Chapter Twenty: Contemporary Art (The Later Twentieth Century)

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Chapter TwentyContemporary Art(The Later
Twentieth Century)
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The New York SchoolThe 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.

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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 worlds 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.
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Jackson Pollock1950
What is action painting?
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Jackson PollockWhite Light1954
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Lee Krasner The Seasons 1957
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Robert Motherwell
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Willem de KooningWoman and Bicycle1952-53
De Koonings 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 Koonings 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.
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Willem de KooningWoman I1950-52
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Franz Kline
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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.
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Mark Rothko Number 15 1957
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Richard Diebenkorn
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Adolph GottliebGreen Turbulence1968
A combination of Action and Color-Field painting.
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The New York SchoolThe Second Generation

• Color-Field Painters
• Hard-Edge Painters

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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).
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Jospeh AlbersHomage to the Square
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Barnett Newman
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Kenneth Noland
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Frank Stella
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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
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Pop Art
Pop 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.
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Richard HamiltonJust What Is It That Makes
Todays Home So Different, So Appealing?1956(Fig
1-28)

• Notice
• How Hamiltons 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 societys values?

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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.
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Robert Rauschenberg
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Roy Lichtenstein
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Jasper Johns Three Flags 1958
How is this a pop culture/pop art image?
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Andy WarholCampbells 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.
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Claes Oldenburg
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Audrey FlackWorld War II (vanitas)1976-77Super
realism
A style of painting which emphasized making
images of persons and things with scrupulous,
photographic fidelity to optical fact.
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Audrey FlackMarilyn1977
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Richard AnuszkiewiczEntrance to
Green1970Optical (Op) Art
This 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.
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Bridget RileyCurrent1964
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Anselm Kiefer Heath of the Brandenburg March
1974
Neo-Expressionism
A 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 Munchs The Scream and other
art evoked by World War I? Neo-Expressionism is
the work elicited by World War II.)
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Chuck Close
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Andrew Wyeth
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Richard Estes
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James Rosenquist
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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
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Keith Haring Unicef 1988
Even to the point of using words to express their
narrative story.
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Jean-Michel BasquiatHorn Players1983
What story does this piece tell?
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Sculpture

• Figurative
• Abstract

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George SegalCezanne Still Life 51982
Figurative
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George SegalThe Diner1964-66
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Duane HansonSupermarket Shopper1970
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Deborah ButterfieldHorse 6-821982
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David Smith Cubi Series 1964
Abstract
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David Smith Cubi XVIII and Cubi XVII 1963-64
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Isamu Noguchi
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Henry Moore
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Louise Nevelson
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Christo and Jean Claude
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Performance ArtJoseph Beuys
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Dan Flavin
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Judy Chicago