Biederman left New York in 1941. After a year in Chicago, he moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, on the Mississippi downriver from St. Paul. There, in 1954 he bought the farmhouse that remained his residence for half a century. Relatively isolated from the hothouse art world of New York, he nevertheless carried on a vigorous correspondence with artists and scientists. Concurrently, between the 1950s and 1990s, he created the bulk of his distinctive relief sculptures and published another dozen books. See also .
Swiss constructivist painter, sculptor, designer, and architect Max Bill tackled his varied projects with a belief in the power of rationally conceived abstract—or, as he would have it, concrete—form. Born in Winterthur, he studied from 1927 to 1929 at the Bauhaus with Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy. Subsequently, he lived mostly in Zurich, although during the 1950s he served as the first director of Ulm’s Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design), its headquarters numbering among the most outstanding of his numerous architectural designs in Germany and Switzerland. An advocate of modern forms for modern life, he designed many clean-cut products for home and office use and presided at the school over the establishment of an elegantly simple, mass-market design mode that has never gone out of style. Besides brightly colored hard-edged geometric paintings, he fabricated public sculptures in several media, often based on spheres or Möbius strips. A publicly minded activist who regarded art and design within a single continuum, he intended his work to contribute to the evolution of a more spiritually nourishing future. See also .
Although applicable to any art that employs a nature-based, abstract formal vocabulary, the term biomorphism is most often applied to describe such work from the late 19th and 20th centuries. First coming into common usage in the 1930s, the word particularly refers to free-form shapes that suggest—but do not illustrate—amoebae, embryos, interior bodily organs, or vine-like plants. They allude to growth and vitality. Artists and designers of late 19th- and early 20th-century art nouveau numbered among the first to popularize these allusive forms. They resurfaced again with particular urgency in the 1920s and 1930s surrealist work of such artists as Jean Arp, Roberto Matta, and Joan Miró. Pablo Picasso also made powerful use of biomorphism in much of his work from the same period. Among sculptors, Henry Moore specialized in interpreting the human body as biomorphic form, conflating man and nature, while in his constructions, Alexander Calder freed abstract biomorphic shapes to float. Arshile Gorky’s work most clearly demonstrates the evolution of surrealist biomorphism into a form of abstract expressionism. As well, most of his colleagues among the first-generation abstract expressionists experimented during their early development with such shapes. Often, surrealist and abstract expressionist biomorphism derives from the practice of automatism.
A tiny liberal arts school in rural North Carolina, Black Mountain College starred as a remarkable avant-garde center in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A who’s who of prominent and emerging visual artists interacted there, along with others including dancers, composers, and writers. Its permissive, interdisciplinary atmosphere foretold the heady spirit of 1960s New York. Founded in 1933, just as the Bauhaus was closing, it attracted Josef Albers to continue the German school’s program as head of the art department. A committed modernist despite his methodical and restrained temperament, Albers attracted teachers and students with wide-ranging experimental interests. The summer program, initiated in 1944, proved particularly successful in this regard. Albers left the college in 1949, but the momentum he had initiated sustained its position as a creative magnet for several additional years. Before it closed in 1957, the college became an important poetry center.
Teachers included Ilya Bolotowsky, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Lyonel Feininger, Clement Greenberg, Jacob Lawrence, Richard Lippold, Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov, Peter Voulkos, and photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, as well as architect Walter Gropius, ceramist Bernard Leach, and Albers’s wife, Anni Albers. Students who profited from the Black Mountain experience included John Chamberlain, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Pat Passlof, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, and Cy Twombly. Notably, it was at Black Mountain that architect and theorist Buckminster Fuller cobbled together his first geodesic dome, that Rauschenberg and others staged what retrospectively became known as the first happening, and that Merce Cunningham formed his long-lived, groundbreaking dance company.
An idiosyncratic, visionary expressionist, Hyman Bloom valued a wide range of subjects, investing even difficult ones—such as carcasses, corpses, and the decrepit elderly—with the spiritual energy that pervaded his universe. Among the most admired avant-garde painters of the early 1940s, he is sometimes seen as a precursor to abstract expressionists. Yet his reputation was soon—and perhaps unfairly—eclipsed, perhaps because he did not entirely abandon representation. His distance from New York—he lived in Boston most of his life—and his very private personality probably didn’t help. Nevertheless, much of his richly painted work submerges subjects into abstract fields that nearly defy decoding. His horizonless seascapes and woodland interiors fill large canvases with swirling forms inspired by nature but detached from it. Other frequent subjects included portraits and figure studies, still lifes, and such decorative items as chandeliers and Christmas trees. Born in Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, Bloom settled with his family in Boston at the age of seven. As a teenager, with his friend Jack Levine, he found encouragement from art theorist, collector, and Harvard professor Denman Ross but otherwise had little formal instruction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from Old Master painting—including the work of Matthias Grünewald, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt—to more recent artists such as William Blake, J. M. W. Turner, Georges Rouault, and Chaim Soutine, he fashioned a jewel-like, richly painterly style. Raised in a deeply religious Jewish family but open as an adult to other metaphysical traditions, Bloom shared a sense of the mystery of being with his close friend, the experimental composer Alan Hovhaness. Bloom frequently visited rural New England and spent his last years in Nashua, New Hampshire.
As the name implies, body art employs the human body—usually the artist’s—as its primary material. Wedged somewhere in between postminimalism, conceptual art, and performance art, body art has few strict parameters, and most body artists have also contributed to other forms of art. As a distinct tendency, it arose in the 1960s as part of a general loosening of accepted styles and techniques, a process that itself reflected cultural forces validating physical sensation and uninhibited personal experience. Irrational currents of violence and sadomasochism appeared frequently during body art’s heyday in the late 1960s and 1970s. Because of the inherently ephemeral nature of their actions or performances, body artists frequently documented their work with photographs, videos, or written notes.
Following closely on the pioneering efforts of Bruce Nauman, the strong performances of New Yorker Vito Acconci (1940–) contributed signally to establishing body art as a viable genre. Also a poet with an MFA from the State University of Iowa (now University of Iowa), in the late 1960s he began photographing himself performing unremarkable actions, much as Nauman was doing in his Samuel Beckett–inspired works. In 1970, he began to subject himself to stressful conditions that heightened the tone of his work while also sabotaging the hypocrisy of social conventions. Recorded, his distinctive hoarse voice shared fears and fantasies, often of an intimate, even erotic nature. For Seedbed, a 1972 work that commanded much attention, he lay beneath a ramp while masturbating, as loudspeakers broadcast his hallucinatory rambles concerning the gallerygoers who walked above him. By the mid-1970s, he had left behind such intensely personal works in order to concentrate on installations that investigated his identity as a social being. Eventually, during the 1980s, he moved on to permanent, architecturally oriented projects that have increasingly emphasized community over confrontation.
In the 1970s, American Chris Burden (1946–2015) took body art to a masochistic extreme in works that required endurance or, more sensationally, inflicted pain, as he enacted states of fear, suffering, and anxiety. In Shoot (1971), a friend shot him in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle. For Trans-Fixed (1974), he had himself nailed face up, Christ-like, to the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. Deadpan descriptions that evaded any justification of his purposes offered to the art establishment a challenge that was not only esthetic but also moral. Since the 1980s, he has given his attention to enormous sculptures and installations, including Urban Light (2008), consisting of 202 salvaged cast-iron street lights, sited near the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
While other Americans who contributed to body art generally maintained a more benign stance, a number of Europeans similarly indulged in shockingly painful activities. Most notably, Vienna actionism (or Wiener Aktionismus) during the 1960s offered events featuring particularly egregious violence and degradation. Although they never organized as a group, its principal participants, Günter Brus (1938–), Otto Muehl (1925–2013), Hermann Nitsch (1938–), and Rudolf Schwarzkogler (1940–69), frequently worked together in performances that typically invoked Freudian horrors and sexual fantasies. Their compatriot Arnulf Rainer also joined in actionist-related activities in the 1960s. Austrian Valie Export (1940–) has offered a feminist take on actionism since the late 1960s. Her performances and videos center on bodily experience but remain generally less brutal in tone. In the late 1960s and 1970s, French artist Gina Pane (1939–90) subjected her body to fiercer experiences, such as cutting and burning.
Serbian-born New York artist Marina Abramovic (1946–) also followed such practices in Belgrade during the late 1960s. Subsequently, she developed less disfiguring but still challenging forms of performance that have continued to attract attention for nearly half a century as she explores issues of ego, danger, and mystic energy as they are revealed under extreme conditions. From 1976 until 1988, she and her partner Ulay (German-born artist Uwe Laysiepen [1943–]) collaborated so intensely that they considered themselves a two-headed being. For a 2010 retrospective exhibition (including restagings of performances enacted by others) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, she created an endurance work, The Artist Is Present. In the building’s atrium, the artist sat motionless and wordless, hour after hour, day after day, as volunteers took turns sitting opposite her composed body clad in a floor-length dress.
French-born Orlan (1947–), inspired by the Vienna actionists in her early career, staged dramatic performances featuring her body under duress. In 1990, she embarked on a project of perfecting her appearance through plastic surgery, intending to transform herself incrementally into another “self” altogether. Narcissistic on the one hand, perhaps it might also function as feminist social criticism or as a philosophical inquiry into the limits of individual identity. See also ; ; ; .
Ilya Bolotowsky’s vibrant paintings and sculptures bridged interests of pre–World War II geometric abstraction and hard-edge work of the 1960s and 1970s. Born in St. Petersburg, he experienced an unsettled childhood. As a young boy, he moved with his family to Baku, Azerbaijan. In 1920, they escaped political turmoil there via neighboring Georgia before relocating to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1921. In 1923, they settled in New York, where Bolotowsky studied until 1930 at the National Academy of Design. The tribulations of these formative years, he later said, figured largely in his desire to formulate an art of pure harmony. Inspired by the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, in 1933 Bolotowsky adopted a non-representational approach. Also attracted to Joan Miró’s work, however, for another decade he admitted biomorphic forms into his compositions. Thereafter, he abandoned any hint of nature to pursue an art strictly focused on relationships of form and color. Despite these limitations, his art depended more on intuitive élan than on formulas. In 1937, he numbered among founders of the American Abstract Artists and later served as president. From 1946 to 1948, he temporarily replaced Josef Albers as head of the art department at Black Mountain College. Subsequently, he taught for many years, mostly around the New York area but also for several years in Wyoming. While remaining committed to geometric abstraction, Bolotowsky gradually relaxed his adherence to Mondrian’s constraints of horizontal and vertical lines and primary colors. He enlarged his palette to produce harmonies of great subtlety, introduced diagonals, and in the 1950s numbered among the earliest artists to use shaped canvases. Later he produced colorful columnar sculptures and relief constructions that extend the principles of his painting into three dimensions. Departing from his close adherence to formal concerns, during the 1950s Bolotowsky also tried his hand at experimental filmmaking, and during the following decade he wrote plays as well. See also .
In the 1930s, Bolotowsky was married to painter, sculptor, and designer Esphyr Slobodkina (1908–2002), also among the founders of the American Abstract Artists. (She served as secretary of the organization for some 30 years.) Born in Siberia, she arrived in New York in 1928 and met Bolotowsky while studying at the National Academy of Design. A versatile artist who turned her talents to textiles and jewelry, among other forms of design, she became best known to the general public as an illustrator of children’s books.
French painter, sculptor, photographer, and filmmaker Christian Boltanski has been most widely recognized for somber installations evoking the Holocaust particularly, but also more universal experiences of mortality, suffering, and loss of innocence. Born in Paris, he remained self-taught as an artist. His experience of growing up in a half-Jewish family traumatized by World War II instilled a sense of vulnerability, along with a belief that his own childhood had been marred by historical circumstances. His earliest work addressed this experience with a mixture of biographical and fictional elements. Subsequently, he broadened his purview while using photography, toy-like constructions, and found materials to carry his creations’ symbolic weight. While also approaching his themes with other sorts of installations, since the mid-1980s Boltanski has concentrated on elegies that combine old black-and-white portrait photographs (or, more often, his slightly unfocused reproductions of them) with lights that illuminate but sometimes also partially obscure anonymous faces that seem to loom from a ghostly beyond. Although individual, the repetitious images—all presented identically, in size and framing, and lined up in rows—underline an equality that death confers on all. Sometimes these installations also include time-battered objects such as clothing or metal boxes that suggest the meagre remains of a life. To underscore the contingent nature of both life and art, he usually leaves visible the electrical wiring for hanging lightbulbs or mounted lamps. When exhibited in dim spaces, these installations glow softly with reverence for the brevity of life and longing for a lost past.
A French artist who barely lived into the post–World War II period, Pierre Bonnard nevertheless left a legacy that could not be ignored by anyone who cared about painting. His sumptuous meditations on everyday life, arguably the finest body of pure painting from the first half of the 20th century, set a benchmark for transforming optical experience into emotionally resonant form. Bonnard’s utterly commonplace domestic scenes—taken from the bath, the breakfast table, the garden—take on visionary significance in a sophisticated brew of traditional pictorial construction and richly hued, painterly technique along with such aspects of modern practice as flattened, dematerialized forms, unexpected color harmonies, freely manipulated spatial relationships, and differential focus. These paintings offer tenderness free of sentimentality, ambiguity without confusion. Joy and melancholy, timelessness and instantaneity, nature and artifice, structure and decoration blend seamlessly.
While studying art in Paris, Bonnard met Édouard Vuillard and other progressive young artists who exhibited together in the 1890s as Les Nabis. Taking Paul Gauguin as their esthetic hero, they drew on aspects of impressionism and post-impressionism, along with symbolist esthetics. Like others in the group, Bonnard supplemented his paintings with posters, book illustrations, and prints, as well as stage design. Along with Vuillard, he became known as an intimist because of their interest in small-scale paintings of humble, usually interior scenes. Later, Bonnard’s paintings became larger, and while his subjects did not change significantly, his mature paintings achieve a universality that transcends their intimist origins.
The abstract sculptural assemblages that made Lee Bontecou’s reputation around 1960 remain her best-known works. Constructed mainly from scraps of canvas and other textiles stitched coarsely over irregular welded armatures, these highly original wall-mounted pieces, nearly always featuring one or more rounded openings into fathomless interiors, offer disquieting and even menacing overtones. A surrealist irrationality combines with abstract expressionist grandeur and compositional freedom to powerful effect. Open to interpretation, the works reminded viewers of such varied precedents as airplanes, kayaks, handmade implements, monsters, war machinery, primitive mythologies, and space exploration. She herself later recalled as motivating factors her own misgivings about the Cold War and nuclear threats. In the 1970s, feminists claimed her as one of their own by emphasizing the vaginal associations of the prominent openings. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Bontecou grew up near New York and trained there between 1952 and 1955 at the Art Students League, where William Zorach numbered among her teachers. Subsequently, in Rome, she created abstracted terra-cotta and bronze bird and animal forms, as well as figural works. Within months after returning to New York toward the end of 1958, she created the first of the signature wall reliefs. During this period, she also produced stylistically similar drawings, making distinctive use not only of graphite but also charcoal and soot. In the mid-1960s, fiberglass enlarged her scale and provided sleeker forms than those in earlier rough-hewn works. Despite widespread praise, by the end of the 1960s she had moved on, turning to vacuum-formed plastic fish and plants that continued to reflect uneasiness about the world and mankind’s place within it. Her baffled audience showed little interest. For the next two decades, she taught and concentrated on prints and drawings, always major interests. Eventually, she reclaimed her sculptural practice with vibrant suspended constellations of small, usually ceramic animals and hybrid figures, sometimes combined with abstracted mechanical forms. Continuing her interest in the natural world and its imperiled state, they nevertheless offer a less fraught vision. Mysterious still, they exhibit a more lyrical, affirmative, and occasionally even humorous tone.
An early harbinger of the 1970s feminist art movement, French-born American sculptor Louise Bourgeois drew from the wellspring of surrealism in envisioning a fearlessly distinctive and often theatrical body of work. Little known until younger, feminist artists found inspiration in her approach, she subsequently gained international art-star recognition. Her reputation soared after her work appeared in a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1982. In 1993, at 81, she alone represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.
Born in Paris, she grew up in a suburb, where her parents operated a tapestry business. She later identified the traumatic atmosphere of her childhood as a preoccupation that fueled her art. With a passive mother and a temperamental, overbearing father who took as his mistress the children’s governess, at an early age she experienced anger and fear, but also resentment, betrayal, vulnerability, and sexual confusion. In adulthood, her art continued to reverberate with these psychological states, expressed through symbolic, abstracted forms. She publicly revealed this history only at the time of her Museum of Modern Art exhibition, when she was already 70. From then on, this self-revelatory narrative overwhelmed other points of view in discussions of her art. To her advantage, it appealed to a confessional age and made her a celebrity. To her disadvantage, it may have obscured other sources of her strength and limited more nuanced evaluations of her contribution.
At the Sorbonne, Bourgeois studied the hard facts of mathematics. But, disappointed to learn that these, too, could be arguable, she “turned toward the certainties of feeling,” as she later explained. She studied at several art studios, notably Fernand Léger’s. In 1938, she married American art history professor Robert Goldwater (1907–73), remembered particularly for his classic study Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), and they moved to New York. There, she continued her training as an artist while also becoming acquainted with others soon known as abstract expressionists. Primarily a painter early in her career, she worked almost exclusively as a sculptor after her first solo sculpture show in 1949, although she continued actively to produce print portfolios and illustrated books.
The early sculptures centered on skinny life-size wood poles carved with abstracted allusions to human anatomy, recalling surrealism’s biomorphic aspect as well as certain forms of “primitive” art. Although Bourgeois always denied any interest in ethnographic precedents, abstract expressionist colleagues in her milieu avidly absorbed them, and her husband’s scholarly work must have brought examples to her attention. In any event, their sleek, rounded anatomical forms extend the feminist viewpoint that had already appeared in the 1946–47 Femme Maison drawings. In these, schematic houses replace the upper bodies of nude women, suggesting the confinement of domestic roles. In the mid-1950s, she joined the American Abstract Artists and broadened her range of media, eventually to include stone and metal, as well as plaster, wax, latex, and cloth. These she employed in creating a wide range of more and less abstracted works based on human anatomy and nearly always invoking the distress of a wounded psyche. In the early 1990s, she produced a notable group of “Cells,” installations constructed mostly with found and salvaged materials, along with such other components as wire mesh, glass, and mirrors. They generally induce a sense of imprisonment and represent, as the artist has said, “different types of pain.”
During her final years, Bourgeois’s international reputation continued to grow. At its opening in 2000, London’s Tate Modern featured her sculptures as the first exhibition within its dramatic multi-story atrium. Among these works, a fearsome spider, more than 30 feet tall, drew the most attention. The largest of a late 1990s arachnid group, Maman (1999; Tate)—“mommy” in French—constituted an “ode to my mother,” as the artist explained, remembering her as a beneficent protector who worked as a weaver in the tapestry restoration workshop. This work’s tangled emotional impact demonstrates, perhaps better than any other single sculpture could, Bourgeois’s ability to create easily apprehensible, universalizing emblems of inner life. See also ; ; ; .
Sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s highly abstracted approach to form won him a place among the most important sculptors of the modern era. Although most of his work remains at least obliquely representational, he intended his highly simplified shapes to express the essential nature of his subjects rather than their exterior appearance. At once aspirational and grounded in its material substance, his sculpture inspired artists across several decades. Among their legion, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Archipenko, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, and Carl Andre benefited directly from his example. The sleek and elegant Bird in Space (original version, 1923), perhaps his most widely admired work, exemplifies the reductive purity characteristic of his works in stone and bronze. It leaves the bird itself behind, evoking instead its swooping upward movement. Like most of his important pieces, it exists in several versions in both media. In 1928, with respect to this work, a landmark U.S. court decision established for the first time the principle that an abstract sculpture could be considered art. (Brancusi had sued, after customs officials had insisted that he pay duty—from which works of art were exempted—when he sent a version of this piece, among others, to New York for exhibition.) When he worked with wood—his first medium and a lifelong, if intermittent, interest—Brancusi preferred a rough-hewn character appropriate to the material.
Born in Romania, Brancusi began carving in wood as a youngster, following in the rural traditions of his native land. In 1896, he began his formal training as an artist in Bucharest. In 1903, he continued his studies in Munich for a year before settling permanently in Paris. There, his work at first reflected the dominance of Auguste Rodin’s example, but as he became acquainted with avant-garde interests, in 1907 his distinctive vision—reflecting interests in folk, African, and Cycladic sculpture—began to emerge. The exhibition of his work in New York’s 1913 Armory Show and at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery the following year established his influence among American artists and his appeal to collectors. A perfectionist who repeatedly returned to a small number of themes, he preferred to refine the works that best expressed his intentions. Besides the Bird in Space, these include The Kiss (original 1907–8), a blocky homage to intimacy; the egg-shaped Sleeping Muse (1909), an idealized woman’s head evoking both tranquil beauty and generative possibility; and several portrait heads, including the stylized Mademoiselle Pogany (1912). In a park at Tirgu Jiu near his childhood home, in 1938 Brancusi installed his most ambitious project, a sculptural ensemble featuring the Endless Column, an undulating wood shaft soaring skyward. Although the fundamentals of his art remained unchanged in the post–World War II period, his work remained a potent force. At his death, Brancusi bequeathed his studio and its contents—including versions of nearly all his major sculptures, as well as more than 1,000 of his own accomplished photographs of his work—to the French state. It remains permanently installed as an adjunct to the Pompidou Center in Paris.
French painter Georges Braque remains best known for his partnership with Pablo Picasso in the invention of cubism. Later their paths diverged, but Braque’s magisterial studio and still life paintings from the post–World War II years stand among the most distinguished accomplishments of the time. Less mercurial than his friend, Braque remained wedded to the formal analysis and contemplative tenor of cubism, while nevertheless moving away from its rigid formulas into new expressive territory. Braque also worked as a printmaker, sculptor, and designer.
Trained in Le Havre and Paris as a decorator and artist, Braque briefly participated in the fauve movement associated with Henri Matisse. After about two years, in 1907 his brightly colored landscapes gave way to a more sober engagement with the structure he found in Paul Cézanne’s work. He also met Picasso in that year, and they soon progressed toward analytic cubism, working so intimately that by 1911 their paintings were difficult to differentiate. In developing the more relaxed synthetic cubist and collage work that followed, Braque—with his decorator’s sensitivity to textures, illusionism, craftsmanship, and color relations—may even have played the more innovative role. During World War I military service, Braque suffered a severe head injury. After returning to his art, he elaborated on cubist achievements, heading into territory that was no less structural but suffused with poetic feeling. Figures and landscape returned, and he enriched the surfaces of his paintings with textures and luxurious colors.
French writer, theorist, collector, cultural gadfly, and self-appointed surrealist guru André Breton spent the World War II years in New York, where his movement caught the attention of many young artists headed toward abstract expressionism. Born in Normandy, as a young man he studied medicine and became interested in abnormal psychologies. Service as an orderly in a military hospital during World War I further piqued his interest in the irrational while also alienating him from the horrors perpetrated in the name of civilization. Subsequently, in Paris he entered into a literary career as an author and editor of important surrealist periodicals, including La Révolution surréaliste (1925–29), Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–33), and Minotaure (1933–39). In 1924, he published Le Manifeste du surréalisme (Surrealist Manifesto), considered the founding document of the movement. The following year, he helped to organize the first exhibition of surrealist art. After the Vichy government condemned his writings, Breton escaped to New York in 1941. Actively involved there in publications and exhibitions, along with other surrealist émigrés he promoted the spirit of innovation and psychological release that underlay the foundations of abstract expressionism. By the time he resumed his activities in Paris in 1946, surrealism no longer counted as a leading force. Breton also amassed an important collection of art, photography, and ethnographic material. Comprising some 5,000 items, it was dispersed after his death, although the Pompidou Center in Paris preserves an evocative wall of objects as they had been displayed in his apartment. See also .
Among the finest colorists in the abstract expressionist group, James Brooks remains particularly remembered for harmonious canvases featuring ample, gestural strokes intermingled with irregular fields of color. He often worked with thinned oils that lend a fluid and lyrical tone to his work. In the 1960s, he simplified his approach, using larger forms that complement contemporary interests in color field painting. He also used spare but sometimes intricate linear elements.
Born in St. Louis, Brooks grew up in the Midwest and in Dallas, where he attended Southern Methodist University and began his training as an artist. In 1926, he moved to New York. At the Art Students League, his teachers included the period’s most influential drawing teacher, Kimon Nicolaides, and the left-wing Boardman Robinson (1876–1952), an illustrator and painter who figured importantly in the revival of mural painting during the 1930s. Following his example, Brooks executed important mural projects for the Depression-era Federal Art Project. The most important of these, Flight (1942; Marine Air Terminal, LaGuardia Airport), a 235-foot-long, circular history of man’s ultimately successful attempts to fly, numbers among the most distinguished mural projects of the period. While working on these, Brooks became increasingly interested the modern styles of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and others. However, service abroad in the U.S. Army between 1942 and 1945 interrupted his development as an artist. Subsequently, while becoming close to Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, he experimented with both cubist formal analysis and automatism before formulating his individual style in the late 1940s. In the mid-1980s, Alzheimer’s disease ended the artist’s career. See also .
Toward the end of her life, Joan Brown specialized in sculpture, but she made her reputation in the 1960s with colorful paintings that pushed Bay Area figurative art in new directions. A San Francisco native, she trained at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute). From Richard Diebenkorn and her mentor Elmer Bischoff, she absorbed a simplified representational approach employing lush, gestural brushwork. Soon, exaggerated, sometimes even cartoonish, forms suggested links to funk art, but more importantly, they gave her work a more expressionist tone than was prevalent in the Bay Area at the time. During the 1970s, as she turned to more thinly painted, patterned compositions, autobiographical subjects related her work to similar interests among feminist artists. In the 1980s, spiritual concerns dominated her paintings and sculptures. Imagery drawn from Hindu, Egyptian, and other exotic traditions frequently appeared, but her long-standing interest in animals and their inner lives also remained important. During that decade, she received nearly a dozen commissions for public sculptures, which mainly took the form of brightly decorated obelisks. In addition, she traveled widely, particularly to Mexico and India, where she died in an accident while installing a monumental sculpture at an ashram. From 1962 until 1966, she was married to Manuel Neri.
An interpreter of nature and its mysterious forces, early and late in his career expressionist painter Charles Burchfield updated this leading and long-standing theme in American art. During the 1920s and 1930s, however, he turned largely to more straightforward and less emotionally charged depictions of the American scene. He painted almost exclusively in watercolor. Born in Ohio and trained in Cleveland, Burchfield served in the military for a year during World War I. Enthralled with nature, in his early work he tried also to invent pictorial symbols representing moods. At his most convincing, as he exaggerated natural forms and sometimes invented imaginary ones, he created eerie, forceful images. In 1921, he moved permanently to the Buffalo, New York, area, where he designed decorative wallpaper until able to devote full time to painting around the end of that decade. Because representations of American life remained popular during the Depression, Burchfield’s observant renditions of small towns and industrial sites kept him afloat financially, but they did not fulfill his aspirations. Returning in the 1940s to an intense and pantheistic engagement with nature, he created ecstatic visions, pulsating with the vitality of Creation. His paintings grew larger and their impact more dramatic. His technique loosened—vigorous brushstrokes seem to vibrate with feeling—and forms veer toward stylization and pattern. Like the abstract expressionists of these years, he suggests a merging of self with larger realities. However, for him, these realities remained grounded in the visible rather than the intangibles of consciousness.
Sculptor Selma Burke, who specialized in portraiture but also addressed symbolic or universalizing themes, numbers among African American artists whose activity as educators formed an important part of their legacies. Born in North Carolina, she trained as a nurse before moving to New York in the mid-1920s. Soon enmeshed in the Harlem Renaissance (she was married briefly to writer Claude McKay), she turned wholeheartedly to sculpture. In the 1930s, she studied in Vienna and in Paris, where she worked with Aristide Maillol. After returning to New York, she opened her own school in 1940 and earned an MFA from Columbia University the following year. In 1949, she moved permanently to New Hope, Pennsylvania, except for the years between the late 1960s and 1981 when she again headed an art center in Pittsburgh and also taught in the public schools. Her straightforward approach to portraiture resulted in commissions for a number of works portraying public figures, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. In later years particularly, she also created formally simplified, dignified, figural images that speak to the value of human experience. See also .
Brazilian painter, sculptor, and designer of tapestries, fabrics, jewelry, and stage sets, Roberto Burle Marx revolutionized landscape architecture and garden design by combining knowledge of modern art with appreciation for the tropical foliage of his native country. He often collaborated with Brazil’s top modern architects, notably Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. Born in São Paulo, Burle Marx grew up in Rio de Janeiro. In 1928–29, he studied at the art academy in Berlin, where, somewhat ironically, he first came to appreciate Brazil’s ecological richness during visits to the city’s botanical gardens. In 1930, he continued his artistic training at Rio’s Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, where Candido Portinari particularly influenced his development. Although he always considered himself primarily a painter, his first garden design, completed in 1933, set the course for future artistic eminence. However, he also ranked among leading contributors to scientific knowledge of tropical botany. In addition, he spearheaded conservation efforts and numbered among early opponents of deforestation. Although he also fulfilled commissions in the United States and elsewhere, because he worked almost exclusively with tropical vegetation, he realized most of his important design projects in South America. Desiring to enhance and dignify the social fabric, he concentrated his beautification efforts on publicly accessible locations. Among these, probably the best known, the nearly three-mile-long walkway (1970) along Rio’s famed Copacabana Beach, features inlaid abstract stone mosaics. These not only offer the pedestrian a constantly changing visual experience but also present lively patterns to observers stationed on balconies of hotels that line the shore. See also .
Known particularly for painted and collaged works that feature non-art materials, notably distressed textiles but also other commonplace and ephemeral components, Italian artist Alberto Burri came to attention shortly after World War II. In its rejection of fine art technique, its anguished metaphysics, and its melancholy individuality, his approach fit roughly into the European tendency known as art autre. Born in Umbria, Burri earned a medical degree in 1940, not long before he was called into World War II military service. While serving as a medic in North Africa, he numbered among Italian forces captured by the Americans. At a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas, he began painting landscapes and still lifes, often employing easily available burlap as a support. Released in 1946, he settled in Rome to pursue art full time. He continued the distinctive use of burlap, which now functioned as an expressive element rather than a background support. In these sacchi, as he dubbed them, crudely stitched seams often recall surgical wounds, areas soaked with red paint suggest bandages, and holes or tears evoke the inconsolable void. Within a short time, Burri incorporated as well charred wood, melted metals, and other materials reminiscent of war and privation. Simple, grandly scaled abstractions in sheet metal appeared in the 1950s. He also soon investigated plastics, which he sometimes singed, as an ingredient of art, and in the late 1970s he began a series of works from industrial Celotex. Additionally, begun in the late 1960s, the monochrome cretti series offers cracked surfaces created as a vinyl medium dried, suggesting his affinity with process art’s pursuit of an aleatory esthetic. Burri also experimented late in his career with a form of land art, complementing his occasional sculptural output. He spent his final years on the French Riviera and died in Nice. See also ; .