Ch 25
Ludwig Miles van der Rohe and Philip Johnson Massive, sleek, and geometrically rigid, this modernist skyscraper has a bronze and glass skin masking its concrete-and-steel frame. The giant corporate tower appears to rise from the pavement on stilts.
Seagram Building
Frank Lloyd Wright Using reinforced concrete almost as a sculptor might use resilient clay, Wright designed a snail shell-shaped museum with a winding, gently inclined interior ramp for the display of artworks.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Philip Johnson & John Burgee In a startling shift of style, modernist Johnson (fig. 25-43) designed this postmodern skyscraper with more granite than glass and with a variation on a classical pediment as the crowning motif.
Sony Building (formerly AT&T building)
Robert Smithson Smithson used industrial equipment to create environmental artworks by manipulating earth and rock. Spiral Jetty is a mammoth coil of black basalt, limestone, and earth extending into Great Salt Lake.
Spiral Jetty
Duane Hanson Hanson used molds from live models to create his Superrealistic life-size painted plaster sculptures. His aim was to capture the emptiness and loneliness of average Americans in familiar settings.
Supermarket Shopper
Joern Utzon The soaring clusters of concrete shells of Utzon's opera house on an immense platform in Sydney's harbor suggest both the buoyancy of seabird wings and the billowing sails of tall ships.
Sydney Opera House
Eero Saarinen Saarinen based the design for this airline terminal on the theme of motion. The concrete-and-glass building's dramatic, sweeping, curvilinear rooflines suggest expansive wings and flight.
Terminal 5
Judy Chicago Chicago's Dinner Party honors 39 women from antiquity to 20th-century America. The triangular form and the materials—painted china and fabric—are traditionally associated with women.
The Dinner Party
Bruce Nauman Nauman explores his interest in language and wordplay in his art. He described this Conceptual neon sculpture's emphatic assertion as "a totally silly idea," but an idea he believed.
The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths
Helen Frankenthaler Frankenthaler and other color-field painters poured paint onto unprimed canvas, allowing the pigments to soak into the fabric. Their works underscore that a painting is simply pigment on a flat surface.
The bay
Jasper Johns American Pop artist Jasper Johns wanted to draw attention to common objects people view frequently but rarely scrutinize. He made many paintings of targets, flags, numbers, and alphabets.
Three Flags
Louise Nevelson The monochromatic color scheme unifies the diverse sculpted forms and found objects in Nevelson's "walls" and creates a mysterious field of shapes and shadows suggesting magical environments.
Tropical Garden II
Cindy Sherman Sherman here assumed a role for one of 80 photographs resembling film stills in which she addressed the way women have been presented in Western art for the enjoyment of the "male gaze."
Untitled Film Still #35
Donald Judd Judd's Minimalist sculpture incorporates boxes fashioned from undisguised industrial materials. The artist used Plexiglas because its translucency gives the viewer access to the work's interior.
Untitled, 1969
Robert Venturi Venturi asserted form should be separate from function and structure. In this house, the facade features an oversized roof recalling a classical temple, but split open at the middle and combined with an arch over the door.
Vanna Venturi House
Nam June Paik Korean-born video artist Paik's best-known work is a cascade of fragmented sequences of performances and commercials intended as a sample of the rich worldwide television menu of the future.
Video still from Global Groove
Jean Dubuffet Dubuffet expressed a tortured vision of the world through thickly encrusted painted sur- faces and crude images of the kind children and the insane produce. He called it "art brut"—untaught and coarse art.
Vie Inquiete
Barnett Newman Newman's canvases consist of a single slightly modulated color field split by "zips" (narrow bands) running from one edge of the painting to the other, energizing the color field and giving it scale.
Vir Heroicus Sublimis
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Consisting of nine black aluminum and smoked glass shafts soaring to 110 stories, the Willis (Sears) Tower dominates Chicago's skyline. It was the world's tallest building at the time of its construction.
Willis Tower (formerly Sears tower)
Willem de Kooning Although rooted in figuration, including pictures of female models on advertising billboards, de Kooning's Woman I displays the energetic application of pigment typical of gestural abstraction.
Woman I
Ellsworth Kelly Hard-edge painting is one variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction. Kelly used razor-sharp edges and clearly delineated areas of color to distill painting to its essential two- dimensional elements.
red, blue, green
Magdalena Abakanowicz Polish fiber artist Abakanowicz explored the stoic, everyday toughness of the human spirit in this group of nearly identical sculptures that serve as symbols of distinctive individuals lost in the crowd.
80 backs
Miriam Schapiro Schapiro calls her huge sewn collages femmages to make the point that women had been doing collages of fabric long before Picasso (fig. 24-16). This femmage incorporates patterns from Japanese kimonos.
Anatomy of a Kimono
Chuck Close Close's goal was to translate photographic information into painted information. In his por- traits, he deliberately avoided creative compo- sitions, flattering lighting effects, and revealing facial expressions.
Big Self-Portrait
Robert Raushenberg Rauschenberg's "combines" intersperse painted passages with sculptural elements. Canyon incorporates pigment on canvas with pieces of printed paper, photographs, a pillow, and a stuffed eagle.
Canyon
Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano The architects fully exposed the anatomy of this six-level building, as in the century-earlier Crystal Palace (fig. 22-47), and color-coded the internal parts according to function, as in a factory.
Centre Georges Pompidou
David Smith David Smith designed his abstract metal sculptures of simple geometric forms to reflect the natural light and color of their outdoor settings, not the sterile illumination of a museum gallery.
Cubi XII
Louise Bourgeois Bourgeois's sculptures are made up of sensuous organic forms that recall the Biomorphic Surrealist forms of Miró (fig. 24-58). Although the shapes remain abstract, they refer strongly to human figures
Cumul I
Tony Smith By rejecting illusionism and symbolism and reducing sculpture to basic geometric forms, Minimalist Tony Smith emphasized the "objecthood" and concrete tangibility of his sculptures.
Die
Bridget Riley Op Art paintings create the illusion of motion and depth using only geometric forms. The effect can be disorienting. The pattern of black dots in Riley's Fission appears to cave in at the center.
Fission
Ana Mendieta In this earth/body sculpture, Mendieta appears covered with flowers in a grave- or womblike cavity to address issues of birth and death, as well as the human connection to the earth.
Flowers on Body
Arshile Gorky Gorky's paintings of the 1940s, which still incorporate recognizable forms, are the bridge between the Bio- morphic Surrealist canvases of Miró and the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Pollock.
Garden in Sochi
Andy Warhol Warhol was the quintessential American Pop artist. Here, he selected an icon of mass-produced, consumer culture, and then multiplied it, reflecting Coke's omnipresence in American society.
Green Coca-Cola Bottles
Eva Hesse Hesse created spare and simple sculptures with parts extending into the room. She wanted her works to express the strangeness and absurdity she considered the central conditions of modern life.
Hang-Up
Jean Tinguely Tinguely produced motor-driven devices pro- grammed to make instant abstract paintings. To explore the notion of destruction as an act of creation, he designed this one to perform and then destroy itself.
Homage to New York
Roy Lichtenstein Comic books appealed to Lichtenstein because they were a mainstay of popular culture, meant to be read and discarded. The Pop artist immortalized their images on large canvases.
Hopeless
Joseph Beuys In this one-person event, Beuys coated his head with honey and gold leaf. Assuming the role of a shaman, he used stylized actions to evoke a sense of mystery and sacred ritual.
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
Hans Namuth "Gestural abstraction" nicely describes Pollock's working tech- nique. Using sticks or brushes, he flung, poured, and dripped paint onto a section of canvas he simply unrolled across his studio floor.
Jackson Pollock painting in his studio
Claes Oldenburg Designed as a speaker's platform for antiwar protesters, Lipstick humorously combines phallic and militaristic imagery. Originally the lipstick tip was soft red vinyl and had to be inflated.
Lipstick(Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks
Alberto Giacometti The writer Jean- Paul Sartre saw Giacometti's thin and virtually feature- less sculpted figures as the epitome of existentialist humanity—alienated, solitary, and lost in the world's immensity.
Man Pointing no.5
Audrey Flack Flack's pioneering Photorealist still lifes record objects with great optical fidelity. Marilyn alludes to Dutch vanitas paintings (fig. 20-1) and incorporates multiple references to the transience of life.
Marilyn, 1977
Frank Stella Stella tried to achieve purity in painting using evenly spaced pinstripes on colored grounds. His canvases have no central focus, no painterly or expressive elements, and no tactile quality.
Mas o Menos
Carolee Schneemann In her performances, Schneemann transformed the nature of Performance Art by introducing a feminist dimension through the use of her body (often nude) to challenge traditional gender roles.
Meat Joy, 1964
Minor White White's "straight photograph" of a natural rock formation is also an abstract composition of jagged shapes and contrasts of light and dark reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist action paintings.
Moencopi Strata, Capitol Reef
Lucian Freud Freud's brutally realistic portrait of an unnamed woman lying on a bed in an awkward position gives the impression the viewer is an intruder in a private space, but the setting is the artist's studio.
Naked Portrait
Mark Rothko Rothko's chromatic abstractionist paintings—consisting of hazy rectangles of pure color hovering in front of a colored background—are composition- ally simple but compelling visual experiences.
No. 14
David Em Unlike video recording, computer graphic art enables the creation of wholly invented forms, as in painting. Em builds fantastic digital images of imaginary landscapes out of tiny boxes called pixels.
Nora
Le Corbusier The organic forms of Le Corbusier's mountaintop chapel at Ronchamp present a fusion of architecture and sculpture. The heavy sprayed concrete walls enclose an intimate and mysteriously lit interior that has the aura of a sacred cave.
Notre-Dame-du_Haut
Jackson Pollock Pollock's paintings emphasize the creative process. His mural-size canvases consist of rhythmic drips, splatters, and dribbles of paint that envelop viewers, drawing them into a lacy spider web.
Number 1
Joseph Kosuth Conceptual artists regard the concept as an artwork's defining component. To portray "chairness," Kosuth juxtaposed a chair, a photograph of the chair, and a dictionary definition of chair.
One and Three Chairs
Francis Bacon Painted in the aftermath of World War II, this intentionally revolting image of a powerful figure presiding over a slaughter is Bacon's indictment of humanity and a reflection of war's butchery.
Painting
Charles Moore Moore's circular postmodern Italian plaza incorporates elements drawn from ancient Roman architecture with the instability of Mannerist designs and modern stainless-steel columns with neon collars.
Piazza d'Italia
Michael Graves In this early example of postmodern architecture, Graves reasserted the horizontality and solidity of the wall. He drew attention to the mural surfaces through polychromy and ornamental motifs.
Portland Building
Hannah Wilke In this photographic series, Wilke posed topless decorated with chewing-gum sculptures of vulvas, which allude to female pleasure, but also to pain, because they resemble scars.
S.O.S. Starification Object Series
Morris Louis Louis created his color- field paintings by holding up the canvas edges and pouring diluted acrylic resin to produce billowy, fluid, transparent shapes running down the length of the fabric.
Saraband
