study set for section 9

WILLEM DE KOONING

WILLEM DE KOONING Despite the public's skepticism about Pollock's art, other artists enthusiastically pursued similar avenues of expression. Dutch-born Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) also developed a gestural abstractionist style. Even his images rooted in figuration, such as Woman I (fig. 15-6), display the sweeping gestural brushstrokes and energetic application of pigment typical of gestural abstraction. Out of the jumbled array of slashing lines and agitated patches of color appears a ferocious-looking woman with staring eyes and ponderous breasts. Her toothy smile, inspired by an ad for Camel cigarettes, seems to devolve into a grimace. Female models on advertising billboards partly inspired Woman I and de Kooning's other paintings of women, which he considered generic fertility goddesses or a satiric inversion of the traditional image of Venus, goddess of love. Process was important to de Kooning, as it was for Pollock. Continually working on Woman I for almost two years, de Kooning painted an image and then scraped it away the next day and began anew. His wife, Elaine, also an accomplished painter, estimated that he painted approximately 200 scraped-away images of women on this canvas before settling on the final one.

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-1952. Oil on canvas, 6' 3 7 8" × 4' 10". Museum of Modern Art, New York. 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.

AUDREY FLACK

AUDREY FLACK One of Superrealism's pioneers was Audrey Flack (b. 1931), who was intrigued by both the formal and technical qualities of photography. For paintings such as Marilyn (fig. 15-21), Flack first projected a photograph onto the canvas. By next using an airbrush (a device originally designed as a photoretouching tool that sprays paint with compressed air), she could duplicate the smooth gradations of tone and color found in photographs. Most of her paintings are still lifes that present the viewer with a collection of familiar objects painted with great optical fidelity. Marilyn is a still life incorporating photographs of the face of Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962). It is a poignant commentary on Monroe's tragic life and differs markedly from Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (fig. 15-19A ), which celebrates celebrity and makes no allusion to the death of the glamorous star. Flack's still life includes multiple references to death and alludes to Dutch vanitas paintings (fig. 10-26). The fresh fruit, hourglass, burning candle, watch, and calendar all refer to the passage of time and the transience of life.

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing No. 5, 1947. Bronze, 5' 10" high. Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines (Nathan Emory Coffin Collection). The writer Jean-Paul Sartre saw Giacometti's thin and virtually featureless sculpted figures as the personification of existentialist humanity—alienated, solitary, and lost in the world's immensity

Andy Warho

Andy Warhol, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962. Oil on canvas, 6' 10 12" × 4' 9". Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 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.

Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky, Garden in Sochi, ca. 1943. Oil on canvas, 2' 7" × 3' 3". Museum of Modern Art, New York (acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest). Gorky's paintings of the 1940s, which still incorporate recognizable forms, are the bridge between the Biomorphic Surrealist canvases of Miró and the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Pollock.

Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack, Marilyn, 1977. Oil over acrylic on canvas, 8' × 8'. University of Arizona Museum, Tucson (museum purchase with funds provided by the Edward J. Gallagher Jr. Memorial Fund). Flack's pioneering Photorealist still lifes record objects with great optical fidelity. Marilyn alludes to Dutch vanitas paintings (fig. 10-26) and incorporates multiple references to the transience of life.

BRIDGET RILEY

BRIDGET RILEY The artist whose name is synonymous with Op Art is the British painter Bridget Riley (b. 1931), who developed her signature black-and-white Op Art style in the early 1960s. Her paintings—for example, Fission (fig. 15-10)—came to the public's attention after being featured in the December 1964 issue of Life magazine. The publicity unleashed a craze for Op Art designs in clothing. In 1965, the exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art bestowed an official stamp of approval on the movement. In Fission, Riley filled the canvas with black dots of varied sizes and shapes, creating the illusion of a pulsating surface that caves in at the center (hence the painting's title). The effect on the viewer of Op Art paintings such as this one is disorienting and sometimes disturbing, and some works can even induce motion sickness. Thoroughly modernist is the Op artist's insistence that a painting is a two-dimensional surface covered with pigment and not a representation of any person, object, or place. Nonetheless, the Op Art movement embraced the Renaissance notion that the painter can create the illusion of depth through perspective.

Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley, Fission, 1963. Tempera on composition board, 2' 11" × 2' 10". Museum of Modern Art, New York (gift of Philip Johnson). 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.

CHUCK CLOSE

CHUCK CLOSE Also usually considered a Superrealist is Seattleborn Chuck Close (b. 1940), best known for his large-scale portraits, such as Big Self-Portrait (fig. 15-22). However, Close felt that his connection to the Photorealists was tenuous, because for him, realism was not an end in itself but rather the result of an intellectually rigorous, systematic approach to painting

CLAES OLDENBURG

CLAES OLDENBURG In the 1960s, Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) also produced Pop artworks that incisively commented on American consumer culture, but his medium was sculpture. Born in Sweden, Oldenburg graduated from Yale University in 1950. He is best known for his mammoth outdoor sculptures—for example, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (fig. 15-20), which, at the request of a group of graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture, he created (in secret and without a fee) as a gift to his alma mater. He installed the 21-foot-tall sculpture on Ascension Day, May 15, 1969, on Beinecke Plaza across from the office of the university's president, the site of many raucous protests against the Vietnam War. Oldenburg's characteristic humor emerges unmistakably in the combination of phallic and militaristic imagery, especially in the double irony of the "phallus" being a woman's cosmetic item, and the Caterpillar-type endless-loop metal tracks suggesting not

CLEMENT GREENBERG

CLEMENT GREENBERG The few traces of representational art in Gorky's work disappeared in Abstract Expressionism. As the name suggests, the artists associated with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism produced paintings that are, for the most part, abstract but express the artist's state of mind, with the goal also of striking emotional chords in the viewer. The most important champion of this strict formalism—an emphasis on an artwork's visual elements rather than its subject—was the American art critic Clement Greenberg (see page 358), who wielded considerable influence from the 1940s through the 1970s. Greenberg helped redefine the parameters of modernism by advocating the rejection of illusionism and the exploration of the properties of each artistic medium. So dominant was Greenberg that scholars often refer to the general modernist tenets during this period as Greenbergian formalism. Greenberg championed abstraction because he believed that it represented purity in art. He thought that artists should strive for a more explicit focus on the properties exclusive to each medium— for example, flatness in painting and three-dimensionality in sculpture. Greenberg argued that a modernist work of art must try, in principle, to avoid communication with any order of experience not inherent in the most literally and essentially construed nature of its medium. Among other things, this means renouncing illusion and explicit subject matter. The arts are to achieve concreteness, "purity," by dealing solely with their respective selves—that is, by becoming "abstract" or nonfigurative.2 The Abstract Expressionist movement developed along two lines—gestural abstraction and chromatic abstraction. The gestural abstractionists relied on the expressiveness of energetically applied pigment. In contrast, the chromatic abstractionists focused on color's emotional resonance.

Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy (performance at Judson Church, New York City), 1964. 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.

Chuck Close

Chuck Close, Big Self-Portrait, 1967-1968. Acrylic on canvas, 8' 11" × 6' 11". Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1969). Close's goal was to translate photographic information into painted information. In his portraits, he deliberately avoided creative compositions, flattering lighting effects, and revealing facial expressions.

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #35, 1979. Gelatin silverprint, 10" × 8". Private collection. Sherman here assumed a role for one of a series 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."

Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969; reworked, 1974. Painted steel, aluminum, and fiberglass, 21' high. Morse College, Yale University, New Haven (gift of Colossal Keepsake Corporation). 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.

DAVID SMITH

DAVID SMITH Sculptor David Smith (1906-1965) produced metal sculptures that have affinities with the Abstract Expressionist movement in painting. In the 1960s, he created a series of largescale works called Cubi that he intended to be seen in the open air (see "David Smith on Outdoor Sculpture" ). Cubi XII (fig. 15-11), a characteristic example, consists of simple geometric forms—cubes and rectangular bars. Made of stainless-steel sections piled on top of one another, often at unstable angles, and then welded together, the Cubi sculptures make a striking visual statement.

DONALD JUDD

DONALD JUDD A predominantly sculptural movement that emerged in the 1960s among artists seeking Greenbergian purity of form was Minimalism. Minimalist artworks generally lack identifiable subjects, colors, surface textures, and narrative elements. By rejecting illusionism and reducing sculpture to basic geometric forms, Minimalists emphasized their art's "objecthood" and concrete tangibility. In so doing, they reduced experience to its most fundamental level. Two of the leading Minimalist sculptors were Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988; fig. 15-11A ) and Missouri native Donald Judd (1928-1994), who produced most of his major works in New York City. Judd's determination to arrive at a visual vocabulary devoid of deception or ambiguity propelled him away from representation and toward precise and simple sculpture. For Judd, a work's power derived from its character as a whole and from the specificity of its materials. Untitled (fig. 15-12) presents basic geometric boxes constructed of brass and red Plexiglas, undisguised by paint or other materials. The artist did not intend the work to be metaphorical or symbolic. It is a straightforward declaration of sculpture's objecthood. Judd used Plexiglas because its translucency enables the viewer access to the interior, thereby rendering the sculpture both open and enclosed. This aspect of the design reflects Judd's desire to banish ambiguity or falseness from his works.

DUANE HANSON

DUANE HANSON Not surprisingly, many sculptors also were Superrealists, including Duane Hanson (1925-1996), who perfected a casting technique that enabled him to create life-size sculptures that many viewers mistake at first for real people. Hanson began by making plaster molds from live models and then filled the molds with polyester resin. After the resin hardened, he removed the outer molds and cleaned and painted the sculptures with an airbrush, and added wigs, clothes, and other accessories. These works, such as Supermarket Shopper (fig. 15-23), depict stereotypical average Americans, striking chords with the public precisely because of their familiarity. Hanson explained: The subject matter that I like best deals with the familiar lower and middle-class American types of today. To me, the resignation, emptiness and loneliness of their existence captures the true reality of life for these people. . . . I want to achieve a certain tough realism which speaks of the fascinating idiosyncrasies of our time.

David Smith

David Smith, Cubi XII, 1963. Stainless steel, 9' 15 8" high. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1972). © Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. 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.

Donald Judd

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969. Brass and colored fluorescent Plexiglas on steel brackets, 10 units 6 1 8" × 2' × 2' 3" each, with 6" intervals. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972). © Donald Judd Estate/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. By rejecting illusionism and symbolism and reducing sculpture to basic geometric forms, Donald Judd and other Minimalist artists emphasized the "objecthood" and concrete tangibility of their works.

Duane Hanson

Duane Hanson, Supermarket Shopper, 1970. Polyester resin and fiberglass polychromed in oil, with clothing, steel cart, and groceries, life-size. Nachfolgeinstitut, Neue Galerie, Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen. © Estate of Duane Hanson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Hanson used molds from live models to create his Superrealist life-size painted plaster sculptures. His aim was to capture the emptiness and loneliness of average Americans in familiar settings.

FRANK STELLA

FRANK STELLA Attempting to arrive at pure painting, the PostPainterly Abstractionists distilled painting down to its essential elements, producing spare, elemental images. One variant of PostPainterly Abstraction was hard-edge painting. Its leading exponent was Frank Stella (b. 1936). In works such as Mas o Menos (More or Less; fig. 15-8), Stella eliminated many of the variables associated with painting. His simplified compositions of thin, evenly spaced pinstripes on colored grounds have no central focus, no painterly or expressive elements, only limited surface modulation, and no tactile quality. Stella's systematic method of painting illustrates Greenberg's insistence on purity in art. The artist's own famous comment on his work, "What you see is what you see," reinforces the notions that painters interested in producing advanced art must reduce their work to its essential elements and that the viewer must acknowledge that a painting is simply pigment on a flat surface.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946. Oil and pastel on linen, 6' 5 7 8" × 4' 4". Museum of Modern Art, New York. Painted in the aftermath of World War II, this intentionally repulsive image of a powerful figure presiding over a slaughter is a reflection of war's butchery. It is Bacon's indictment of humanity

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (looking southeast), New York, 1943-1959. 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 (fig. 16-28) for the display of artworks.

Frank Stella

Frank Stella, Mas o Menos (More or Less), 1964. Metallic powder in acrylic emulsion on canvas, 9' 10" × 13' 8 1 2". Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (purchase 1983 with the participation of Scaler Foundation). In his hard-edge paintings, Stella tried to achieve purity using evenly spaced pinstripes on colored grounds. His canvases have no central focus, no painterly or expressive elements, and no tactile quality.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

HELEN FRANKENTHALER Color-field painting, another variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction, also emphasized painting's basic properties. However, rather than produce sharp, unmodulated shapes as the hard-edge artists had done, the color-field painters poured diluted paint onto unprimed canvas and allowed the pigments to soak in. No other painting method results in such literal flatness. The images created, such as The Bay (fig. 15-9) by Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), appear spontaneous and almost accidental (see "Helen Frankenthaler on Color-Field Painting," below)

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963. Acrylic on canvas, 6' 8 7 8" × 6' 9 7 8". Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit. Frankenthaler and other color-field painters poured paint onto plain canvas, allowing the pigments to soak into the fabric. Her works underscore that a painting simply pigments on a flat surface.

JACKSON POLLOCK

JACKSON POLLOCK The artist whose work best exemplifies gestural abstraction is Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), who developed his signature style in the mid-1940s. By 1950, Pollock had refined his technique and was producing large-scale abstract paintings, such as Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist; fig. 15-5), which consist of rhythmic drips, splatters, and dribbles of paint. The mural-sized fields of energetic skeins of pigment envelop viewers, drawing them into a lacy spider web. Using sticks or brushes, Pollock flung, poured, and dripped paint (not only traditional oil paints but aluminum paints and household enamels as well) onto a section of canvas that he simply unrolled across his studio floor. This working method earned Pollock the derisive nickname "Jack the Dripper." Responding to the image as it developed, he created art that was spontaneous yet choreographed. Pollock's painting technique highlights the most significant aspect of gestural abstraction—its emphasis on the creative process. Indeed, Pollock literally immersed himself in the painting during its creation (see "Jackson Pollock on Action Painting," above). Art historians have linked his ideas about improvisation in the creative process to his interest in what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) called the collective unconscious. Pollock's reliance on improvisation and the subconscious has parallels in Surrealism and the work of Vassily Kandinsky (fig. 14-5), whom critics described as an Abstract Expressionist as early as 1919.

JASPER JOHNS

JASPER JOHNS Although Pop Art originated in England, the movement found its greatest success in the United States, in large part because the more fully matured American consumer culture provided a fertile environment for the movement. Indeed, Independent Group members claimed that their inspiration came from Hollywood, Detroit, and New York's Madison Avenue, paying homage to America's predominance in the realms of mass media, mass production, and advertising. One of the artists pivotal to the early development of American Pop Art was Jasper Johns (b. 1930), who moved to New York City in 1952. Johns sought to draw attention to common objects in the world—what he called things "seen but not looked at."6 To this end, he did several series of paintings of numbers, letters, flags, and maps of the United States. In Three Flags (fig. 15-16), Johns painted a trio of overlapping American banners of decreasing size, reversing traditional perspective. By reducing the American flag to a repetitive pattern, Johns drained meaning from the patriotic emblem. This is not the flag itself but three pictures of a flag in one. Nonetheless, the heritage of Abstract Expressionism is still apparent in Johns's choice of medium—encaustic, an ancient method of painting with liquid wax and dissolved pigment (fig. 3-42), here mixed with newsprint. Thus the flags, painted on three overlapping canvases, have a pronounced surface texture, emphasizing that the viewer is looking at a handmade painting, not a machine-made fabric.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950. Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas, 7' 3" × 9' 10". National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund). Pollock's "action 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.

Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 2' 6 7 8" × 3' 9 1 2". Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (50th Anniversary Gift of the Gilman Foundation, the Lauder Foundation, and A. Alfred Taubman). © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. American Pop artist Jasper Johns wanted to draw attention to common objects that people view frequently but rarely scrutinize. He made many paintings of targets, flags, numbers, and alphabets.

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. Wood folding chair, photographic copy of a chair, and photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of "chair"; chair 2' 8 3 8" × 1' 2 7 8" × 1' 8 7 8"; photo panel 3' × 2' 1 8"; text panel 2' × 2' 1 8". Museum of Modern Art, New York (Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund). 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."

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979. Multimedia, including ceramics and stitchery, 48' × 48' × 48'. The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn. Chicago's Dinner Party honors 39 women from antiquity to the 20th century. The triangular form and the materials—painted china and fabric—are traditionally associated with women.

LEE KRASNER

LEE KRASNER A towering figure in 20th-century art, Pollock tragically died in a car accident at age 44, cutting short the development of his innovative artistic vision. Surviving him was his wife, Lee Krasner (1908-1984), whom art historians recognize as a major Abstract Expressionist painter, although overshadowed by Pollock during her lifetime. The Seasons (fig. 15-5A ) is one of her finest works.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

LOUISE BOURGEOIS In contrast to the architectural nature of Nevelson's work, a sensuous organic quality recalling the evocative Biomorphic Surrealist forms of Joan Miró (fig. 14-27) pervades the work of French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). Cumul I (fig. 15-14) is a collection of round-headed units huddled, with their heads protruding, within a collective cloak dotted with holes. The units differ in size, and their position within the group lends a distinctive personality to each. Although the shapes remain abstract, they refer strongly to human figures. Bourgeois used a wide variety of materials in her works, including wood, plaster, latex, and plastics, in addition to alabaster, marble, and bronze. She exploited each material's qualities to suit the expressiveness of the piece. In Cumul I, the alternating high gloss and matte finish of the marble increases the sensuous distinction between the group of swelling forms and the soft folds swaddling them. Bourgeois connected her sculpture with the body's multiple relationships to landscape: "[My pieces] are anthropomorphic and they are landscape also, since our body could be considered from a topographical point of view, as a land with mounds and valleys and caves and holes."4 Sculptures such as Cumul I are openly sexual: "There has always been sexual suggestiveness in my work. Sometimes I am totally concerned with female shapes—characters of breasts like clouds—but often I merge the activity—phallic breasts, male and female, active and passive."5

LOUISE NEVELSON

LOUISE NEVELSON Although Minimalism was a dominant sculptural trend in the 1960s, many sculptors pursued other styles. Russian-born Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) created sculpture combining a sense of the architectural fragment with the power of Dada and Surrealist found objects to express her personal sense of life's underlying significance. Beginning in the late 1950s, Nevelson assembled sculptures of wood objects and forms. She enclosed small sculptural compositions in boxes of varied sizes, and joined the boxes to one another to form "walls." She then painted the forms in a single hue—usually black, white, or gold. This monochromatic color scheme unifies the diverse parts of pieces such as Tropical Garden II (fig. 15-13) and creates a mysterious field of shapes and shadows. The structures suggest magical environments resembling the treasured secret hideaways dimly remembered from childhood. Yet the boxy frames and the precision of the manufactured found objects create a rough geometric structure that the eye roams over freely, lingering on some details. The effect is rather like viewing the side of an apartment building from a moving elevated train.

Lucian Freud

LUCIAN FREUD Born in Berlin in 1922, Lucian Freud (1922- 2011) moved to London with his family in 1933 when Adolph Hitler became German chancellor. The grandson of Sigmund Freud, the painter is best known for his unflattering close-up views of faces in which the sitter seems almost unaware of the painter's presence, and for his portrayals of female and male nudes in foreshortened and often contorted poses—for example, Naked Portrait

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier, interior of Notre-Dame-du-Haut (looking southwest), Ronchamp, France, 1950-1955. Constructed of concrete sprayed on a frame of steel and metal mesh, the heavy walls of the Ronchamp chapel enclose an intimate and mysteriously lit interior that has the aura of a sacred cave.

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier, the exterior of Notre-Dame-du-Haut (looking northwest), Ronchamp, France, 1950-1955. The organic forms of Le Corbusier's mountaintop chapel present a fusion of architecture and sculpture. The architect based the shapes on praying hands, a dove's wings, and a ship's prow.

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois, Cumul I, 1969. Marble, 1' 10 3 8" × 4' 2" × 4'. Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © Louise Bourgeois/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Bourgeois's sculptures consist of sensuous organic forms that recall the Biomorphic Surrealist forms of Miró (fig. 14-27). Although the shapes remain abstract, they refer strongly to human figures.

Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson, Tropical Garden II, 1957-1959. Wood painted black, 5' 111 2" × 10' 113 4" × 1'. Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 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.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Seagram Building (looking northeast

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Seagram Building (looking northeast), New York, 1956-1958. Massive, sleek, and geometrically rigid, this modernist skyscraper has a bronze and glass skin that masks its concrete-and-steel frame. The giant corporate tower appears to rise from the pavement on stilts.

MARK ROTHKO

MARK ROTHKO In contrast to the aggressively energetic images of the gestural abstractionists, the work of the chromatic abstractionists exudes a quieter aesthetic, exemplified by the work of Russianborn Mark Rothko (1903-1970). Rothko believed that references to anything specific in the physical world conflicted with the sublime idea of the universal, supernatural "spirit of myth," which he saw as the core of meaning in art. Rothko's paintings are compositionally simple, with color serving as the primary conveyor of meaning. In works such as No. 14 (fig. 15-7), Rothko created compelling visual experiences by confining his compositions to two or three large rectangles of pure color with hazy edges. The forms are shimmering veils of intensely luminous colors that appear to be suspended in front of the colored backgrounds of his canvases. Although the color juxtapositions are visually captivating, Rothko intended them as more than decorative. He saw color as a doorway to another reality, and insisted that color could express "basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom. . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."3 Like the other Abstract Expressionists, Rothko produced highly evocative paintings reliant on formal elements rather than on specific representational content to elicit emotional responses in viewers.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 80 Backs, 1976-1980. Burlap and resin, each 2' 3" high. Museum of Modern Art, Dallas. 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.

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960. Oil on canvas, 9' 6" × 8' 9". San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (Helen Crocker Russell Fund Purchase). Rothko's chromatic abstractionist paintings—consisting of hazy rectangles of pure color hovering in front of a colored background—are compositionally simple but compelling visual experiences.

Michael Graves

Michael Graves, Portland Building (looking northeast), Portland, Oregon, 1980. 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.

Minor White

Minor White, Moencopi Strata, Capitol Reef, Utah, 1962. Gelatin silver print, 1' 1 8" × 9 1 4". Museum of Modern Art, New York. © The Minor White Archive, Princeton University. 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 paintings.

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik, video still from Global Groove, 1973. 3 4" color videotape, sound, 30 minutes. Collection of the artist. 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.

Post-Painterly Abstraction

Post-Painterly Abstraction Post-Painterly Abstraction, a term that Clement Greenberg coined, was another postwar American art movement. It developed out of Abstract Expressionism, but manifests a radically different sensibility. Whereas Abstract Expressionism conveys a feeling of intense passion, Post-Painterly Abstraction is characterized by detached rationality emphasizing tighter pictorial control. Greenberg saw this art as contrasting with "painterly" art, which emphasized loose, visible pigment application. Evidence of the artist's hand, so prominent in gestural abstraction, is conspicuously absent in PostPainterly Abstraction. Greenberg championed this art form because it embodied his idea of purity in art.

RICHARD HAMILTON

RICHARD HAMILTON In 1956, an Independent Group member, Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), made a small collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (fig. 15-15), which exemplifies British Pop Art. Trained as an engineering draftsman, exhibition designer, and painter, Hamilton studied the way that advertising shapes public attitudes. Long intrigued by Marcel Duchamp's ideas (see page 388), Hamilton consistently combined elements of popular art and fine art, seeing both as belonging to the whole world of visual communication. He created Just What Is It? for the poster and catalog of one section of an exhibition titled This Is Tomorrow, which included images from Hollywood cinema, science fiction, and the mass media.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG A close friend of Johns's, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) began using mass-media images in his work in the 1950s. Rauschenberg set out to create works that would be open and indeterminate, and he began making multimedia works that he called combines, which intersperse painted passages with sculptural elements. Some Rauschenberg combines seem to be sculptures with painting incorporated into certain sections. Others are paintings with three-dimensional objects attached to the surface. Canyon (fig. 15-17) is typical of his combines. Pieces of printed paper and photographs cover parts of the canvas. Much of the unevenly painted surface consists of pigment roughly applied in a manner reminiscent of de Kooning's work (fig. 15-6). A stuffed bald eagle attached to the lower part of the combine spreads its wings as if lifting off in flight toward the viewer. Completing the combine, a pillow dangles from a string attached to a wood stick below the eagle. Rauschenberg tilted or turned some of the images sideways, and each overlays part of another image. The compositional confusion may resemble that of a Dada collage, but the combine's parts maintain their individuality. The various recognizable images and objects seem unrelated and defy a consistent reading, although Rauschenberg chose all the elements of his combines with specific meanings in mind. For example, he based Canyon on a Rembrandt painting of Jupiter in the form of an eagle carrying the boy Gany - mede heavenward. The photo in the combine is a reference to the Greek boy, and the hanging pillow is a visual pun on his buttocks.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

ROY LICHTENSTEIN As the Pop Art movement matured, the images became more concrete and tightly controlled. In the late 1950s, Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), who was born in Man - hattan not far from Madison Avenue, the center of the American advertising industry, turned his attention to commercial art and especially to the comic book as a mainstay of American popular cul - ture (see " Roy Lichtenstein on Pop Art and Comic Books" ). In paint - ings such as Hopeless (fig. 15-18), Lichtenstein excerpted an image from a comic book, a form of entertainment meant to be read and discarded, and immortalized the image on a large canvas.

Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? 1956. Collage, 10 1 4" × 9 3 4". Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen. The fantasy interior in Hamilton's collage of figures and objects cut from glossy magazines reflects the values of modern consumer culture. Toying with mass-media imagery typifies British Pop Art.

Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, Centre Georges Pompidou (the "Beaubourg," looking northeast

Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, Centre Georges Pompidou (the "Beaubourg," looking northeast), Paris, France, 1977. The architects fully exposed the anatomy of this six-level building, as in the century-earlier Crystal Palace (fig. 12-24), and color-coded the internal parts according to function, as in a factory

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959. Oil, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, cardboard box, printed paper, printed reproductions, photograph, wood, paint tube, and mirror on canvas, with oil on bald eagle, string, and pillow, 6' 9 3 4" × 5' 10" × 2'. Sonnabend Collection, New York. © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. 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.

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (looking northeast), Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970. © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. 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.

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein, Hopeless, 1963. Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 3' 8" × 3' 8". Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel. © Estate of 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.