Odalisk
Robert Rauschenberg
1955-1958
•sexual symbolism- collage elements
drawn from popular culture, found in
advertising
•phallic post presses into cushion and
turns light on or off
•he wants his assemblages to be taken
apart to be seen as individual elements
very similar to the spontaneity of action
painting
Bed
Robert Rauschenberg
1955
•Includes striped toothpaste, fingernail
polish, pillow, quilt
•Stresses the act of self-actualization by
exploiting the vividness of the
associations attached to real things
•Is not any form of systematic
iconography, but rather the individual
should read the elements in any number
of different ways
Canyon
Robert Rauschenberg
1959
•Rauschenberg delved greatly to bring out
new items such as, sheet metal and
enamel on wood.
•This diverse work of multiple
connotations, unifies just one creative
philosophy, that of free & independent
randomness.
•Rauschenberg urged to communicate to
the audience through objects and items
that played as representational aids,
giving American contemporary art and
sculpture a new meaning and aspect.
Booster
Robert Rauschenberg
1967
•Largest hand-pulled lithograph that had
ever been made, full length sequence of
xrays of his own body
•Composition: x-ray, celestial movement
of the year 1967, magazine images of
drills migrating the stars movement
•It is not an attempt to bring work out of
chaos, but simply waking up to the very
life we live
•Self Portrait
Cornell ‘64 Happenings
#4: Men cover car with strawberry jam
Allan Kaprow
1964
•Kaprow was exploring a direction in art
where idea and process were considered
more important than the object.
•A Happening is an assemblage of events
performed or perceived in more than one
time and place. Its material environments
may be constructed, taken over directly
from what is available, or altered slightly;
just as its active ties may be invented or
commonplace. It is connected with NeoDada Movement
•Kaprow was as much a link between
Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as
Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, or even the
sculptor George Segal.
The Diner
George Segal
1964-1966
•The artist called these types of artworks
"situation sculptures.”
•His “decision to enter literal space was
determined by strong urges for total
experience”
•To make the figures, Segal wrapped
bandages soaked in plaster around the
bodies of his friends or models. When the
bandages had dried and hardened, he
carefully cut them off and reassembled
the cast of the body.
• The artist was also inspired by his
memories of stopping at this type of
restaurant during his late-night drives
home to New Jersey after visiting art
galleries in New York City.
Floor Cake
Claes Oldenburg
1962
•Was inspired by the way cars sat inside a
showroom and was determined to fill a
gallery with sculptures of that proportion
•Soft sculpture of canvas and vinyl and
stuffed with foam, cardboard, or kapok
•Comparison to surrealism b/c of radical
shift in scale- gave it dreamlike aura
•Commercial success but critics hated it- it
was figurative and funny rather than the
march towards abstract purity
Geometric Mouse -- Scale A
Claes Oldenburg
1969/1971
•Geometric Mouse X is an abstract,
geometric representation of a mouse
•The mouse became part of Oldenburg's
personal mythology. It was used as a
letterhead symbol for his first
retrospective exhibition
•Oldenburg regards the geometric mouse
as a symbol of analysis and intellect,
“autobiographical but not necessarily a
portrait…In other words, the mouse is a
state of mind”
•Paint on Cor-Ten Steel
Clothespin
Claes Oldenburg
1976
•Began to design on an architectural scale
and produced this work for an area in DT
Philly
•Oldenberg directed a team of welders
giving it a theatrical quality of testing and
reworking ideas even in the final stage
•The sculpture's resemblance to a daily
object should not obscure its artistic
qualities. It is not, in fact, a reproduction
of an ordinary clothespin, but a sweeping,
stylized version.
Target with Plaster Casts
Jasper John
1955
•They ARE targets but at the same time
they are painterly works of art, made with
artistic materials
•Primary colors- analyzing the basic
structural elements of the language of
painting
•The newspaper fragments are not
supposed to be decoded, but rather
meant as a sense of information overload
as if one were watching 2 films running
over each other. Deals with the idea of
randomness in Mass Media
•Performance aspect; one can open the
casts to reveal its “private” contents for a
general evocation of the senses
Three Flags
Jasper Johns
1958
•Flat subject based on a ready-made
formal scheme
•Prefabricated imagery tied art into mass
production and popular consumerism
•Made the boundaries of the canvas
identical to the image leaving nothing but
surface treatment as a basis for formal
interpretation
•3 layers of canvas- seems rather cubist
on its play with the illusion of the picture
plane
False Start
Jasper Johns
1959
•Oil on top of newspaper- interweaves
patches of primary colors overlapped with
stenciled words (the names of colors but
not appropriately placed nor were they
the words of the color used)
•What one knows and what one actually
sees
•There are no accidents in his work… he
made no studies before completing work
meaning his work was all improvisation
*Like Polluck
Painted Bronze (Ballantine Ale)
Jasper Johns
1960
•Are these works of art or everyday
objects?
•Handcrafted look- rendered each can
and base separately and painted the
labels too large and illegible
•Subject chosen b/c Johns drank
Ballantine Ale and the color of the can is
similar to the bronze casting
•Revealed a new emotional intimacy of
the artists life
Blue Sponge Relief
Yves Klein
1957
•Klein was a pioneer in the development
of Performance art, and is seen as an
inspiration to and as a forerunner
of Minimal art, as well as Pop art.
•Inspired by the sponges themselves
•The sponges were to represent humanity
on intellectual and spiritual levels. The
sponges absorb in and out as humans
breathe in and out
Anthropometrics of the Blue Period
Yves Klein
1960
•Klein had three nude models cover
themselves in blue paint and affix their
body prints on the white papers, laid out
on the gallery walls and floor.
•The idea was about the application of
the specific blue, not the color itself
•Sometimes the creation of these
paintings was turned into a kind
of performance art—an event in 1960, for
example, had an audience dressed in
formal evening wear watching the models
go about their task while an instrumental
ensemble played Klein's 1949 The
Monotone Symphony
Baluba III
Jean Tinguely
1961
•Junk-art aesthetic from an interest in
motion, impermanence, accident
•*Unlike Rouchsenburg, Rouchsenburg
specifically chose his materials in his sculptures
whereas Tinguely stumbled upon his materials
by accident
•“Meta-matics” were comically collaged
iconoclasm that mechanically painted
“abstract expressionist” pictures
•Often he invited the viewer to participate
in his carnival-like contraptions
Fat Chair
Joseph Beuys
1964
•Rejection of materialism in favor of an
essential spirituality- stems from the
German romantic tradition
•The chair conforms to human anatomy
and order, fat signifies chaos b/c it
undergoes a metamorphosis with a slight
change in temperature (suggesting a
spiritual transcendence in man)
•His interest in transcendentalism comes
from the writings of Rudolph Steiner
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
Joseph Beuys
1965
•Covered his head in honey (a life force,
product of creativity) and gold pigment,
tied a steal sole to right shoe (hard
reason) and felt on his left (spiritual
warmth), sat for 3 hrs mouthing
explanations of his works to the dead
hare he held in one hand
•Opened communication to the nonrational world of soul concerning the
irrelevance of explanations in art
•The artist is not an object-maker but
rather a medium of esoteric knowledge
The Pack
Joseph Beuys
1969
•Known for his highly political work
•The Pack exudes the chaotic and
dynamic energy which Beuys considered
essential in order to bring change in
society. Twenty-four sledges, resembling a
pack of dogs, tumble from the back of a
VW van. Each sledge carries a survival kit
made up of a roll of felt for warmth and
protection, a lump of animal fat for
energy and sustenance, and a torch for
navigation and orientation.
•Sense of urgency- part invasion, part
escape to survival
Lecture at New School, New York
with Freedom Democracy Socialism
Joseph Beuys
1974
Intense sessions raising political
consciousness, drawing diagrams and
notations to punctuate his delivery
•His lecturing did not break his line of
sculptural works but rather furthered the
evolution towards encompassing “social
sculpture”
•Beuys was motivated by a belief in the
power of universal human creativity and
was confident in the potential for art to
bring about revolutionary change.
•concept of social sculpture, in which
society as a whole was to be regarded as
one great work of art (the Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk) to which each person
can contribute creatively
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band, album cover for The Beatles
Peter Blake
1967
•t featured a colorful collage of life-sized
cardboard models of famous people on
the front of the album cover and lyrics
printed on the back cover, the first time
this had been done on a British pop LP
•According to Blake, the original concept
was to create a scene that showed the
Sgt. Pepper band performing in a park;
this gradually evolved into its final form,
which shows The Beatles, as the Sgt.
Pepper band, surrounded by a large group
of their heroes, rendered as lifesized cutout figures
•Blake asked them to make lists of people
they'd most like to have in the audience
at this imaginary concert
Just What Is It That Makes Today's
Houses So Different, So Appealing?
Richard Hamilton
1956
•The collage consists of images taken
mainly from American magazines. The
principal template was an image of a
modern sitting-room in an advertisement
in Ladies Home Journal
•Using commercial graphic-design
techniques and imagery from popular
media, he undertook sophisticated
exploration of the language of visual signs
•Hamilton described this as “Instant Art”
from the magazines
Picture Emphasizing Stillness
David Hockney
1962
•The armature of lines around the
painterly figures suggests his debt to
Francis Bacon
•The introduction of lettering into a
gestural style of figurative painting, in a
small print just in front of the leopard's
forepaws, shows the influence of Larry
Rivers.
•The caption, “They are perfectly safe.
This is a still” implies that the linguistic
context of the picture as a picture (rather
than a reference to nature) defines the
reality it describes
Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott
David Hockney
1969
•Painting contains stark classicism in the
precision of its drawing, in the hard edge
application of the paint, and in the
orderliness of its composition and one
point perspective
•Hockney felt that photographs distort the
way we see by taking in too much at once,
so in 1972 he joined multiple close-up
and fragmentary photographs of his
friend Peter Schlesinger
•Painting has a moving focus in which the
eye follows a path from point to point
rather than holding to a conventional
one-point perspective
Campbell's Soup Cans
Andy Warhol 1962
•Warhol may have painted them in
response to the Painted Bronze of 1960
by Jasper Johns, but surpassed the Johns
sculpture in the inexpressive literalness
with which they were presented
•The cans did not represent the soup
itself, rather the image of soup, divorcing
the signifier from the signified more
radically than any painting up to that time
had done
•Canvases have no trace of expressive
gesture or individuality
Gold Marilyn Monroe
Andy Warhol
1962
•This creates an expressive dissonance
between the machine like façade and the
sense of the individual buried within it
•This overwhelming barrage of surface
glitter deuces the observer to a helpless
voyeur, passively experiencing life as an
assembly line of images
•By duplicating a photograph known to
millions, Warhol undermined the
uniqueness and authenticity characteristic
of traditional portraiture. Instead he
presented Monroe as an infinitely
reproducible image.
Saturday Disaster
Andy Warhol
1964
•Warhol embarked on a disaster series
that amplified the morbid preoccupations
of he “Marilyns.” He based the series on
gruesome tabloid photos of mutilated
accident victims, the a bomb, and the
electric chair
•He multiplied the images in decorative
patterns and brilliant colors
•These images not only disturb us
because of their horrifying explicitness,
but also because Warhol’s detachment
suggests a depersonalization that is in
itself terrifyingly death like
Self-Portrait
Andy Warhol
1967
•Warhol had tended either to print the
screens in monochrome, so that the scale
of values corresponded to nature, or to
find more artificial looking versions of
naturalistic colors
•Changing the values of the photograph
and dissociating the colors from any
reference in nature at all
Skulls
Andy Warhol
1964
•Series did not sell so well
•'I never understood why when you died,
you didn't just vanish, and everything
could just keep going the way it was only
you just wouldn't be there. I always
thought I'd like my own tombstone to be
blank. No epitaph and no name. Well,
actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'.' -Andy
Warhol
•The dichotomy between the subject and
the execution, the image of a skull and
glamorous colors in which it is painted, is
representative of Warhol's schizophrenic
personality, of his well documented desire
for fame and celebrity, glitzy life in
contrast to, as quoted above, his wish for
a blank tombstone.
Blam!
Roy Lichtenstein
1962
•Mimics frames of comics and images out
of advertisements, improving on them
slightly in the composition and details
•Comparing to Kaprow’s “The
Happenings” it has a similar mixture of
expressionism, detached humor and
objectivity, the objectivity of assimilating
found objects from the urban
environment without alteration
•Heavily influenced by the commercialism
that surrounded him
Little Big Painting
Roy Lichtenstein
1965
•Lichtenstein denies any intentional social
comment in his work. When he explains
his motivation in choosing certain
subjects and treating them in a certain
way, he does so in terms of curiosity -- a
desire to redo an old work in a new way
•The painting injects a note of humor that
contradicts the heroic high-seriousness of
the Abstract Expressionist
•Lichtenstein's surface is anonymous. His
brush stroke paintings of the nineteensixties are related to Jean Tinguely's
"meta-matic" machines of the late
nineteen-fifties -- works of kinetic
sculpture that mechanically produced
Abstract Expressionist style paintings.
Drowning Girl
Roy Lichtenstein
1963
•During this period, Lichtenstein often
painted anonymous strips, most often
with soap-opera romance or action
themes
•With small holes and heavy pigment
Lichtenstein’s screens frequently clogged
up, so that he had to touch up sections of
the painting by hand to enhance the
mechanical look
•He often contrasted these dot-patterned
areas with flatly painted patches to
achieve the crass, visual punch of popular
media imagery
F-111
James Rosenquist
1965
•Political and especially anti-war imagery
became prominent in Rosenquist’s
painting after the assassination of JFK.
•Designed to cover all four walls of a room
of the Castelli Gallery
•The fighter-bomber runs the entire
length of the mural. It underlies
everything, just as the public’s concerns
over the war did in 1965, when the US
began the bombing of North Vietnam
The Wait
Edward Kienholz
1964-65
•Mostly made out of desiccated animal
bones
•Her head is in a plastic-encased photo of
a young woman’s face, as if the woman of
her youth still lives in in her mind
•She sits patiently waiting in her heavy,
dark, antique chair, dressed in brittle,
yellowed garments
•The jars around her neck seem to contain
tokens of her memories
Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights
Edward Ruscha
1962
• Depicts convincing three-dimensionality
of objects in a landscape in LA Ruscha’s
trademark and word paintings make an
equivalence between words, signs, and
objects feel like a matter of course
•The reality in the picture hovers uneasily
between abstraction and representation,
undermining the conventional distinction
between them
•As with New York Pop Art, Ruscha’s
painting also attack aesthetic and
semiotic hierarchies by setting advertising
and commercial art devices in a fine art
context
Cubi XVII
David Smith
1963
•Evokes figural associations
•Used liquor boxes to make the 3d cubes,
and he also kept 40-50 prefabricated
boxes on hand for spontaneous
modifications
•Judd: “Smith seems to combine the
anthropomorphism of his forms with the
anthropomorphism of things he might
observe… ‘it is in the work and it is
beyond him.’
•Later influences Noland
And Half
Kenneth Noland
1959
•Noland was heavily influenced by the
teachings of Josef Albers, who famously
taught and wrote that colors and people's
perceptions of them are governed by
intrinsic human instincts. Albers called
this theory "the interaction of colors."
•Noland spent a lifetime experimenting
with a variety of forms (circles, chevrons,
plaids, etc.) and colors on the canvas in
order to challenge people's perceptions
without offering any apparent meaning or
context in his art.
•Noland's art reduced abstract imagery to
its most basic archetypes - in the form of
geometric shapes and lines.
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor
(second version)
Frank Stella
1959
•Influenced by Noland, his geometric
paintings and shaped canvases
underscore the idea of the painting as
object. A major influence on Minimalism
•Stella was an early advocate of making
non-representational paintings, rather
than artwork that alluded to underlying
meanings, emotions or narratives. He
wanted his audiences to appreciate color,
shape and structure alone.
•Stella challenged the very notion of a
painting by declaring his flat canvases,
structured reliefs, metal protrusions and
freestanding sculptures all to be
paintings.
Untitled (Stack)
Donald Judd
1967
•Judd rejected Abstract Expressionism through
lack of imagery, composition, and by reducing
painting and sculpture to its basic elements
through using natural light, simple lines, industrial
materials, and solid colors on flat surfaces.
Therefore replacing the metaphor with literal
truth.
•Influenced by Frank Stella, Judd believed that art
should no longer be representational nor presume
to describe human emotion. It should purely just
be.
•Judd's work is governed by a unique combination
of reductive and highly distilled geometric forms.
Protractor Series: Takht-i-Sulayman
Frank Stella
1967
•Influenced by Jasper John’s Three Flags,
because the objects themselves are the
image
•Repetition of lines/stripes as a rhythm
and interval
•The idea of eliminating foreground and
background by painting a single motif,
identical with the form of the canvas (as
in the flags) led directly to Stella’s most
important innovation – the shaped canvas
Die
Tony Smith
1962
•His greatest contribution involved the
delicacy with which he calibrated the
scale of his works in relation to their sites,
undercutting the conventional motion of
monumentality and making his sculptures
remarkably responsive to their
architectural or natural setting
• Influenced by Barnett Newman, who
had been exploring the idea of the holistic
image seen all at once as a single form,
rather than as parts making up a whole
•He merely gave the specification to a
fabricator over the telephone, thus
separating himself completely from the
physical object
Tomb of the Golden Engenderers
Carl Andre
1976
•Known for his geometrical arrangement
of commercial and natural materials such
as bricks, cement blocks, logs, and bales
of hay.
•The clear geometry relates to Frank
Stella’s early shaped canvases, while the
overall structure implies infinite
continuation as in Brancusi’s modular
series of “Endless Columns”
Zinc-Zinc Plain
Carl Andre
1969
•The rigidly arranged scheme sets off the
natural eccentricities of the materials
•As the title suggests, Steel Zinc
Plainrepresents a territory or a space as
much as an object. By placing it on
the floor rather than on a plinth and
allowing it to be walked across, Andre
alters the viewer’s relationship to the
work of art.
• Simple, geometric forms made from
industrial materials are characteristic
features of Andre’s sculptures.
Untitled (to Charles Cowles)
Dan Flavin
1963
•Flavin’s work emerged out of a mixture
of influences, from Kaprow’s happenings
and junk sculpture to his struggles with
the spirituality of his Catholic upbringing
that he rejected and yet somehow could
not eliminate
•In 1963, he began working exclusively
with new industrially prefabricated
florescent tubes and fixtures
•Flavin’s works tease the viewer’s
definition of art as dependent on an
original object
Monument for Vladimir Tatlin
Dan Flavin
1966
•The boundlessness of the light implied
the sublime for Flavin and it still carried
an association of spirituality – the unlikely
fusion of the industrial and the
transcendental made these works what
he called “a modern technological fetish”
•This romantic aspect is more pronounced
in the work of Flavin and Andre then in
that of Stella, Judd, and Morris, whereas
they all shared an affinity for industrial
materials, simplifies forms, systems,
permutations, and a concern with
focusing on real materials and space
Untitled (Three L-Beams)
Robert Morris
1965-66
•Famous for exploring the idea of
sculpture without fixed form
•Composed of elements lying down
•Symbolic, shamanism, spiritual
interpretations
•It is the same shape, but does not
represent that (look different)
•Process art: devised certain strategies in
ways he made sculpture
Untitled
Robert Morris
1968
•Explores space and gravitational mass, as
well as the idea of mutable form
•Explores the idea of chance
Untitled
Robert Morris
1967-68
•The process involves randomly scattering
the pieces across the floor and on top of
each other
•To move pieces, he sent for more pieces
to be randomly dropped on the floor by
movers themselves
•Represents use of chance
Modular Open Pieces, Floor/Corner
Piece Sol LeWitt
1976
•These visually complicated works
embody simple structural systems that
the viewer can extrapolate form their
form.
•LeWitt referred to the underlying
concept of these works as a “grammar”
•LeWitt’s allusion to language derived
from structuralism, which posited
meaning as a decipherable, universal
structure underlying form
•LeWitt recognized that while the
underlying logic in a work may be a
simple scheme set on a predictable
course, the object itself is experientially
unpredictable
Four Color Frame Painting #1
Robert Mangold
1983
•Mangold juxtaposed the framing edges
and seams of the canvases with drawn
lines that allude to a continuous geometry
•He deliberately created perceptual
contradictions to underscore the
incompatible realities of the different
systems
Three Panels: Orange, Dark Gray, Green
Ellsworth Kelly
1986
•The whole picture had become the unit
in a hard edge style of painting as early as
1958
•Unlike Mangold and Bochner, Kelly
arrived at this in the more intuitive
manner characteristic of the late fifties
•His stress on dividing the entire space of
a painting, juxtaposing flat forms on a
plane rather than arranging them within a
composition, resulted in an articulation of
the surface as a single field of color which
in turn became the form
Untitled
Robert Ryman
1963
•In a similar way with Kelly, Ryman’s
concentrated focus on the nuances of the
abstract mark seemed to open a whole
new range of possibilities for him
•Restricting himself to an all-white palette
since the beginning of the sixties, Ryman
has heightened the pure visibility of each
component of the painting – the gestural
mark, the surface, even the mechanical
support and the way it is fastened to the
wall
•The registration of the process of making
the object becomes the content
After the Marchioness of Solana
Brice Marden
1969
•Similar to Ryman, Marden exquisitely
refined sense of touch, gesture and
surface concerns the literal but sensuous
experience of the paint itself
•The same cool, experimental
investigation of materials and process was
also evident in what came to be called
“structuralism film”
•Anthropomorphism: the representation of objects (especially a god) as having human form or traits
•Minimalism - A twentieth century art movement and style stressing the idea of reducing a work of
art to the minimum number of colors, values, shapes, lines and textures. No attempt is made
to represent or symbolize any other object or experience. It is sometimes called ABC art, minimal art,
reductivism, and rejective art.