Sir Herbert Read’s account of modern painting ends with a gloomy picture oflost values and self-indulgence. He was writing at a time when the creative drive of Abstract Expressionism in America and the parallel informal style in Europe had degenerated into empty gesture. A generation later this moment can be seen as a watershed. New styles and attitudes were developing, and many of the younger artists who emerged during the sixties turned their attention to criticism of the language and content of painting itself. For some this meant moving out of the activity of painting altogether and embarking on a new range of media that seemed to offer an alternative: performance, film, video, and endless documentation. Others found that painting could be questioned and redeveloped from within.
At the same time a dramatic change in man’s visual sense was taking place, and new dimensions were opened up not only for the artist but also for his audience. During the sixties the world saw earth rise from the moon. Supertechnology found visual expression through live colour transmissions and a proliferation of photographic imagery. In terms of art the effects were widespread. They were felt fairly directly in the fascination with technology that runs through kinetic art and on into the use of video. Less direct but more significant was the long-term change in man’s perception of his relationship to the world, of time scale and space scale. Generally speaking this was the experience for which artists had to find new forms of expression.
EDUARDO
PAOLOZZI
Evadne in Green Dimension. 1972
Painters in particular were certainly affected by another powerful range of external influences which drew them still farther away from the inward-looking tendencies of the previous generation. The art of hard-sell advertising exploded over billboards, television screens, and colour supplements. Painters ransacked the devices and imagery of commercial art for their own ends. Even the most thoroughly abstract artists—the Colour Field painters—were affected by the scale and glamour of the billboard and the VistaVision screen.
At the same time the art market and the art machine in general established itself more clearly as part of the consumer world. The potential of modem art as commercial investment and cultural diplomacy was increasingly exploited. Along with this came the making of overnight reputations and overweight catalogues,
the escalation of' art publishing and competitive institutional activity on an international scale. For many of the artists unwilling to be absorbed into this overblown system Marcel Duchamp became a patron saint. His anti-art tactics of fifty years before provided pointers to ways of outwitting the system at least for a while. Investigations of the status of the art object and of the role of the artist himself proliferated. Many continue into the seventies as part of the fabric of art itself.
Against this background, painting, though often pronounced dead, continued. The main difference was that, like sculpture, it no longer occupied such a dominant position in the spectrum of art. Within painting three main tendencies became evident.
There was, firstly, a preoccupation with the actual material of art and with the language of painting itself paint for paint’s sake. This includes much of the American art of recent years, the painters after Pollock who were concerned with scale and
colour values, from Mark Rothko (1903—73), Barnett Newman (1905-70), and Morris Louis (1912-62) to Kenneth Noland (b. 1924) and Frank Stella (b. 1936).
Then, secondly, there was the stream that sought to manipulate figurative imagery in an exploration of painting that also appeared to bridge the gap between life and art. Here again much of the impetus was American, and often involved the incorporation of graphic or photographic source material into painting. Here the key figures were Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925), and Andy Warhol (b. 1930).
The third current is the stream of painting that attempts to transcend its material: paint as idea. This is more characteristically European, and its main exponents in the early sixties were Yves Klein (1928-62) and Piero Manzoni (1933-63).
These tendencies ran parallel to each other, and at times intermingled.
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1 1 Pollm k's ch ip painting and emphasis on colour had dominated I lie .iii ol the fifties, ii was the bold frontal simplicity of two slightly oldn painters which largely conditioned the painting of the sixties, for Mark Rothko and Harnett Newman painting was essentially a vehicle ol spiritual concerns and values, an expression "I I a i 1 1 1 as il had indeed been for Pollock. To put it another way, they were romantic artists who aimed to overwhelm the senses with works ol sublime directness. ‘Paintings’, said Rothko, ‘must be like miracles.' In (In' sixties, together with Morris Louis who died in 19(12, they became generally regarded as the high priests ol (lolour I'ield painting, creators of work which effectually challenged architecture in terms ol grand, poised stability. Rothko’s paintings in particular appeared as oases of calm and order, where bars and rectangles, stained into the canvas, hovered in implied space or lay embedded in deep red, closely matching grounds. In Newman's finest panoramic paintings the entire held ol vision was occupied by a single colour, usually reinforced by narrow marginal bands, lie aimed for a dense, well-tended Imish; to him painting was ‘both a solidifying process and an assertion ol freedom ... a denial of dogmatic principles’.
I n some respects Morris I amis combined the qualities of Rothko and Newman. He was at his best working on a large scale and m an ostensibly informal manner, letting stripes stream diagonally across the extremities ol a painting, leaving the centre open and bare, or else sluicing the canvas with huge muted curtain washes, obliterating Ins previous, brighter stains.
for a time Stella, Noland, Jules Olitski (b. 1922), Larry Poons (b. 1937), and in England John Hoyland (b. 1934) and John Walker (b. 1939), I'm t her extended the tradition of Abstract Expressionism by developing the idea ol absolutely straightforward painting, free ol atmospherics and mystic connotations. This short-lived style, because of its smoothness of finish and lack of visibly manual hrushwork, became known as Post-Painterly Abstraction, or Hard Edge painting.
The mood was expansive throughout the sixties. As turnover in modes and motifs accelerated, in a proliferation of targets,
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stripes, chevrons, ;ind shaped c anvascx, paint was sprayed, toileted, and stained, and evn lai get ( an vases hecai nc 1 accepted as the norm. < )lilski, Newman, and lillswot ill Kelly (b i <»'-'>) In rued to sculpture at vaiious limes; and lot a while some sculptor., notably Anthony (into, painted llieii pine:,, giving c olom lorm and a hybrid intensity which soon palled, howevei
Anolhei rapidly developed set ol attempts to accentuate the impact ol painting stemmed Irom an exploitation ol optical sen salions. It was lagged 'Opart'. Vasarely (b ipoH), loi one, had worked within such perceptual terms loi many years and the (iron pc dc Rec herche d'Ail Visuel in Iraure which included Julio I .e Pan (b, and Irancjoii Morellet (b it)vh), logrlliei
with Italian artists like (iianni (lolonibo (b ip'p/j and Albeilo Miasifb. t<H7) ol (iroups I and N, attempled a sysleniali< invesli Ration ol the possibilities in this field I lie British artist Bridget Riley (b. icpji) worked more instinctively, moving Irom dark black and while daz/le to subllei colout modulation s< lieincs liventually 1 lie overlapping modes ol ( )p art and Post Paintri ly Abstiac (ion soon bred 01 provoked < nun In re.n lion, I lie paint' i s who had made the greatest initial impact, Noland, Stella, and Riley in particular, went on to develop refined and in many instances sweetened variants ol their pioneering work Images tended to become less defined, atmospherics and painlerlinexs were- bac k. Stella translated Ins shaped painted canvases, first
292 Reduction
BARNETT NEWMAN
Who’s Afraid of Red , Yellow and Blue III. ig66 7
into stuffed reliefs, then into wooden equivalents. Painting in such terms entered its inevitable mannerist phase, becoming all too easily a matter of taste, a matter of mere technical accomplishment, a means of dazzling and beguiling the eye. At its best, however, and particularly when the scale was so vast that the spectator could drown in it, this line of painting made a direct sensual impact.
In opposition to the lavish use of material, another tendency developed, a way of painting according to a systematic set procedure that turned away from lusciousness of paint to make painting a more cerebral activity. The idea was to push painting to its farthest limits by reducing it to its bare essentials. It was not a new aim, and once again its roots can be traced back to Duchamp and his maxim ‘Reduce, reduce, reduce.’
Symptomatic of this process of reduction has been the regular appearance of monochrome paintings: every modern generation (beginning with Malevich) has produced its own brand of white paintings. Although the motivations differ, there is often an element of puristic purging of other painters’ excesses in this. Sometimes there have been bridging moments, in which white
was used, but the value of the material was not denied. In 1931, for instance, Robert Rauschenberg, most sensual of painters, produced his White Paintings. These were surfaces intended as screens on which shadows could fall: plain backdrops, in other words. At the same time Ad Reinhardt (1913-67) took to monochromatism, and pushed cerebrality to an extreme. He moved systematically towards the paintings he called his Ultimate Black Paintings. His last years were spent on these, and they were accompanied by statements, written theories and epigrams which were to influence the generation that followed.
There is a line that continues into the seventies to reappear in so-called Post-Conceptual painting, to which we will return. But it should be borne in mind that this tendency towards Minimalism minimal colour and minimal image-—was going on in America and Europe at the same time as full-blown Colour Field painting and the figurative imagery of Pop art. In America the systematic retreat from colour interplays and extravagances in scale and procedure was to find characteristically direct expression in the work of Robert Ryman (b. 1930) and Sol LeWitt (b. 1928). In Europe there was a parallel process of paring away.
294 Materialistic and Philosophical Approaches
Although the visual results were superficially similar, the attitudes of Yves Klein (1928-62) and the New Realists (see page 306) in France, of Francesco Lo Savio (1935-63) and Piero Manzoni l 1 933-63) in Italy, and of Peter Roehr (1944-68), Gotthard Graubner (b.1930), and the Zero Group in Germany, belonged more to a philosophical framework than did those of their American counterparts.
For such American artists the concern was mainly with the surface of the canvas and with the nature of the pigment applied to it. Theirs could be characterized as a materialistic approach, an investigation of the facts of a two-dimensional surface. The language of painting, in other words, could be pared down to concentrate simply on the relationships between colours and shapes. For a painter like Frank Stella the art-work needed no further justification: it simply existed. ‘It’s just there’ became the catch-phrase, and the spectator was expected to respond physically, perceiving the painting only on the visual evidence of what was there, without looking for any other kind of meaning.
For the European artists of the same generation, many of whom died tragically young, meaning remained very important, and the intention was often highly idealistic. The painted surface was still very much the conveyor of messages, to a degree which would have embarrassed an American counterpart. In Europe in the sixties the process of reduction had more in common with Malevich’s Suprematism than with the factuality of American Minimalism. The surface had to be simplified to remove unnecessary distractions from the central preoccupation. In some cases the sensation of space was as important as it had been for Malevich. Where Malevich had an intuitive and philosophical feeling for infinite space, the young painters of this generation had the additional evidence of technological experiments in space. In some ways their attempt to produce an equivalent in painting for sensations of infinity and timelessness was just as much a reaction to modern society as was the depiction of urban technology undertaken by the Pop artists. But it was utterly opposed both to that kind of imitation of external reality and to the
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materialism and hard fact of, say, Stella. An element of alchemy survived in European art, and with it a special kind of feeling for man’s relationship to materials, shapes, and colours, and for the meanings of these. Therefore art in Europe sought for an extended meaning, not an ever more specialized language of form. But both these tendencies of tht' sixties, the materialistic and the philosophical, were to be equally influential on a subsequent generation.
There were two American artists whose work provoked great excitement and outrage in the late fifties: Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Although their painting was lain con fused for a time with Pop art, in retrospect it can be seen to combine all the main tendencies of these years, and this is why their influence proved so pervasive. Perhaps their chief distinction in common was that they appeared to ignore or overlook the tradi tional boundaries between painting and sculpture. Johns achieved the goal of‘reduction’ bv presenting flat commonplaces as images: targets, maps, the Stars and Stripes. These were intended neither as still-life nor as abstraction; nor did they have anything to do with Cubism's working arrangement of both. Each painting was a record of assimilation, digestion, adjustment. Each one became
an object, camouflaged, embalmed, and enshrined. Schwitters, Duchamp, Pollock were synthesized: for Johns was at once a neo-Dadaist, a neo-Realist (see page 306) and a second-wave Abstract Impressionist. Each of his early paintings served as a prototype; and he became perhaps the single most influential artist of die decade. On the one hand, he worked on the edge of the systematic reductive field and, on the other, he was among the first to anticipate an injection of fresh and everyday figuration into the confines of fine art.
Even before Johns, Robert Rauschenberg had investigated the possibilities of reductive painting, with canvases that are principally white or black. From this he moved on to the rich and complex play of imagery and colour that made his major works of the early sixties into elaborate collages of life. Where Johns tended to present a single head-on object, Rauschenberg built up teeming inventories combining highly gestural brushstrokes and photo-silkscreened images. This ambiguity was logically extended into the ‘combine' paintings, in which he too broke
through the traditional two-dimensional definition of painting to combine fiat-painted areas with provocative three-dimensional objects: a stuffed goat, a chicken, or a dishevelled bed.
By 1963 the phenonemon that was readily packaged and labelled Top art’ had emerged. It was centred on London and New York and brought together those artists who for a number of years had been fascinated by the idea of reprocessing popular imagery. At the start there appeared to be an element of calculated outrage in their work, aimed at upsetting prevailing fine art values and providing a radical alternative. However, Andy Warhol’s (b. c. 1928) adoption of Campbell’s Soup cans as the stuff of still-life, and Roy Lichtenstein’s (b. 1923) adaption of comic-strip techniques and situations, stemmed not so much from a desire to shock as from an urge to exploit the formal potential of brash commercial graphics. James Rosenquist (b. 1933) exploited the imagery and technique of billboard painting, acting in effect as a figurative Colour Field painter. He dr ew on his training as a sign painter in much the same way as Warhol applied his experience as a commercial graphic artist. Tom Wesselmann (b. 1931) specialized in a kitch enette-Matisse manner, reflecting in turn his training as a cartoonist and often moving beyond the two-dimensionality of the painting to incorporate elements of household furniture, from shower curtains to lavatory seats.
Andy Warhol emerged as the most deliberately enigmatic of Pop artists. He used photographs of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, an electric chair, flowers, two-dollar bills, Jackie Kennedy, race riots, the Xlona Lisa , and Chairman Mao, processing them into contemporary icons. ‘All painting is fact, and that is enough,’ he said; ‘the paintings are charged with their very presence.’ To emphasize his detachment from any emotive content in these images, he silkscreened them on to canvas in batches, implying that they could be repeated ad infinitum.
British Pop may have lacked the glamour, drama, and market impact of the American varieties, but is said to have started earlier. It can be traced back to the forties, and the Scottish sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi’s (b. 1924) passion for the pulp imagery of
sol lewitt Wall Drawing
comics and science fiction. Equally, in 1957, Richard Hamilton (b. 1922) listed the qualities of existing mass-media imagery (to which he gave the name of Pop) as:
Popular (designed for a mass audience)
Transient (short-term solution)
Expendable (easily forgotten)
Low-cost
Mass-produced
Young (aimed at youth)