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 Hofmann
The Gate
1959-60
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 Pollock
1950
What is action
painting?
Jackson Pollock
White Light
1954
Lee Krasner The Seasons 1957
Robert Motherwell
Willem de Kooning
Woman and Bicycle
1952-53
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 Rothko
Blue, 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
A combination of Action and Color-Field painting.
Adolph
Gottlieb
Green
Turbulence
1968
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 Albers
Homage to the Square
Barnett Newman
Kenneth Noland
Frank Stella
Figurative Painting
Francis Bacon
Painting
1946
“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 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 reintroduces 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 Hamilton
Just 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 Rauschenberg
Retroactive I
1964
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 Warhol
Campbell’s Soup I
1968
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 Flack
World War II
(vanitas)
1976-77
Superrealism
A style of painting
which emphasized
making images of
persons and things
with scrupulous,
photographic fidelity
to optical fact.
Audrey Flack
Marilyn
1977
Richard Anuszkiewicz
Entrance to Green
1970
Optical (“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.
Bridget Riley
Current
1964
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 Munch’s The Scream and other art evoked by World War I? NeoExpressionism 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 Basquiat
Horn Players
1983
What story does this piece tell?
Sculpture
•Figurative
•Abstract
Figurative
George Segal
Cezanne Still Life #5
1982
George Segal
The Diner
1964-66
Duane Hanson
Supermarket Shopper
1970
Deborah Butterfield
Horse #6-82
1982
Abstract
David Smith Cubi Series 1964
David Smith Cubi XVIII and Cubi XVII 1963-64
Isamu Noguchi
Henry Moore
Louise Nevelson
Christo and Jean Claude
Performance Art
Joseph Beuys
Dan Flavin
Judy Chicago