CHAPTER 17:

ART FROM THE 50’S TO THE PRESENT

CHAPTER SUMMARY

After World War II, the United States led the art world with a dynamic explosion of Abstract Expressionism. Artists splattered, flowed, dripped and splashed paint on canvas to challenge the viewers’ senses and the traditional idea of art itself. New York was the new leader of the art world.

Sculpture followed painting in its search for new ways of interpretation, now that the doors for freedom of expression were wide open – a freedom afforded by the U.S Constitution. Both painting and sculpture explored Abstract Expressionism until there was no other way to turn.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

In America and Britain, Pop Art was a return to recognizable subject matter (a reaction against the emotional expression of Abstract Expressionism), such as billboards, comic strips, highway signs, movie stars, advertising art and items found in grocery stores.

Op (Optical) Art emphasized visual sensations and indicated a return to the classic tendencies of cool technology.

With the passing of Pop and Op art and the decline and disinterest in Abstract Expressionism, artists began taking off in a variety of directions, from absolute realism to absolute abstraction to absolutely nothing (minimal art).

CHAPTER SUMMARY

Because of the art that was generated through these movements, the very definition of art must be altered to meet the contemporary ways artists expressed or did not express themselves.

Art is a difficult term to define, and during the last part of the 20th century, and currently, we still cannot nail down a simple, clear definition of what art is. Diversity is the key to contemporary art. A vast array of materials, forms, technology, statements, juxtapositions, and environments have been used to capture the imagination of artists.

We have to continue to ask ourselves “What is art?”

17.1: ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISMArtists:

Willem de KooningJackson PollockRobert MotherwellHans HofmannFranz KlineLee KrasnerMark RothkoRichard Diebenkorn

Terms:

IndividualityNonconformityDrip PaintingAction Painting

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Abstract Expressionism (Action painting) got its name because it emphasized shape colour and/or line with no recognizable subject matter and stressed emotions and individual feelings instead of design or form.

Artists used expression as a way of maintaining control in a world that was to them out of control (post World War II).

Their work was meant to be felt emotionally not reasoned out. Artist were influenced by Kandinsky and Gorky.

Because emotional art is very personal, styles were very individual as well.

WILLEM DE KOONING

His style is recognized by slashing brush strokes on large canvases with colour and tremendous action depicting non-objective subject matter.

His paintings were frantic, violent with little flow and crude.

Because the emphasis is on the act of painting as part of the subject matter, such work

is called Action Painting.

JACKSON POLLOCK

Best known for his Drip Paintings, Jackson Pollock freed himself from traditional ways of painting with brushes.

With the canvas on the floor, he could walk on it and pour, drip, splatter paint in trance-like actions.

While he could not control the paint as with brushes, he completely engaged himself releasing his subconscious creativity.

The final piece is intended to appear flat, not an illusion of 3D space as in classical art.

ROBERT MOTHERWELL

His work is controlled where outlines, forms, and shapes are clearly defined.

His paintings have flatly painted delicate colours.

He used strong contrasting shapes against the delicate hues.

The paintings are non-objective but express the mood or emotion of specific historical events.

HANS HOFMANN

He is best known for his canvases of heavily applied, brilliant colour with great intensity.

His paintings are explorations of colour theory in which push and pull is created between colours to create depth and space on a flat surface.

While de Kooning’s paintings are violent, Hofmann’s have a sense of serenity and visual balance.

FRANZ KLINE

Moving away from representational scenes of New York, Kline refined his style into a vigorous, slashing form of abstraction.

He moved away from forms derived from urban structures to completely non-representational.

He often works in limited colour (black and white).

Like Pollock, he worked on the floor with large house brushes in powerful energetic vertical and horizontal strokes.

LEE KRASNER

Like the other abstract expressionist, she progressed through realistic art to become a leader of this expressive movement.

Married to Pollock, their early works were similar. Later she explored collages created by tearing up old canvases.

The results were richly textured surfaces, colourful, continuous movement and a unity of design. They have a noisiness yet joyfulness as well.

MARK ROTHKO

His paintings are recognized by rectangles with their soft edges and blended colours.

The effect is of a feeling of floating vibrating shapes in and out of the background colour.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

His work shows a turning away from completely non-objective works to ones suggestive of scenes and figures.

He combined reality with the expressive power of the Abstract Expressionists.

17.2: POP ART AND OP (OPTICAL ILLUSION) ART

Pop art derived its name from art that used or based its imagery from “Popular Culture”.

Their subjects were of mass produced objects such as Coke bottles, beer, Campbell’s Soup cans, comic strip characters, Hollywood stars, famous people, and anything common and popular from the American culture.

Pop Art is not a style, but an attitude toward art and toward subjects that were reminders of supermarkets, movies, television and comics.

It was a reaction against Abstract Expressionism

17.2: POP ART AND OP (OPTICAL ILLUSION) ART

Artists:Claes Oldenburg

Robert RauschenbergJasper Johns

Roy LichtensteinAndy WarholGeorge SegalBridget Riley

Victor VasarelyRichard Anuskiewicz

Ron Davis

CLAES OLDENBURG

He used found materials to makes sculptures and drawings of the objects he saw around him.

He enlarged ordinary household objects, such as a three-way electrical plug, to enormous size.

He also developed a technique of soft sculpture, made from soft fabrics stuffed with soft filler of ordinary objects in enormous sizes.

The play on size makes mundane objects monumental but also adds humour to often serious expressive painting.

Many questions are raised about commercialism and industrialism and a “throw away”, disposable society.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

His work was a bridge between abstract expressionism and pop art by combining mundane commercial objects such as license plates, street signs, men’s clothing with abstract canvases.

They were called Combine Paintings. Like Picasso and Braque he combined reality and abstraction.

The sensations he created were difficult for the public to understand. The titles often had nothing to do with the artwork adding to the confusion.

JASPER JOHNS

He used abstract expressionistic techniques with common subject matter as the American flag, targets, beer cans, and maps of the U.S.

He forces you to look at things that are commonly overlooked. He does this through repetition and the use of complimentary colours that vibrate on the canvas.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

He wanted to play on the slick, multiple images of commercial art, its mechanical techniques and its glossy colours.

His work is recognized by the enlarged comic strip scenes and text including the ben-day dots (pixels used in the printing industry) that make up the printed image on canvas.

The scenes poke fun at the melodramatic scenes found in comic strips and the American fascination with them.

ANDY WARHOL

He focused in on American mass production and its boring repetition.

Subjects included Coke bottles, Campbell’s Soup cans or even famous celebrities.

He used a mechanical screen print process to add to the repetitiveness and impersonal approach – opposite to the emotional abstract expressionist artist.

The repetition of an instantly recognizable object or person reduces the meaning or destroys the original meaning just as a cliché overused loses it original meaning.

GEORGE SEGAL

Like Claes Oldenburg, Segal was concerned with everyday subjects; however, he used different medium and subjects. He used plaster gauze to make moulds of life-sized people.

The plaster was left unpainted and startlingly real in real settings and with props.

They are simply realistic slices of American life.

BRIDGET RILEY

She created Op (Optical illusion) Art.

Surfaces appear to bulge, recede, undulate, yet are flat surfaces.

The illusions are created with colour, line and shape often with dizzying effects and a sense of actual movement.

VICTOR VASARELY

As the leader of the Op Art movement in America, he used geometric shapes and brilliant colour to create optical illusions.

He achieves this with changing sizes of the objects and subtly changing colour tones to trick the eye of the viewer.

The edges are hard and crisp.

RICHARD ANUSKIEWICZ

Using sharp edges and crisp colour, he created Op art the pulsated in and out. His work is optically stimulating.

RON DAVIS

To create optical works, he used contemporary materials like acrylic, polyester resin with fibreglass.

He fused colour to the rear surface of fibreglass to create illusions.

With his technique, it is difficult to separate the illusion from reality.

17.3 COLOUR FIELD PAINTING

Artists:Helen Frankenthaler

Joseph AlbersBarnett NewmanKenneth NolandEllsworth Kelly

Frank StellaAdolph Gottlieb

Sam FrancisMorris Louis

17.3 COLOUR FIELD PAINTING

Colour Field Painting (a.k.a. Post-Painterly Abstraction, Classical Abstraction, and Hard-edge Painting) having been developed during the 1960’s and 1970’s, owes a lot to Mark Rothko’s large, flat colour paintings.

Colour Field painters generally avoided any sense of paint texture in their work. They rely solely on flat fields of colour. What set it apart from Abstract Expressionism was the lack of emotion, violent movement or colour, and slashing brushwork. Colour Field paintings are cool and very serene. Artist minutely planned their works. However, some improvised and allowed for accidental happenings.

Many of the pieces achieved mural size becoming an important part of the interior environment they were hung in. Enlarged field painting opens up space in works by leaving portions painted white or as natural canvas.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

Used a painting technique whereby she stapled unprimed canvas to the floor and in a spontaneous manner, poured, spread and flowed paint onto the canvas.

The unprimed canvas and liquefied paint created Stain painting. The artist is in less control of the result.

Although the artist at the end may cut, crop and rotate the piece for its final display. It is a very spontaneous approach and very difficult for some artists because of the amount of “control” they have on the way the paint reacts to the raw canvas.

JOSEPH ALBERS

He became the teacher of many Colour Field painters.

Using the square as a motif, he demonstrated the qualities of colour and how they react when next to each other or near other colours. These interactions caused colours to recede or approach creating depth without classical techniques.

BARNETT NEWMAN

He was part of a movement to produce art totally without any visual or geometrical associations.

His work is recognized by a single, wide or narrow line of contrasting or similar hue.

The content is reduced to a minimum. His work is called Minimal Art.

It has a totally unemotional quality with extreme precision.

The paintings have no specific or hidden meaning. The work was intended to allow a viewer to reflect inward and meditate like a Buddhist.

KENNETH NOLAND

He continued the emphasis of the “canvas” over the subject matter or design.

His paintings of concentric circles have rings that pulsate and move forward.

Later he became one of the first artists to work on shaped canvases like diamonds and triangles.

ELLSWORTH KELLY

His work is recognized by canvases (9 feet x 20 feet) with pure colours, often limited to two, and geometric shapes.

He preferred to work with acrylics because he could achieve hard perfect edges with tape and thinned paints.

FRANK STELLA

He carried the shaped canvas further. His geometric designs took advantage of the unframed edges.

Differing from other Colour field painters, he used an extremely varied colour palette, fluorescent paints and metallic. Colours are carefully chosen to create visual movement.

ADOLPH GOTTLIEB

His work is recognized usually by two shapes: a disk and a ragged edge form.

The disk, often a soft edged round shape, is calm and geometric.

The ragged shape breaks out of any containment. His work is like a combination of Kenneth Noland and Kline’s slashing black brushstrokes.

SAM FRANCIS

He poured freely applied thin colours onto the canvas.

The colours spread, stain, and overlap, creating transparent layers.

The dripping paints, cut-off edges of shapes and open areas of white negative space create a sense of movement in and out of the picture surface as if the canvas is only part of a larger subject.

MORRIS LOUIS

He based his images on the physical movement of colour across unprimed canvas.

He poured paint onto the canvas, then tilted it and allowed the paint to run and superimpose other colours.

The result was sometimes linear and sometimes shapes.

Works are very spontaneous and unplanned but delicate and careful. Spreading of colours was done carefully, controlled, stopped and shifted through tilting the canvas.

Colours have a soft smoke appearance.

17.4: NEW REALISMArtists:

Chuck CloseAndrew Wyeth

James RosenquistRichard Estes

Duane Hanson

17.4: NEW REALISM

The movement, which hit its peak during the 1970’s, is a.k.a: Super Realism, Photo Realism, New Realism, and Hyper Realism.

Artists used commercial art techniques of airbrush and photography or anything else that would produce realistic images.

It is based on the Pop Art of the 1950’s.

It led to the illusionistic paintings of the 80’s with mind boggling illusions of reality.

Subjects were treated with cool, intellectual approaches, and images were metaphors for deeper meaning.

In this way the art is different from the Realism of the 19th century. New Realism reflects high energy of contemporary life.

CHUCK CLOSE

He used the camera and photography as a source for art imagery and to aid in achieving his photographic realism.

His works were massive in size depicting himself and his friends.

They lack any emotional suggestions or inner qualities of the subject and remain purely objective.

He has said that he intended to translate photographic information into paint information.

Every imperfection and detail is documented in an unbiased manner. Even the dots or grains from the photograph are represented as dots and marks on the canvas.

CHUCK CLOSE

ANDREW WYETH

His work is a continuation of the American Scene painting and depicted the natural environment of Pennsylvania and Maine.

He also depicted portraits of his neigbours. He completed his works in egg tempera which allows for exacting realism.

JAMES ROSENQUIST

He worked as a billboard painter.

His artwork continued on this massive scale.

He used the same techniques of commercial artists (air brush) giving his work a similar look to the advertising style and package design, which references Pop Art.

RICHARD ESTES

He is considered a master of the urban scene.

His buildings, windows, and vehicles and light are mind boggling in their realistic depiction.

People are characteristically absent.

Life comes from light and the reflective surfaces.

He worked directly from photographs and slides.

Again, the result is a completely detached, dispassionate reproduction.

RICHARD ESTES

DUANE HANSON

Hanson produced life-sized, coloured models of people, dressed and surrounded with real things.

He used modern polyester resins tinted with natural flesh colours to create the models originally created from plaster casts of models.

The results were highly life-like and they created a creepy feeling because of their soul-lessness. The subjects are of ordinary people.

The combination of realism and the fact that the figures are unknown by most people cause people to walk past them unnoticed, thinking they are real people.

17.5: SCULPTUREArtists:

Isamu NoguchiHenry Moore

Barbara HepworthLouise Nevelson

David Smith

17.5: SCULPTURE

Sculpture made great steps forward in the use of new materials, techniques, concepts and directions.

The variety and scope of sculpture has made it difficult to define.

Sculpture took on a much larger scale than in the past.

There was a development of open sculpture where it did not divide or enclose space.

New materials such as: steel, Plexiglas, epoxy, fired clay, leather, wire, plastic, fabrics and rubber allowed for the creation of sculptures never seen before.

ISAMU NOGUCHI

He carved from massive granite abstracted and minimal sculptures closely related to Japanese garden art used in Buddhist meditation.

His works are quiet and simple.

HENRY MOORE

His abstracted forms are based on the human figure.

His sculptures became more abstracted over the years.

The pieces are monumental.

The space or setting in which the sculptures were to be placed played an important part in the design and creation of the sculptures.

BARBARA HEPWORTH

Like Moore, Hepworth worked in simplified forms- basic organic and geometric forms.

Although she worked with traditional materials – marble, wood, bronze, she produced a contemporary effect by grouping the pieces to make an arrangement.

The arrangements could be changed again and again producing a different effect each time.

LOUISE NEVELSON

Worked primarily in wood in which she created many compartments into which she placed scraps, boards, and pieces of Victorian houses. These then were arranged in various ways.

Everything was painted a single colour often black or white to unify everything.

The works are called assemblages.

DAVID SMITH

He was one of the first to weld steel into sculptural forms.

His works are based on cubes machined to give a textured surface and arranged into balanced arrangements.

RUDY KEHKLA

Minimal visual cues to assist the mind to define space, enclose volume, provoke mood or silently hear music or sound.

Sometimes no more than a simple gesture, his work can consist of a strand or two, or be a highly detailed study consisting of hundreds of pieces of wire.

The shadows cast by each of these 3D sketches are fascinating.

17.6: NEW DIRECTIONSIt is extremely hard to define art from the 1960’s to the present. Art has been created in so many different ways and direction that differ from art previously produced. The experimental approach used by modern artists makes modern art difficult to define.

A new Kinetic, Earth, Concept Art brought about a totally different way of looking at and experiencing art and sculpture. Art has come to combine many aspects of other media that to categorize works of art as painting or sculpture is often impossible.

Kinetic Art involved motors or moved due to wind and air currents.

Artists created works that were interactive with the viewer.

Earth could be shaped and moved into massive Earth sculpture to be affected by wind, rain, bodies of water.

Other artists relied on an idea, thought, words, diagrams or concepts to communicate concepts that they have in mind, but never carry out.

Others use light, lasers, curtains placed throughout the countryside and then removed to be non permanent artworks. Others use sound and video and computer technology in various combinations to create permanent and non-permanent artwork.

Diversity is the only thing that unifies today’s artwork.

ALEXANDER CALDER

Kinetic art - art that has moving parts

Art that is affected by its environment such as air currents, or mechanisms that cause it to move such as motors.

CHRISTO & JEANNE CLAUDE

The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to create works of art or joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.

LUCAS SAMARAS

FOUND ART - JUNK ART

ENVIRONMENTAL - EARTH ART

PERFORMANCE ART