Chapter Twenty:Contemporary Art

(The Later Twentieth Century)

The New York School:The First Generation

Sometime during World War II the center of the Western art world

shifted from Paris to New York. Immigrant artists arrived and their

influence merged with Native American traditions to create new ideas

and styles. Abstraction was the main stylistic vehicle, and Abstract

Expressionism, centered in New York, spread through the postwar

world.

Hans HofmannThe Gate1959-60

Abstract Expressionists continued the turn against conventional definitions and techniques. They saw themselves as leaders in the quest to find the path to the future. These New York artists viewed their art as a weapon in the struggle to maintain their humanity in the midst of the world’s increasing insanity. To create, they turned inward. Their works had a look of rough spontaneity and exhibited a refreshing energy; their content was intended to be grasped intuitively by each viewer, in a state free from structured thinking.

Jackson Pollock1950

What is action painting?

Jackson Pollock

White Light

1954

Lee Krasner The Seasons 1957

Robert Motherwell

Willem de KooningWoman and Bicycle1952-53

De Kooning’s series of huge women was inspired in part by female models on billboards, but the forms also suggest fertility figures. Shapes and colors play through, over, and across one another with no definable order. As with other action painting, de Kooning’s images seem to be eternally coming into being before the eyes of the viewer, but the tension between flat design and lines in space, between image and process, is heightened by the recognizable figure whose violent power demands recognition. It is for such qualities that de Kooning has been called an “artist who makes ambiguity a hypothesis on which to build.”

Willem de Kooning

Woman I

1950-52

Franz Kline

Mark RothkoBlue, Orange, Red 1961

Rothko was the best-known of the Color-Field painters and used this approach to represent the sublime. He 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.

Mark Rothko Number 15 1957

Richard Diebenkorn

Adolph GottliebGreen Turbulence1968

A combination of Action and Color-Field painting.

The New York School:The Second Generation

• Color-Field Painters• Hard-Edge Painters

Helen Frankenthaler The Bay 1963

Frankenthaler was one of the first artists to explore the effects of drenching the fabric of the canvas with fluid paint (called soak-stain).

Jospeh AlbersHomage to the Square

Barnett Newman

Kenneth Noland

Frank Stella

Francis BaconPainting1946

Figurative Painting

“I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.”

~Louise Bourgeois

Pop ArtPop art emerged in the early 1950s, contradicting the premises of Modernism and introduced the Postmodernist decades that close the twentieth century. The name Pop was coined by the British critic Lawrence Alloway to refer to the popular mass culture and common imagery of the contemporary urban environment. Pop culture is manifest in our everyday experience through photography, film, television, advertising, packaging, and all the commercial visuals that are so common we hardly notice them, though we absorb them totally. Pop adherents declared this media worthy of notice and worthy of notice as art--quite the equal of “fine” art when skillfully managed. Indeed, for Pop artists there is no distinction. Pop art re-introduces all the instrumentalities of meaning that the abstract expressionists had banished from its abstract and minimal forms--signs, symbols, metaphors, allusions, illusions, images--and represented these from the multitude of artifacts that make up the context of our daily experience. Rather than disdain the cheap, vulgar and banal, Pop artists assign value to them as real and present, and the selection and presentation of them as legitimate art.

Richard HamiltonJust What Is It That Makes Today’s Home So Different, So Appealing?1956(Fig: 1-28)

Notice:•How Hamilton’s collage reflects the values of modern consumer culture•The Abstract Expressionist painting is used as a rug whereas the comic book and automobile logo (both images of pop culture) are transformed into a painting on the wall and a lampshade•What is this piece saying about society’s values?

Robert RauschenbergRetroactive I1964

Rauschenberg intended to narrow the gap between art and life in his style and choice of imagery. He developed “combine paintings,” in which the parts were to coexist simultaneously and equally. In the 1950s, such works contained an array of art reproductions, magazine and newspaper clippings, and segments painted in an abstract expressionist style. In the 1960s, he adopted the commercial medium of photoscreen and began filling entire canvases with appropriated news images and anonymous photographs.

Robert Rauschenberg

Roy Lichtenstein

Jasper Johns Three Flags 1958

How is this a pop culture/pop art image?

Andy WarholCampbell’s Soup I1968

Andy Warhol was the quintessential pop artist. Like Rauschenberg, who he greatly admired, Warhol found his subjects in mass media, but mostly in commercial design, mass advertising, and news photos of ordinary people rather than in images of fine art, famous events or anonymous photos.

Claes Oldenburg

Audrey FlackWorld War II (vanitas)1976-77

SuperrealismA style of painting which emphasized making images of persons and things with scrupulous, photographic fidelity to optical fact.

Audrey Flack

Marilyn

1977

Richard AnuszkiewiczEntrance to Green1970

Optical (“Op”) ArtThis genre produces precisely drafted patterns that directly, even uncomfortably, affect visual perception. Using numerous devices of visual ambiguity (familiar in the science of perceptual psychology), the Op artist designs surfaces that vibrate, pulsate and flicker, advance and retreat, creating the illusion of movement.

Bridget RileyCurrent1964

Anselm Kiefer Heath of the Brandenburg March 1974

Neo-ExpressionismA violent, figurative style of the second half of the twentieth century that stemmed from the ideas and largely revived the German expressionism of the early twentieth century. Neo-Expressionism embraces a narrative format--that is, it tells a story.

(Remember Munch’s The Scream and other art evoked by World War I? Neo-Expressionism is the work elicited by World War II.)

Chuck Close

Andrew Wyeth

Richard Estes

James Rosenquist

Eric Fischl A Visit to/A Visit From/The Island 1983

Although Neo-Expressionism was primarily a genre found in Europe, Americans began to embrace narrative in art as well…

Jean-Michel BasquiatHorn Players1983

What story does this piece tell?

Sculpture

•Figurative

•Abstract

George SegalCezanne Still Life #51982

Figurative

George SegalThe Diner1964-66

Duane HansonSupermarket Shopper1970

Deborah ButterfieldHorse #6-821982

David Smith Cubi Series 1964

Abstract

David Smith Cubi XVIII and Cubi XVII 1963-64

Isamu Noguchi

Henry Moore

Louise Nevelson

Christo and Jean Claude

Performance ArtJoseph Beuys

Dan Flavin

Judy Chicago