art 176 2

Monogram 1955 oil, collage, goat, tire and mixed media on canvas pop new york, united states -------------

more yellow

water lillies c. 1915-1926 oil on canvas impressionism france ----- narration / virtual walk through

no lilly pads

Dance 1909 oil on canvas fauvist France ------------ A final work that we might consider by Matisse can be seen in the image here, one which also conceptually relates a musical sensibility. While it depicts in a basic way a dance, it does not make any remote overtures toward portraying specific dancers; it's instead an invocation of the mood of dance, the essence of dance, which has been given here a visual equivalent. The figures therefore are symbols of dancing, and because they are only figurative identities, they are subject to a lack of concrete visual definition as well, rendered as basic, curving shapes of color, and set into an unspecified and universal space, a conceptual place rather than a literal one. In the work of early 20th-century painters like Matisse, then, we arrive at something of an extreme point, in the steady reduction of painted forms into things like minimized and collapsed silhouettes, though still without arriving at total abstraction. While we have seen that some of the work of these painters continued to face challenges in reception, this will also be a time in which the recognition of self-consciously modern forms of art will come to drastically change as well. In the recent decades and through the efforts of the different ambassadors of new art ideas that we've seen, the public also began slowly to take note, so that by the time artists like Matisse, or his contemporary Picasso, enter the fray, we find that they will have a very different experience than some of the Realists, Impressionists or Post-Impressionists who cleared paths before them. The reason for this is that in some circles, the avant-garde came now to be regarded the sort of freshest taste, and the most sophisticated cultural fashion. This vaunting of experimental art has extended all the way into our contemporary art world, in which the most influential galleries, dealers or artists often are so because of a reputation or unearthing the "next big thing," so to speak. It's a changing perception - an in-the-know quality - which comes to take wider shape in the art world here in the opening of the 20th century, and which will concretize as a hip subculture in the decades to follow.

blue

Untitled 1974 Brass minimalism New York, United states ----- An example of work by one of the most well-known Minimalist artists of the time can be seen in the image here. Donald Judd worked in the language of pure basic geometry, attempting to create independent objects with no reference to anything outside of them. He typically worked therefore in the most fundamental of shapes, and in a pared down compositional manner that involved merely lining things up, in which simple repetition worked to negate the idea of individual expression. Thus, these were not to his mind "sculptures" - attributes of the fine art world - but simply objects in the environment to be met like any other. Judd said for example that "a shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole." Judd's choice of materials also often served to remove the encounter with these objects from the expectations of fine art. He made them often out of things like steel, aluminum, brass, unadorned wood, or Plexiglas. Eventually, the objects were even constructed by outside manufacturers - following the artist's designs, but not of his hand - further escaping from the understanding of the work as a distinguished artifact. For Judd, the benefit of all this was that the art would be more truthful - there would be no illusion involved in the object. To his mind, traditional art forms pretended to be something that they weren't; here, the objects were simply themselves. According to this philosophy, while the art produced an experience, it did not dictate the parameters of it, nor what kind of importance might be found therein. It's an undefined kind of exchange which again needs not even be emotional in its disposition, aiming instead simply for objectivity.

gold boxes

Map 1961 Encaustic, oil, and collage on canvas pop New York, us ------- The turn to the social surface, and the establishment of Pop. It's hard really to overestimate the impact that the ideas of Abstract Expressionism had on the world of avant-garde art, representing as it did the next major step in the redefinition of painting in particular, and its role. In the years that followed its establishment though, there were artists also working in those modes who started to sense that the investigation had been taken as far as it could go, and so the next revolutions in western art will eventually come - in both look and focus - to be in quite drastic opposition to what we saw in the kind of art just considered. In fact, the turn away from those priorities was a conscious one, and so in some ways Abstract Expressionism was as much a force in art history for the profound reactions to it that it later engendered. The main shift from those alternate worlds of painting that we discussed will come first, in the late '50s into the 1960s, in the form of a renewed consideration of the tangible experience - the actual, physical experience - of society. So whereas Abstract Expressionists funneled their passionate expressive energy into burrowing beneath the surface of the mundane existence, the artists who sought out new avenues after them began later to stare instead right at that very surface, to see what those real-life happenings could tell us about the desires and social complexities of the real, functioning contemporary world. So there will start to be a new and heightened awareness of the concrete and the tangible, which was felt to have been neglected within Abstract Expressionism, in its endless pursuit for the purely emotional. And as this change took firmer and firmer hold over the next couple of decades, its attention came to be more and more honed in on especially the most immediate and superficial layer of society, casting a light on cultural conditions of materialism and commercialism, which will herald the onset of Pop art proper. We will start the transition by looking first at a couple of progenitors, or predecessors to Pop, like Jasper Johns here, who was intrigued by the forceful assertion of material that some of the Abstract Expressionists had introduced, but instead of using that technique to dive further into an abstract zone, Johns conjured up within this style the symbols of everyday life instead, using these striking canvases not to transcend, but to call attention to the interaction with familiar things. His subject matter therefore become conspicuously banal, and included iconography like maps, targets, money, flags, parts of nondescript faces, and sometimes even just series of letters or numbers - things frequently seen in our real lived lives, but complacently so, without noticing.

red, blue, green