Art Since 1950

Art since 1950
Teaching
National Gallery of Art, Washington

This publication is made possible by the PaineWebber Endowment Special thanks are owed to Arthur Danto for his generosity; Dorothy
for the Teacher Institute. Support is also provided by the William and Herbert Vogel for kind permission to reproduce slides of Joseph
Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for the Teacher Institute. Kosuth’s Art as Idea: Nothing; Barbara Moore for help in concept
Additional grants have been provided by the GE Fund, The Circle development; Linda Downs for support; Marla Prather, Jeffrey Weiss,
of the National Gallery of Art, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and Molly Donovan of the Department of Twentieth-Century Art,
and the Rhode Island Foundation. National Gallery of Art, for thoughtful suggestions and review; Sally
Shelburne and Martha Richler, whose earlier texts form the basis
of entries on Elizabeth Murray and Roy Lichtenstein, respectively;
© 1999 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington Donna Mann, who contributed to the introduction; and Paige
Simpson, who researched the timeline. Additional thanks for assis-
tance in obtaining photographs go to Megan Howell, Lee Ewing,
NOTE TO THE READER Ruth Fine, Leo Kasun, Carlotta Owens, Charles Ritchie, Laura Rivers,
Meg Melvin, and the staff of Imaging and Visual Services, National
This teaching packet is designed to help teachers, primarily in the Gallery of Art; Sam Gilliam; Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van
upper grades, talk with their students about art produced since 1950 Bruggen; and Wendy Hurlock, Archives of American Art.
and some of the issues it raises. The focus is on selected works from
the collection of the National Gallery of Art. For more complete Designed by The Watermark Design Office
information about artists and movements of this period, see the
resources listed in the bibliography. Unless otherwise noted, all works are from the National Gallery
of Art, Washington.
This packet was developed by the Education Division in collaboration
with the Editors Office, National Gallery of Art. The booklet Cover images: Robert Rauschenberg, Copperhead Grande/ROCI
was written and adapted from gallery sources by Carla Brenner, CHILE (detail), 1985, acrylic and tarnishes on copper, Gift of the
and edited by Dean Trackman. Teaching activities were suggested Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950
by Carla Brenner, Arthur Danto, Anne Henderson, Megan Howell, (Lavender Mist), 1950, oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas, Ailsa
Barbara Moore, Ruth Perlin, Renata Sant’Anna, Paige Simpson, Mellon Bruce Fund. Andy Warhol, Green Marilyn, 1962, silkscreen
and Julie Springer, with helpful suggestions from Corinne Mullen, on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Gift of William C. Seitz and
Bettyann Plishker, and Marilyn Wulliger. Irma S. Seitz, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National
Gallery of Art. Susan Rothenberg, Butterfly, 1976, acrylic on canvas,
Gift of Perry R. and Nancy Lee Bass. Frank Stella, Jarama II, 1982,
mixed media on etched magnesium, Gift of Lila Acheson Wallace.
Mark Rothko, Untitled (detail), 1953, oil on canvas, Gift of the Mark
Rothko Foundation, Inc. Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961, oil on
canvas, Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, Gift of the Artist, in Honor of
the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. Eva Hesse, Test
Piece for “Contingent” (detail), 1969, latex over cheesecloth, Gift of
the Collectors Committee.
Contents
5 Introduction
11 Works in focus
12 Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950
15 Willem de Kooning, Study for Woman Number One, 1952
16 Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1953
19 Barnett Newman, Yellow Painting, 1949
20 Robert Rauschenberg, Copperhead Grande/ROCI CHILE, 1985
23 Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1982
26 Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961
30 Andy Warhol, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Rauschenberg Family), 1963
33 Claes Oldenburg, Glass Case with Pies (Assorted Pies in a Case), 1962
34 David Smith, Voltri VII, 1962
37 Ellsworth Kelly, White Curve VIII, 1976
40 Ad Reinhardt, Black Painting No. 34, 1964
41 Frank Stella, Jarama II, 1982
45 Tony Smith, Moondog, 1964/1998
46 Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 681 C, 1993
49 Joseph Kosuth, Art as Idea: Nothing, 1968
50 Eva Hesse, Test Piece for “Contingent,” 1969
53 Richard Long, Whitechapel Slate Circle, 1981
56 Sam Gilliam, Relative, 1969
59 Susan Rothenberg, Butterfly, 1976
62 Philip Guston, Painter’s Table, 1973
63 Chuck Close, Fanny/Fingerpainting, 1985
66 Martin Puryear, Lever No. 3, 1989
68 Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 1996/1998
71 Anselm Kiefer, Zim Zum, 1990
74 Sigmar Polke, Hope is: Wanting to Pull Clouds, 1992
77 Elizabeth Murray, Careless Love, 1995–1996
79 Teaching activities
80 Discussion activities
82 Art activities
83 Research/writing activities
85 Glossary
89 Bibliography
90 Quotation sources
92 Summary chronology of artists and works
94 List of slides
Slides, reproductions, and timeline

Forty slides, six color reproductions,
and an illustrated timeline poster are
included in this packet
3
Introduction
The 1950s premise that “existence precedes essence” meant

Following the outbreak of World War II, the focus that humankind played the central role in deter-
of artistic activity shifted, for the first time, from mining its own nature. People had to live in a
Europe to the United States and to young painters mode of expectancy and change, always making
in New York, including Willem de Kooning, Barnett themselves. They held ultimate, awesome respon-
Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko (see sibility but were also free. Abstract expressionism
pages 12–19). Grouped under the rubric abstract took the idea of freedom as a given—and this
expressionism, their diverse styles generally fall more than anything else is what is common to its
into two categories: one relying primarily on the different styles.
artist’s gesture and the other on color. Although
a few painters, such as de Kooning, continued to The 1960s
use recognizable images, most did not. At first By the 1960s both abstract and nonobjective art
their pictures shocked the public, but they soon had lost their ability to shock. Painting with recog-
came to dominate the art world. nizable subjects now seemed radical. Pop artists,
So-called action (or gesture) painting is epito- so named for their use of images drawn from
mized by Pollock’s Lavender Mist (see page 13). Its popular culture, broadened the definition of art
intricate interlace was created by a bold, physical by painting such everyday things as comic-book
technique that put the artist, as he said, “in the characters and soup cans.
painting.” Pollock placed his canvases flat on the Ordinary objects had made their way into fine
floor and poured and flung his paints. His works art before—cubist still-life painters, for example,
are records of his creative process, a direct view had incorporated newspaper type and collage ele-
of his emotions and actions. ments. David Smith (see page 34) used discarded
The second category within abstract expres- metal objects in his welded sculpture. But Smith
sionism is represented by the evanescent rectan- and the cubists were primarily interested in
gles of color in Mark Rothko’s Untitled (see page the visual qualities of these objects. This visual
17). Through floating shapes, subtle brushwork, emphasis began to shift in the mid-1950s with
and color modulations, Rothko evoked a range of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (see
emotions, from elation to foreboding. His medita- pages 20 and 23). Rauschenberg used ordinary
tive and silent pictures invite contemplation. objects in what he called “combine paintings.”
Art historians have long pointed to the influ- Johns, whose painted works sometimes incorpo-
ence on young abstract expressionists of sur- rated three-dimensional casts, produced painted
realist artists, many of whom had fled war-torn bronze or plaster versions of such things as
Europe for the United States in the 1930s. This lightbulbs and his own paint brushes stuffed into
view finds, for example, a parallel between the a coffee can. For later pop artists, these ordinary
spontaneity of action painting and the automatic objects became subjects in a more direct way—
imagery used by the surrealists. But while the unabashed reflections of a consumer society.
surrealists mined the subconscious for preexist- With ironic detachment, pop artists put the mass
ing mental images to reproduce, action painters culture of mid-century America in the spotlight,
found the image in the act of painting itself. replacing the high seriousness of abstract expres-
By the early 1950s, existentialist thinkers were sionism with deadpan coolness.
in the intellectual vanguard. “We weren’t influ- Roy Lichtenstein’s Look Mickey (see page 27)
Note: Boldface terms are enced directly by existentialism, but it was in went a step further, not only using characters
defined in the glossary. the air. . . . we were in touch with the mood,” from popular culture but emulating the dot pat-
de Kooning noted in an interview. Existentialism’s tern of commercial printing. Though it looked
5
as familiar as the Sunday comic pages, Look case. Abstract expressionism had dominated
Mickey was made with careful consideration of in the 1950s, and abstraction of different kinds
color, composition, and other formal concerns. continued to dominate into the 1960s. In a sense,
Lichtenstein’s picture was very much hand abstraction was modern art—what people first
painted, but other pop artists began to move imagined when hearing those words. The genera-
away from traditional “fine-art” techniques. Andy tion of abstract artists that followed the abstract
Warhol’s Now Let Us Praise Famous Men (see expressionists developed diverse coloristic styles
page 31), for example, was made by a largely sometimes characterized as postpainterly
mechanical printing process using a silkscreen abstraction. Some, including Morris Louis (see
that had been created from a photograph, not page 58), let their pigments soak into the fabric
from his own drawing or design. The role of the of the canvas and become more like a stain than
artist in making art was being reconsidered. paint on the surface. Their methods were taken
With expanded computer use, wider exposure up by the younger artist Sam Gilliam (see page
to media such as television, and faster communi- 56), whose own unique contribution was to free
cations, the 1960s experienced an explosion the canvas from its rectangular support.
of information—new kinds of information The term postpainterly is also used to describe
and new ways of processing it. The visual arts the nongestural approach of Ellsworth Kelly (see
extended into realms that had been considered page 37). In comparison with the highly subjec-
quite distinct, such as theater, dance, and music. tive art of the 1950s, Kelly’s flatly painted panels
A number of artists, including at various times in bold colors or in black and white seem pristine
Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg (see page 33), formal exercises, though he is inspired by things
and Warhol, concentrated their efforts on he sees in the world around him. His works have
performance-type works, some of which were what could be described as “perfect pitch” in
called happenings. The first happening was terms of color and shape. They are controlled
organized by Allan Kaprow in 1959. “The happen- and impersonal, with barely a trace of the artist’s
ing,” he said, “is performed according to plan but hand.
without rehearsal. . . . It is art but seems closer to The simplification and reduction of works like
life.” He had been inspired in part by the music Kelly’s, not the lively irreverence of pop, attracted
of John Cage, whose performances relied on the attention of many younger artists in the
unscheduled audience participation. In Cage’s 1960s and 1970s. The sobriety and concentration
“4’33’’,” for example, a pianist sat without striking of Frank Stella’s early work (see page 41), espe-
a single key for four minutes and thirty-three sec- cially, was an important influence on what came
onds. The random sounds coming from the audi- to be called minimal art. In 1965 Donald Judd
ence were the only music. Artists’ studios were (see page 44) wrote an essay entitled “Specific
often sites for happenings. In many ways, Warhol’s Objects” that helped define the aims of minimal
Factory, which is what he called his studio, was a art. In some respects, minimalism was more a way
permanent happening. of thinking about art than making it. Minimal art-
For all of its visibility and widespread appeal, ists employed industrial means to manufacture
pop art’s real theoretical complexity—its ques- impersonal, often rigid, geometric forms. They
tioning of assumptions about fine art—was not strongly asserted the object-ness of art.
fully appreciated until much later. Not every artist The 1970s
in the early 1960s was interested in pop, in any In the 1970s, if not before, the idea that art fol-
6
lowed some linear course that could be plotted, ditional “media” as rubber, ice, and food), and
perhaps even predicted, had to be set aside. the interaction of natural forces. Process encom-
From the time Vasari wrote Lives of the Artists passed such works as a transparent box in which
in the sixteenth century, art history had been moisture condensed and a sculpture created by
written as a progression from one style to the the random fall of molten metal. Process did not
next. No longer. The 1970s, sometimes called simply allow for but, in fact, relied on change
the “pluralistic 70s,” saw the introduction of and the element of chance introduced through
body art, conceptual art, process art, land art, the action of weather, atmosphere, gravity, oxi-
performance art, feminist art, and others. They dation, or other forces. Art was no longer fixed.
can all be seen as part of one larger postmini- Like life itself, it encompassed mutability and
mal movement, but what is most significant is even decay. One of the first artists to set aside
the very fact of their multiplicity. Anything, it the precision and hard surfaces of minimalism
seemed, could be art. And as Joseph Beuys, for a more processlike approach was Eva Hesse
an influential German performance artist, (see page 50).
maintained, everyone is an artist. In the early 1970s sculptor Martin Puryear
In 1970 the exhibition Information at the (see page 66) began using his fine handworking
Museum of Modern Art in New York featured skills to develop an elegant, abstract style. His
works by conceptual artists. Like Sol LeWitt (see (usually) wooden sculptures have a strong, even
page 46), these artists appreciated the purity mysterious “presence.” Made using the laborious
of minimalism but not its obsession with the art techniques of woodworker, boatwright, and bas-
object. For them, the idea was the art. The object ketweaver, they derive power from the discipline
was a mere by-product. Perhaps there was no of craft.
object per se, only documentation of the artist’s Pop artists painted comic-book characters
idea or activity. At least in part this marked a and movie stars, but most other artists avoided
reaction against the commodification of art, a recognizable imagery. About 1970, though, Philip
rejection of the consumer culture so gaudily Guston, who had been an abstract expressionist
apparent in 1960s pop. Conceptual art ranged (see page 62), began to paint hobnailed boots
from “body” pieces like those of Chris Burden, and hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan, bewil-
who in one work had himself shot in the arm, to dering admirers of his previous work. By the end
the more cerebral word plays of Joseph Kosuth of the decade, both figures and more represen-
(see page 49). The assumption that a work of art tational styles had made a reappearance. So-
was primarily defined by its visual qualities was called new image art of the late 1970s and 1980s
being undermined. typically set a single figure in a dense, often
Closely related to conceptual art was so- expressionistic, background. Unlike the emotion-
called land or earth art—for example, Robert ally detached figures of pop, the motifs, like the
Smithson’s large-scale reshapings of the land- horses of Susan Rothenberg (see page 60), are
scape (see page 55) and the more anonymous often mysterious and solemn. Like new image
efforts of Richard Long (see page 53), whose art painters, Chuck Close (see page 63), who painted
includes walks in the countryside. Also related to hyperrealistic close-up faces of family members
conceptual art were process works, whose final and friends, retained theoretical links with
form was determined by the artist’s technique, minimalism, conceptual art, and process.
choice of materials (which included such nontra- The 1980s into the 1990s
7
In 1981 at London’s Royal Academy, the curator of works of art and as the theoretical underpinnings
the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting observed, of new approaches for artists. They have opened
“The artists’ studios are full of paint pots again.” up the meaning of a work of art to multiple inter-
His comment pointed to the preponderance of pretations and created new possibilities for appro-
sculpture, performance art, and nonpaint media priated (that is, borrowed) imagery. For Sigmar
that had preoccupied so many artists in the pre- Polke (see page 74), the imagery he appropriates
ceding decade. In the early 1980s, first in Germany from another art source becomes new art in his
and Italy and a bit later in the United States, a hands because its context and therefore its mean-
number of young painters returned not only to ing have changed.
painting on canvas but to expressive styles and In the 1990s artists have also responded to
emotion-laden, highly charged content. Though new social critiques from African Americans,
enormously varied, their works have usually been feminists, homosexuals, and other groups.
labeled together as neo-expressionism. These Sharper attention is being paid to issues of the
paintings are often large, their surfaces densely artist’s identity. We can note this motivation, for
worked and frequently encrusted with an array example, in the “interiority” and female imagery
of materials. Like Anselm Kiefer’s meditations on of Elizabeth Murray’s shaped canvases (see page
the evil of the Holocaust (see page 71), they fre- 77) or in the highly personal symbolism of Louise
quently tackle once-taboo subjects. A booming art Bourgeois (see page 68). In Bourgeois’ case, this
market apparently starved for images and emotion is a path she has been exploring for more than
paid unprecedented prices for these works in the fifty years.
1980s.
In the 1990s many artists—and more crit-
ics—have identified themselves as postmodern.
In one sense this label reflects the reaction of
painters distancing themselves from the focus of Quoting a Renaissance aphorism, noted art
modernism on color, line, and composition. But historian Dore Ashton acknowledged that “Truth
it also reflects the influence of such postmod- is the daughter of Time.” Our conclusions grow
ern thinkers and writers as Jacques Derrida and less secure as we approach the present. Many
Roland Barthes. Many of the artists who have of the assumptions we have held about art since
come of age in the second half of the twentieth the Renaissance have been questioned or even
century—especially since the late 1960s—have set aside. We no longer necessarily accept, for
been more widely educated than their predeces- example, that art “progresses” along a trajectory
sors and have a natural affinity for theoretical we can plot, that it is permanent and relies on
approaches. Chuck Close, only one of several art- traditional fine-art techniques, or that it conveys
ists we discuss who attended graduate school at meaning or emotion through form. In fact, we
Yale, said that “we learned to talk art before we have been forced to consider whether art is
could really make it.” The discourse surrounding fundamentally defined by the way it looks.
such ideas as semiotics, poststructuralism, and Perhaps its “essence” lies elsewhere. Perhaps
deconstruction have tended to make art a more it has no claim to “essence” at all.
hermetic pursuit, increasingly self-referential. The works in this packet suggest many
The techniques of deconstruction, in particular, questions. The following paragraphs consider
have been used as tools for the interpretation of a few of them.
8
What distinguishes art from ordinary objects? Both Rauschenberg and Warhol (see pages 20
What is the role of the artist in “making” art? and 30), at about the same time, started to use
photosilkscreening. This was a mechanical—in fact
In 1913 Marcel Duchamp (see page 22) showed his a photographic—process that took an image not
first readymade, a bicycle wheel. It was followed of the artist’s own making and put it at the center
in later years by a bottle rack, a urinal, and other of his work. Warhol compounded the issue by
“outrages.” These were, as surrealist author repeating his images (coke bottles, soup cans, and
André Breton defined them, “manufactured Marilyn Monroe, for example) many times over.
objects promoted to the dignity of art through Moreover, art emerged from Warhol’s studio, which
the choice of the artist.” This was the opening he called the Factory, that he had not touched
salvo in the assault on the status, on what some himself. He teased and provoked the public with
later artists called the “fetish,” of the art object. It comments like this one to an interviewer: “Why
wasn’t until the late 1950s, however, that the real don’t you ask my assistant Gerard Malanga some
battle was joined. Sculptors and collage artists had questions? He did a lot of my paintings.”
long incorporated found objects for their value as The question of originality becomes even more
abstract visual elements. But when Rauschenberg complex when we look at the reuse of images
exhibited a stuffed goat (see page 20), he was that are not simply everyday things such as soup
implying that everyday things were not any less cans but that were themselves created as art by
interesting in themselves than the representations someone else. In appropriating images in this way,
of them that we had been calling art. Warhol (see artists such as Sigmar Polke (see page 74) can
page 30) suggested that, well, anything could be comment on the very practice of art.
art. Such views of course tended to undermine the
object. Eventually conceptual artists asserted that Must a work of art endure, or can it be ephem-
the object was nothing but a residue of the real art eral?
that was the artist’s idea. No longer possessed of
its former aura, the object per se was up for grabs, In the 1970s a number of artists turned to the
ready to be appropriated, copied, or even negated. landscape to make art. One of the largest land-
art projects undertaken in the United States was
Must a work of art be unique? What constitutes Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (see page 55).
originality? What distinguishes original and Massive quantities of earth and rock were moved
copy? at great expense and human effort. The work has
since sunk into the Great Salt Lake, disappearing
In a famous essay entitled “Art in the Age of by design.
Mechanical Reproduction” (published originally In the work of conceptual artists such as Sol
in the mid-1930s), Walter Benjamin mused about LeWitt (see page 46), whose pieces exist more as
what authenticity meant in the twentieth century. ideas than as things, the question of permanence
“From a photographic negative, for example,” he is even more complicated, since ideas are able to
noted, ”one can make any number of prints: to be reconstructed indefinitely—or may never be
ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.” He given physical form at all. And for process artists,
worried about the “depletion” of art’s “aura,” the ephemeral quality of their materials was
which he defined as the “here and now of the in itself an art medium, one that adds change
work of art—its unique existence in space and and the unpredictability of experience to their
time.” These words still haunt the discussion. “palette.” Art is part of lived experience. Does
9
it need to be permanent in a way life is not? What role does the viewer have to play?
Philosopher Theodor Adorno wondered, “If art,
having once recognized duration as illusion, could In the questions we have been considering, one
renounce it, if it could incorporate its own mortal- thing is consistently clear: the viewer is more
ity into itself out of sympathy with the ephemeral critical now than ever before. The viewer has
nature of the living, then that would be appropri- a much greater role to play—as participant, as
ate to a conception of truth not as something collaborator. Happenings and performance may
external and abstract, but as grounded in time.” naturally imply an active spectator, but the same
The other side of this coin is the symbolic interaction has been introduced to what we might
value of permanence. Anselm Kiefer (see page initially consider more traditional one-way works
71), for example, uses lead to embody the weight of painting and sculpture. Robert Rauschenberg’s
and tragedy of history. It assumes more power, use of reflective surfaces in Copperhead Grande
though, for audiences who no longer assume that (see page 21) is only one, and a very literal,
art must be made to endure. example. It makes the viewer’s own image and
surroundings a part of the picture.
To what extent, if at all, does art need to fit the In a different but equally crucial way, appropri-
traditional definition of high art to be “fine art”? ation artists also rely on the viewer. The viewer’s
assumptions are an integral part of the art, no less
In the 1960s pop art changed what we accept as so than pigment for a painter. Postmodern theory
fine art. It offered new subjects from the busy, has put the viewer in the driver’s seat, so to speak,
sometimes glaring confusion around us: brand since it is the viewer who creates the meaning of
logos and commercial products, comic-strip char- a work. Moreover, a lot of art produced today is
acters and movie stars. It has changed not only about art. Consider Jasper Johns’ references to a
what we see as art but the way we see it. We can Renaissance altarpiece and his own earlier paint-
now look at art—and at our own surroundings— ings in Perilous Night (see page 24). Looking at art
with what has been called a vernacular gaze, today requires us to have considered the art of all
taking in everything at once without judgments periods, including our own.
about value or hierarchies. Is it any less appropri-
ate, any less strange, really, that our artists paint
Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck rather than Venus
and Adonis? These characters are part of the ico-
nography we all share, democratic and meaningful
perhaps in a way that ancient gods and goddesses
can no longer claim to be.
10
Works in focus
3⁄4
Jackson Pollock
American, 1912–1956
Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, and

spent most of his youth in California. In 1929—at
only seventeen years old—he left Los Angeles for
New York, where he studied with painter Thomas
Hart Benton. Pollock’s early work shared Benton’s
rhythmic arabesques and undulating contours.
The young painter, however, was more attuned to
the intense, interior-driven works of Albert Pinkham
Ryder than to the folksy narratives of his own
teacher.
In 1936 Pollock worked in the New York shop of
muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, and about 1938 he
turned from Benton’s style to what he saw as the
more powerful and epic work of Siqueiros, Diego
Rivera, and other Mexican mural painters. The
large scale of their paintings and the
“controlled accidents” that were a part of the
experimental techniques used in Siqueiros’ shop
also had an impact. Increasingly, Pollock was inter-
Jackson Pollock (Jackson
ested in painting mythic images from a private
Pollock Papers, Archives
of American Art,
inner world, and he entered Jungian analysis in
Smithsonian Institution) 1939. Influenced by surrealism, his work from the
early 1940s frequently made use of cryptic, cal-
ligraphic scribbles that resembled the automatic
writing (see glossary) that surrealists used to
access the unconscious. At this time, too, Pollock
was reading the ideas of artist Wassily Kandinsky,
who saw art not just as an expression of inner
states but as evoking “basic rhythms” of the uni-
verse. In the mid-1940s Pollock’s works lost their
totemic images, becoming looser, freer. The scrib-
bles expanded. Placing his canvases flat on the
floor and painting with a drip technique, he arrived
at the allover style of his most famous works.
By the mid-1950s abstract expressionism had
become the style of modern art. Pollock himself
was a larger-than-life figure in American culture—
he was featured in Life magazine, and Vogue used
his works as backdrops for fashion shoots. The last
years of his life, however, were troubled by heavy
drinking and depression. He died in 1956 in an
automobile accident.
12
Jackson Pollock
Number 1, 1950
(Lavender Mist), 1950
Oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas,
2.210 x 2.997 m (87 x 118 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund
SLIDE 1
AND COLOR REPRODUCTION
13
Jackson Pollock
Nearly fifty years later, our mental image of the modern artist is still
a picture of Jackson Pollock—larger than life, intense, even reckless.
By 1947 Jackson Pollock had begun to place his My painting does not come from the easel. . . .
large canvases on the floor and paint them using On the floor I feel more at ease. I feel nearer, more
a variety of slinging and pouring techniques, part of the painting, since this way I can walk
working quickly and spontaneously from all sides around it, work from the four sides and literally be
to create an allover tracery of lines. in the painting.
Different colors and different painted shapes— —Jackson Pollock
broader splotches and softer colors below, and

sharper, darker ones on top—lend a shallow frosti- making—chance and choreography. Its essence
ness to Lavender Mist. There is no central focus. lies in the act of its creation. Though the physical
No concentration of effect locks our gaze, no sto- performance of painting was a spontaneous and
ryline or compositional dynamic draws our atten- unrepeatable event, the painting itself was always
tion from point to point. Instead, our eyes travel subject to artistic will. “I can control the flow of the
freely around the canvas or simply rest. This lack paint,” Pollock contended. “There is no accident.”
of a focal point and the nearly ten-foot horizontal Pollock’s tracery has the same structure as a
dimension of the canvas make the painting some- drawn line and serves the same organizational
thing we experience as much as see. purpose. His snap-of-the-wrist technique of fling-
Although a derisive reviewer had nicknamed ing paint had surprising accuracy. In effect, it
Pollock “Jack the Dripper,” the complex and subtle extended his reach and gave him a delicate touch.
structural interlace of Lavender Mist is the result Pollock often went back into his paintings, adding
of both happenstance and split-second decision the lines that knit his pictures together.
VIEWPOINT A c t i o n p a i n t i n g
Art critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term action painting, which describes the work of
Pollock, de Kooning (see page 15), and many other abstract expressionist painters. In a cel-
ebrated essay published in 1952, he wrote, “At a certain moment, the canvas began to appear
to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act.... His act-painting is of the
same metaphysical stuff as the artist’s existence.” For Rosenberg, subjective qualities were
paramount. Painting was an epic struggle between artist and material. With grand, heroically
scaled gestures, the action painter created an art wrung from confrontation and catharsis.
Mark Tansey, American, born By contrast, critic Clement Greenberg, another champion of abstraction in the 1950s
1949, A Short History of and 1960s, concentrated on the formal properties of the paintings. For him, the total “painting-ness” of Pollock’s work was para-
Modernist Painting (detail),
mount, its denial of external references and sole reliance on line, color, and form—the internal logic of painting itself. Greenberg
1979–1980, oil on canvas,
believed that abstract expressionism was the completion of “modernism with a capital M,” the culmination of a pursuit that could
72 x 72 in., The Eli Broad
Family Foundation, Santa be traced to Maurice Denis’ comment in 1890: “Remember that a picture—before it is a battle horse or a nude woman or some
Monica, California (photo anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order.”
© Douglas M. Parker) Pollock’s allover paint emphasized the flatness of the canvas, as Mark Tansey points out with ironic literalness in A Short
History of Modernist Painting. For Greenberg and like-minded critics, flatness—not storytelling, which properly belonged to litera-
ture, or depth, which properly belonged to sculpture—was the ultimate source of quality in painting. These views, which approach
painting on its own terms, established the outlines of critical discussion for much of the rest of the century.
3⁄4
14
This is all about freedom
Willem de Kooning Critic Harold Rosenberg had been looking at de “What’s the problem? This is all about freedom.”
American 1904–1997 Kooning’s bold, slashing brushstrokes when he For de Kooning, painting was about drama and the
Study for Woman
coined the term action painting. But de Kooning outpouring of the artist’s emotions. “Painting isn’t
Number One, 1952
departed from purely abstract painting. Between just the visual thing that reaches your retina—
Pastel, crayon, and graphite,
0.229 x 0.285 m 1949 and 1951 he started to fragment the human it’s what is behind it and in it,” he said. “I’m not
(9 x 111/4 in.) figure, arriving finally at a series of unsettling interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or
Andrew W. Mellon Fund images of women. This drawing is a study for one of reducing painting to design, form, line, and color.
SLIDE 2 them. The grimacing face—and de Kooning’s almost I paint this way because I can keep putting more
violent style—subverted classical images of the things in it—drama, anger, pain, love, a figure,
beautiful woman and commented on women’s role a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes
in contemporary culture. it again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t
The recognizable imagery in de Kooning’s new matter if it’s different from mine as long as
works struck some as a betrayal of abstract it comes from the painting, which has its own
expressionism, but the artist himself remarked, integrity and intensity.”
15
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko (Photographs Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in what
of Artists Collection One, is today Daugavpils, Latvia. His family immigrated
Archives of American Art,
to the United States when he was ten, settling
Smithsonian Institution)
in Portland, Oregon. Planning a career in law or
engineering, Rothko entered Yale in 1921, but in
late 1923 he moved to New York and began art
classes. In the 1930s, while earning his living by
teaching art classes for children, Rothko painted
mostly street scenes and interiors with figures.
He stressed the emotional quality of his subjects,
something he admired in children’s art.
During the 1940s Rothko’s imagery became
increasingly symbolic. Like many of his contempo-
raries, he felt that new subjects and a new idiom
were required to express the anxiety and tragedy
of the war years. He turned to themes of myth,
prophecy, archaic ritual, and the unconscious mind.
Influenced by the presence in New York of surreal-
ist artists, Rothko relaxed his technique, and his
images became more abstract. Figurative associa-
tions and references to the natural world finally
disappeared altogether in the late 1940s. Rothko
progressively eliminated linear elements, and
asymmetrically arranged patches of color became
the basis of his compositions. By 1950 Rothko had
reduced the number of floating rectangles to two,
three, or four and aligned them vertically.
In the late 1950s, when Rothko’s work dark-
ened dramatically, distinctions between shape
and ground became more difficult to discern. The
resulting sensation of enclosure lends itself to
meditation. Between 1964 and 1967 Rothko was
occupied with paintings for the Rothko Chapel,
originally commissioned for the University of St.
Thomas in Houston, Texas. For the last few years of
his life, Rothko was physically ill and suffered from
depression. He committed suicide in February 1970.
16
Mark Rothko
Untitled, 1953
Oil on canvas, 1.951 x 1.723 m
(763/4 x 673/4 in.)
Gift of the Mark Rothko
Foundation, Inc.
SLIDE 3
17
Mark Rothko
You might as well get one thing straight.... I am not an abstractionist ...
not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else....
I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy,
ecstasy, doom, and so on.
—Mark Rothko
By 1950 Rothko had removed all references to painting and viewer “intimate and human.”
either the natural world or myth from his paint- The fact that lots of people break down and cry when
ing and adopted the soft-edged rectangles of confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate
Untitled. Stacked vertically and hovering over a with those basic human emotions. The people who
hazy ground, they occupy an ambiguous space. weep before my pictures are having the same religious
Rothko’s technique appears simple, but close experience I had when I painted them.
examination reveals its richly varied effect. He —Mark Rothko
painted with several thin layers applied in differ-

ing degrees of saturation and transparency, giving Rothko was convinced that pure pictorial prop-
his colors the appearance of luminosity and depth. erties such as color, surface, proportion, and scale
The liquid paint soaks the canvas, leaving soft, could disclose the presence of philosophical truth.
indistinct edges. The shapes seem to float. Their He linked luminosity, darkness, broad space,
feathery edges impart an aura-like vibration as if and color contrast to tragedy, ecstasy, and the
they were animated by an interior light. sublime. His abstract shapes recede or advance
Using nothing more than these subtle varia- according to color. Are these rectangles superim-
tions, Rothko evoked a range of atmospheres and posed on the background or are they voids in the
moods. Some paintings seem buoyant. Others, like background? This ambiguity in their relationship
this one, somberly meditative. poses questions of presence and absence—
Rothko wanted the large scale of his paintings in existential terms, of being and nothingness.
to envelop the viewer. He asked that his largest Rothko’s ideas about the “meaning” of his
pictures be hung “so that they must be first encoun- works are elusive. He generally avoided explaining
tered at close quarters, so that the first experience the specific content of his work, believing that the
is to be within the picture.” He sought what he abstract image could represent directly the fun-
termed damental nature of “human drama.” For the most
“clarity: the elimination of all obstacles between the part, he gave up conventional titles too, using
painter and the idea and between the idea and the numbers or colors to distinguish one work from
Mark Rothko, Street Scene,
observer.” He wanted his pictures to inundate the another. This helped him resist explanations
1936/1938, oil on canvas,
viewer’s eye immediately, displacing the everyday. of meaning. “Silence,” he said, “is so accurate.”
0.915 x 0.558 m
(36 x 22 in.), Gift of The But Rothko’s intention was not to overwhelm. On
Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. the contrary, he hoped to make the contact between
Critics comment
Rothko’s paintings have often been compared to landscape, their horizontal bands and luminous colors likened to sunsets over the
horizon. Even the projection of his “color-light” was compared by Elaine de Kooning, artist, writer, and wife of Willem de Kooning, to
the physical sensation of atmospheric pressure. For her, Rothko’s colors recalled the ominous, pervasive light before a hurricane.
Critic Robert Rosenblum presented the classic formulation of this view in his 1961 essay “The Abstract Sublime.” He suggested
that Rothko’s painting could be seen as having descended from eighteenth-century conceptions of the Romantic Sublime—that
boundlessness of nature that evokes a religious sort of awe. The precursors of Rothko’s painting were to be found in the landscape
paintings of J.M.W. Turner and Frederic Church. “We are the monk before the sea,” Rosenblum wrote, “standing silently and con-
templatively before these huge and soundless pictures as if we were looking at a sunset or a moonlit night.”
Unlike the horizon, however, Rothko’s horizontals do not extend to the edges of our sight. His vague rectangles float, framed on all
sides by their nebulous background. In earlier pictures, Rothko used architectural elements from the city—the subway, apartment blocks,
and interiors—to define and compress space and to establish similar fore- and background relationships. His experience, it has recently
been argued, was largely urban, and it would seem likely that he was intuitively inclined to locate the tragedy of modern life in city
spaces.
18
Zips through the color field
In contrast to the gestural energy of works by Pollock

or de Kooning—who have been called “heroic”—
Rothko and Barnett Newman are more often described
as “oracular,” as if their works conveyed the cryptic
and prophetic messages of some divinity. Newman saw
the role of the artist as one of creator, bringing form
out of chaos.
After destroying much of his earlier work,
Newman arrived in 1948 at a new compositional
fulcrum he called the zip. The zip, a usually vertical
stripe, is a stark interruption of allover flat color.
Often made with the aid of masking tape, the zip at
once inhabits and divides the color field. It is a pres-
ence, but also a lacuna, a void. The radical reduction
of Newman’s work would prove to be of great influ-
ence on Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt (see pages
37 and 40).
Barnett Newman
Yellow Painting, 1949
(671/2 x 523/8 in.)
Gift of Annalee Newman
SLIDE 4
19
Robert Rauschenberg
American, born 1925
Robert Rauschenberg at Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas.

Graphicstudio in April 1987 He studied design briefly in Kansas City under the GI
(© Graphicstudio, University
Bill and for a few months in Paris. After he learned of
of South Florida, photo by
Josef Albers’ work and the innovative Black Mountain
George Holzer)
College (see glossary), Rauschenberg returned to the
United States. He studied at Black Mountain only
briefly but continued to make trips there after he
moved to New York in 1949. At Black Mountain,
Rauschenberg became friends with dancer Merce
Cunningham and composer John Cage, whose use of
chance and elements of everyday experience proved
to be of great influence.
Among Rauschenberg’s first works were several
monochromatic pictures, including an all-white series,
whose austerity and limited range foreshadow mid-
1960s minimalism. However, some of these were back-
drops for dance performances. They were meant to be
seen in changing patterns of light and shadow and, in
a sense, assumed the presence of the human figure.
In 1952, when abstract expressionism dominated the
art world, Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a
Robert Rauschenberg, Cardbird drawing with the intention of erasing it. After he exhib-
Door, published 1971, card- ited the ghostly rubbed-out image, both homage and
board, paper, tape, wood, rebellion, many critics labeled him a neo-Dadist. In 1954
metal, offset lithography, and Rauschenberg began incorporating found objects in his
screenprint, 2.032 x 0.762 x
paintings. Until about 1961 he produced what he called
0.279 m (80 x 30 x 11 in.),
Gift of Gemini G.E.L.
“combine paintings.” They used a variety of techniques,
SLIDE 5 including collage, painting, silkscreening, and dye trans-
fers, and incorporated fabric, stuffed animals, printed
Rauschenberg printed the elements, and other materials. These works were
logos on these boxes, making
important precursors of pop, but Rauschenberg’s works
an ironic comment on earlier
lack the detached coolness of pop. They are messy and
works in which he simply used
commercial cartons. expressive, filled with the whole humming, buzzing con-
fusion of life and the world. For a number of years in
the mid-1960s, Rauschenberg concentrated on perfor-
Robert Rauschenberg, mance, more elaborate sculpture, and installations.
Monogram, 1955–1959,
Between 1984 and 1991 Rauschenberg devoted his
mixed media, 1.22 x 1.83 x
1.83 m, Moderna Museet,
energies to a project to promote world peace through
Stockholm (© Robert art. ROCI, or Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural
Rauschenberg, photo by Interchange, was funded almost entirely by the artist.
Tord Lund/Moderna Museet Rauschenberg’s iconoclastic inventiveness, energy, and
Stockholm)
humane spirit have made him one of the most influen-
tial artists of this century.
20
Robert Rauschenberg
Copperhead Grande/ROCI CHILE, 1985
Acrylic and tarnishes on copper,
2.286 x 3.658 m (90 x 144 in.)
Gift of the Robert Rauschenberg
Foundation
SLIDE 6
21
Robert Rauschenberg
Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc,
it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrange-
ment. Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act
in that gap between the two.)
—Robert Rauschenberg, 1959
Copperhead Grande is one of the products of copper surface reflects the viewers, changing as
ROCI, the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural they shift position. It puts them and the space and
Interchange, a project the artist launched in movements around them literally in the picture.
1984. It took him to nine countries in seven years: Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol (see page 30)
Japan, Mexico, Chile, Tibet, Cuba, Venezuela, started to use photosilkscreening processes at
Malaysia, the former Soviet Union, and the former about the same time. Earlier Rauschenberg had
East Germany. In each case, he worked with local used a solvent transfer method to add type and
artists and craftspeople and collected objects that printed images to his canvases. Even when he is
he then incorporated into the works produced using the more mechanistic silkscreening tech-
there. The areas chosen were outside the main- nique, however, Rauschenberg remains interested
stream of Western art, and many were dictatorial in producing a varied surface. He often paints
states. The artist’s goal was to focus an artistic over the printed image, adding expressive marks
dialogue and creative energy on the situation of that continue to show his connection to abstract
peoples living under oppressive regimes. expressionism. Warhol’s silkscreened images, on
Collaboration has been and continues to be the other hand, are more impersonal—more cool.
an important element of Rauschenberg’s art.
He has worked with many other artists and with Chile, I think, is one of the most beautiful places in
musicians, dancers, and scientists. His ideas the world. In the north are deserts and copper fields.
about partnership extend to the audience as To get there, I drove for the better part of a day from
well. Rauschenberg helped change the dynamic Santiago and wanted to photograph the forges and
between the viewer and the work of art, insisting flying fire when we came back from the copper mines.
that art is not so much a thing as it is a process We had a hard time. It took a day and a half, actually
that continues, in the repeated act of contempla- to get permission because the mines were a govern-
tion, even after the work itself is “complete.” ment operation. . . . On the way back, there were some
In place of canvas, Copperhead Grande uses llamas on the hill grazing. I got out and a couple of
a copper sheet as a support. Its images were llamas approached us and I found three big turquoise
screened or painted with acrylics or “burned in” stones just lying in this desert. The llamas, the smelt-
with chemicals that tarnish the surface. The effect ing, and the factories, all were real experiences.
is of an irregular kaleidoscopic mosaic. The shiny —Robert Rauschenberg, 1991
Fo u n d o b j e c t s
Found objects were incorporated in works of art long before the 1950s. In the early twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp,
cubist still-life artists had incorporated newspaper fragments, ticket stubs, and the like, in part, for their French, 1887–
1968, Bottle
abstract visual qualities. Surrealist artists also used found objects to jolt the mind. Rauschenberg’s found
Rack, Collections
objects have more in common with the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, who exhibited ordinary manufac-
Mnam/Cci–Centre
tured goods as art without elaboration. Georges Pompidou
Rauschenberg’s everyday objects, even as they become art, retain their original identities. He chooses (photo courtesy
them not for their abstract form, but for their very “thingness.” In Rauschenberg’s works the whole is not Photothèque
greater than the parts, it is the parts, something to be experienced in its multifarious detail. An appear- des collections
du Mnam/Cci)
ance of disorder—almost messiness—prevents Rauschenberg’s images from resolving into one coherent
form. They must be seen in a series of “instances” whose order is not directed by narrative or composi-
tional device but comes about only through the act of viewing.
22
Jasper Johns
American, born 1930
Jasper Johns (Rudi Blesch Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, and
Papers, Archives of American spent most of his childhood in South Carolina. In
Art, Smithsonian Institution)
1949 he moved to New York, where he took a few
classes in art and design before being drafted by
the army and sent to Japan. He was back in New
York by 1952, and like Rauschenberg and Warhol,
he helped support himself by designing window
displays.
In 1954, after a dream, Johns painted an
American flag. About this time, he said he had
decided to “stop becoming and be an artist.” He
destroyed most of his earlier work and started to
concentrate on mundane objects. During the next
three years he did a number of other flags, along
with targets, stenciled letters, and numbers—all
familiar images. These “things the mind already
knows,” he said, “gave me room to work on other
levels.” These were images so recognizable that
the viewer could look past what was represented
to see them as abstract patterns and to focus on
the artist’s surprisingly expressive rendering of
them. They were iconic images, but their surfaces
were rich and tactile. Johns’ favored technique
was encaustic. He applied warm pigmented wax
over laboriously constructed collages.
Johns’ work was not exhibited until 1957, but
it enjoyed immediate success. During most of this
time, he worked closely with Robert Rauschenberg,
who lived in the same building. The two reintro-
duced recognizable imagery after the predominant-
ly abstract work of the previous decade, forming a
link between abstract expressionism and pop.
Johns incorporated plaster casts in many of his
paintings and in 1958 started to make sculpture of
Jasper Johns, Flags I, 1973,
everyday objects. His painting became more com-
screenprint on J. B. Green
paper, sheet: 0.699 x 0.900 m
plex iconographically in the 1960s and 1970s as
(27 1/2 x 357/16 in.), Robert he explored relationships between language and
and Jane Meyerhoff Collection thought using visual and verbal puns. Johns’ work
SLIDE 7 has been increasingly personal and referential of
other art as well as his own.
23
Jasper Johns
Perilous Night, 1982
Encaustic on canvas with objects,
1.705 x 2.442 x 0.159 m
(671/8 x 961/8 x 61/4 in.)
Robert and Jane Meyerhoff
Collection
SLIDE 8
24
Seeing a thing can sometimes trigger the mind to make another thing. In some
instance the new work may include, as a sort of subject matter, references to
the thing that was seen. And, because works of painting tend to share many
aspects, working itself may initiate memories of other works. Naming or paint-
ing those ghosts sometimes seems a way to stop their nagging.
—Jasper Johns, 1984
One of Johns’ overriding interests has been to Mathias Grünewald, Isenheim

explore the nature of seeing, of perception, and Altarpiece, Resurrection panel,
1513–1515, oil on panel, 2.690 x
specifically of “viewing” art. Recently he has turned
1.430 m (© Musée d’Unterlinden,
this lens on the history of art and his own work.
Colmar, photo by O. Zimmerman)
Perplexing juxtapositions and moody colors
make Perilous Night a darkly mysterious picture.
It combines real and painted objects, abstract and
illusionistic styles, the obvious and the obscure. It
seems to be disjointed, but the diptych format of
two equal halves encourages us to recognize rela-
tionships as well as distinctions.
In the upper right is a silkscreened musical
score, the beginning of the composition “Perilous plish red outlines trace a figure from a German
Night” by the artist’s friend John Cage. This estab- altarpiece completed in 1515. The figure is one of
Jasper Johns, Untitled (from Untitled
1972), 1975/1976, pastel and graphite
lishes, from the outset, the painting’s personal the soldiers who has fallen to the ground at the
on gray paper, 0.385 x 0.959 m frame of reference. The words perilous and night foot of the sarcophagus as the resurrected Jesus
(153/16 x 373/4 in.), Gift of Jasper Johns, also suggest the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled ascends to heaven. Knowing this helps make
in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of Banner.” They immediately call to mind the paint- sense of other elements in the picture. For exam-
the National Gallery of Art
ings of the American flag that were among Johns’ ple, mourning is implied by the handkerchief that
first exhibited works. His signature here also seems is “pinned” to the lower right. Painted in a mock-
Untitled is one of several drawings
Johns made after a 1972 painting that to echo the stenciled lettering he used in earlier illusionistic style, this cloth itself refers to a
marked a new direction in his work. pictures. And next to the score is yet another refer- Picasso etching of a weeping woman.
The crosshatches explore various sys- ence to Johns’ own work, this time a crosshatch The arms, so disturbingly like meat suspended
tematic manipulations of pattern. painting of the type that occupied him in the 1970s. from hooks, were cast from the same child at three
Thinking about these pattern manipu-
Another series of references can be drawn out different ages. What are we to make of their promi-
lations, Johns wrote in his sketchbook,
“Another possibility: to see that some-
of the panel on the left side of Perilous Night, nent spots? It has been suggested that Johns is
thing has happened. Is this best shown which is copied in a smaller scale and rotated on referring to either of two other panels from the
by ‘pointing to’ or by ‘hiding’ it?” the right. Though difficult to distinguish, its pur- altarpiece. One shows Christ’s arms similarly dotted
with wounds. The second shows a diseased demon
with sores. With the latter association, Johns may
be alluding to AIDS, which was just being identified
when he made this piece. Yet another interpretation
is that the spots are an extrapolation of the kind
of pattern manipulation Johns was exploring in the
crosshatch pictures—examples of which he has placed
just behind the arms. One year before, in a painting
entitled In the Studio, he made this relationship more
explicit. There, the dots can be seen to devolve, as
if by entropy, beginning as a vague crosshatch and
losing form until they become mere splotches.
25
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City. In

high school he began to draw and paint, taking
summer classes with artist Reginald Marsh at the
Art Students League. He left New York to attend
the school of fine arts at Ohio State University.
After serving three years in the army, Lichtenstein
returned to Ohio State in 1946, remaining as stu-
dent and instructor until 1949. He later taught at
the State University of New York in Oswego and
at Rutgers.
Lichtenstein had his first exhibition in New
York in 1951, which he later recalled was “in the
abstract expressionist idiom” then dominating the
art world. He spent the next six years in Cleveland,
working as a draftsman and graphic designer. In
1957 he was back in New York and soon began to
experiment with comic-strip characters in his work.
In 1960 Allan Kaprow, an old friend and organizer
of happenings, introduced Lichtenstein to other
Left to right: Roy Lichtenstein
draws on a lithoplate used in artists with similar concerns, including Andy
Roads Collar, assisted by Tom Warhol (see page 30) and Claes Oldenburg (see
Pruitt and Alan Holoubek, page 33). The next year, Lichtenstein painted Look
March 1987 (© Graphicstudio, Mickey. It was a turning point. Lichtenstein finally
University of South Florida,
rejected abstract expressionism and its emphasis
photo by George Holzer)
on brushstroke, gesture, and the artist’s mark. He
also turned from its elusive “subjects” to the clear-
cut images of popular culture. Lichtenstein quickly
emerged as one of the most important artists in
the new pop style.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Lichtenstein under-
took an exploration of the history of Western
art. These “quotations” from the history of art
Roy Lichtenstein, Artist’s Studio
culminated with works that incorporated his own
No. 1 (Look Mickey), 1973, oil
and acrylic on canvas, 96 1/8 x
earlier paintings. Together they question assump-
1281/8 in., Walker Art Center, tions about copy and original, reproduction and
Minneapolis, Gift of Judy and uniqueness, high and low art.
Kenneth Dayton and the
T. B. Walker Foundation, 1981
26
Roy Lichtenstein
Look Mickey, 1961
(48 x 69 in.)
Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein,
Gift of the Artist, in Honor of the
50th Anniversary of the National
Gallery of Art
SLIDE 9
27
Roy Lichtenstein
Look Mickey, considered a pop icon, was Lichtenstein’s first comic-strip subject
painted in a style that imitated the look of commercial printing. It used the stuff
of popular culture to make “high” art.
Two familiar Disney cartoon characters stand on a ing the Benday dots used in inexpensive color
fishing pier. Mickey Mouse can barely contain his printing—in the faces of the two characters. “This
amusement as he realizes that Donald Duck, who was the first time I decided to make a painting
exclaims, “LOOK Mickey, I’ve hooked a BIG one!!” really look like commercial art. The approach
has in fact hooked his own jacket. The words have turned out to be so interesting that eventually it
a literal connection to the image, of course, but became impossible to do any other kind of paint-
they also suggested to the art world that some- ing,” Lichtenstein recalled.
thing else may have been hooked. Perhaps audi- To accept pop’s pervasive and for the most
ences, collectors, or galleries? Did Lichtenstein part commercial images as art, many people
hook himself a new style? wanted to understand them as somehow trans-
Lichtenstein remembered seeing this scene in a formed by the artists who used them. But
1960 Disney children’s book, Donald Duck Lost and Lichtenstein demurred, not believing “transforma-
Found. He had been drawing cartoons for his chil- tion” was a part of art’s function: “I think my work
dren for some time, and he decided to paint the is different from comic strips—but I wouldn’t call it
scene in Look Mickey “large, just to see what it transformation. . . . What I do is form, whereas the
would look like.” The painting is approximately four comic strip is not formed in the sense I’m using
by six feet. He used bright primary colors, without the word; the comics have shapes, but
complexity or ambiguity, and painted dots—mimick- there has been no effort to make them intensely
Benday dots
Roy Lichtenstein, Look Benjamin Day (1838–1916), a New York printer, first used small
Mickey (detail)
dots in photoengraving. While his purpose was to increase the
range and subtlety of halftone reproductions, Lichtenstein’s
large dots have the reverse effect. Rather than coalescing into
a more refined image, they become features in themselves. In
contrast to abstract expressionism, in which the painted
brushstroke was a highly charged mark of the artist at work,
Lichtenstein’s Benday dots, though applied by hand, have an
impersonal look. At first Lichtenstein painted them using a
plastic dog brush, which he dipped into paint and then pressed
on the canvas. Later he stenciled the dots through a screen he
had made by drilling a metal sheet. Eventually he purchased
perforated metal and paper screens.
cov4
Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke, unified. The purpose is different, one intends
1965, color screenprint on to depict and I intend to unify.”
heavy, white wove paper,
In fact, Lichtenstein was concerned with the
image: 0.564 x 0.724 m
(223/16 x 281/2 in.), Gift of
formal aspects of art. In Brushstroke and other
Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein works, Lichtenstein paid ironic homage to abstract
SLIDE 10 expressionism, removing from the artist’s mark its
individuality and gesture. By freezing and objecti-
fying it, Lichtenstein reduced the high seriousness
of abstract expressionism’s brushstroke even while
he was projecting it into monumental scale. The
contrast challenges viewers to question their own
notions of what constitutes “the art” in painting.
VIEWPOINT P o p
The term pop art was picked up and applied in print by critic of pop in the United States were troubled by the banality
Lawrence Alloway. But “POP” first appeared, literally (written of its images, others regarded this as its strength. Critic
on a candy wrapper) and as a new style, in a collage by English Henry Geldzahler, a contributor to a pop symposium in 1962,
artist Richard Hamilton. In his subversive image of postwar noted, “The popular press, especially and most typically Life
consumer culture, a cover of the pulp magazine Young Romance magazine, the movie close-up, black and white, technicolor
hangs like a painting. Hamilton later defined pop this way: and wide screen, the billboard extravaganzas, and finally the
introduction, through television, of this blatant appeal to our
P o p u l a r (designed for a mass audience) eye into the home—all this has made available to our society
Tra n s i e nt (short-term solution) and thus to the artist, an imagery so pervasive, persistent
E x p e n d a b l e (easily forgotten) and compulsive that it had to be noticed.”
Low cost Pop did not simply make use of American popular culture.
M a ss p ro d u ce d It gave Americans a new way to see and think about their culture.
Yo u n g (aimed at youth) Art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto described his own experi-
Wi tty ence in an essay entitled “The Abstract Expressionist Coca-Cola
Sexy Bottle”: “Pop redeemed the world in an intoxicating way. I have
G i m m i c ky the most vivid recollection of standing at an intersection....
G l a m o u ro u s There were used-car lots on two corners, with swags of plastic
Bi g Bu s i n ess. . . pennants fluttering in the breeze and brash signs.... Heavy
trucks roared past, with logos on their sides. Lights were flash-
Clearly, pop veered toward kitsch. It was despised by ing. The sound of raucous music flashed out of the windows of
formalist critics such as Clement Greenberg (see page 14) automobiles. I was educated to hate all this. I would have found
since it lacked “quality.” For Greenberg, quality was autono- it intolerably crass and tacky when I was growing up an aesthete.
mous—that is, solely dependent on intrinsic elements—but As late as my own times, beauty was, in the words of George
it was also universal, even transcendent. Certainly, as one Santayana, ‘a living presence, or an aching absence, day or night.’
critic paraphrasing Robert Rauschenberg quipped, qual- I think it still is for someone like Clement Greenberg or Hilton
ity did not lie “between art and Life.” While many critics Kramer. But I thought, Good heavens. This is just remarkable!”
29
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol with assistants employs photographs and ready-made images in

(Photographs of Artists place of those drawn by the artist.
Collection One, Archives
Many of these prints were produced by assistants
of American Art, Smithsonian
in his studio, dubbed the Factory. Their imagery
Institution)
included car crashes, violent protests in the civil
rights movement, the electric chair, and celeb-
rity portraits. In many of these works there is an
underlying concern with death—even the celebri-
ties, like Marilyn Monroe, were recently deceased.
Warhol began experimenting with film in 1963,
and from 1965 devoted more attention to film
and other media, although he continued to make
paintings and prints. Multimedia events billed as
productions of the
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Exploding Plastic
Pittsburgh to an immigrant family from central Inevitable included
Europe. After studying at the Carnegie Institute of rock music perfor-
Technology between 1946 and 1949, he moved to mances by the Velvet
New York and quickly achieved success as a com- Underground. The
mercial artist and illustrator. The charming and Factory became a
whimsical style of his line drawings, particularly of free-form arena
shoes, won him recognition and advertising awards, of music and perfor-
and he continued to do this kind of work into the mance art, occupied
early 1960s, even after he had determined to paint by an ever-changing
“seriously.” cast of artists, drug
Andy Warhol, A Boy for Meg, Warhol’s first serious paintings, based on comic Andy Warhol, Green Marilyn, addicts, transves-
1962, oil on canvas, 1.829 x 1962, silkscreen on synthetic
strips and advertisements, are among the earliest tites, and celebrities.
1.321 m (72 x 52 in.), Gift of polymer paint on canvas, 0.508
examples of pop. Initially he employed a loose style In 1968 Warhol
Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine x 0.406 m (20 x 16 in.), Gift of
SLIDE 11
that was a send-up of abstract expressionist ges- William C. Seitz and Irma S. Seitz, was severely wound-
tural painting, but he soon adopted a more anony- in Honor of the 50th Anniversary ed during an attempt
mous look, with flatter colors and harder outlines. of the National Gallery of Art on his life by an
Critics inclined to view painting as a means of con- SLIDE 12 unbalanced would-
veying emotion and the artist’s personality were be member of the
shocked—not so much by the deliberate vulgarity Factory. Thereafter,
of Warhol’s pictures as by their impersonality. he distanced himself from some of the fringe char-
Warhol once said that he wanted to “be a acters in his entourage, associating instead with the
machine,” and his concern for eliminating conven- rich and famous. During the 1970s he was largely
tional signs of the artist is clear from his shift to occupied with commissioned portraits done from
techniques that gave his pictures the look of print- photographs. In the 1980s Warhol’s work was rein-
ed materials. At first he used stencils and rubber vigorated by his collaboration with younger artists
stamps. Beginning in 1962 Warhol used a photo- like Francesco Clemente and Michael Basquiat, who
mechanical silkscreen process—a technique that had been influenced themselves by Warhol’s earlier
30
Andy Warhol
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(Rauschenberg Family), 1963
Silkscreen on canvas, 2.082 x 2.082 m
(82 x 82 in.)
Gift (Partial and Promised) of
Mr. and Mrs. William Howard Adams
SLIDE 13
31
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol’s fame and celebrity tend to obscure his importance.
He helped redefine what we accept as art.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is one of several modern photographs, the color, in fact, of Evans’
portraits of artist Robert Rauschenberg (see page photographs. It would be easy to accept Warhol’s
20) that Warhol made in the early 1960s. While image as another one from the Agee-Evans book.
Warhol was still working as a commercial artist, He uses the color to suggest the transition from
the inventive works of Rauschenberg and Jasper old to new, as well as to focus attention on the
Johns (see page 23) had been important influ- source of his image as a photograph.
ences on his own decision to transform himself
into a “serious” artist. Andy has fought by repetition to show us that
Warhol took his title, a phrase found in the bibli- there is no repetition really, that everything we look
cal apocrypha, from a book by James Agee and at is worthy of our attention. That’s been a major
Walker Evans. Focusing on the dignity of poor tenant direction for the twentieth century, it seems to me.
farmers during the Depression, the book paired —John Cage
Agee’s text with photographs by Evans. Originally
published in 1941, it received even greater attention The mechanical means of Warhol’s production
in 1960 when it was reissued. Rauschenberg, still an called into question the role of the artist in making
infant in the old family photograph he supplied to art. Warhol himself joked in 1963 that he thought
Warhol, had grown up in Depression-era Texas in someone else should be able to do all his paintings
a family of modest means, though not so poor as for him. In fact, assistants at the Factory did help
Agee’s and Evans’ sharecroppers. produce many of them. Moreover, the serial multipli-
Warhol used the photograph to make a cation of Warhol’s images—most famously his soup
silkscreen that he printed on the canvas more cans and Coke bottles—challenged traditional ideas
than forty times, in eight rows. Most of the rows about art’s uniqueness. Warhol was also testing
have the sepia coloring of old family heirloom the relationship between art and ordinary object,
photographs. Two, however, Warhol chose to print suggesting this distinction was a flexible and intel-
with black ink over silver. This is the color of lectual one. Anything had the potential to be art.
Andy Warhol, Brillo Box, 1964, In 1965 Warhol’s Brillo Boxes

silkscreen ink on wood, was scheduled for exhibition
171/16 x 141/8 x 171/8 in., in Toronto. Canadian inspectors
Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift demanded payment of the
of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley duties applicable to normal
(photo by Larry Sanders) merchandise—such as boxes
of Brillo pads. The director of
the National Gallery of Canada,
called in to consult, said, “I
could see that they were not
sculpture.” He was not alone.
Many in the established art
world—other artists included—
were appalled. The public,
however, was more receptive.
A pervasive 1960s distrust of
authority extended to so-called
art experts.
32
P o p a r t a n d h a p p e n i n g s a t O l d e n b u r g ’s S t o r e
Claes Oldenburg described his environment, the Store, on a

poster in 1961:
This store will be constantly supplied with new objects

which I will create out of plaster and other materials
in the rear half of the place. The objects will be for
sale in the store. The store will be open every day at
hours I will post . . . the hours when I will be able to be
in the store, which is also of course my studio.
The store may be thought of as a season-long exhib-

it, with changing & new material. It will be the center
Claes Oldenburg of my activities during the season.
American, born 1929
Glass Case with Pies
Pies in a Glass Case is just one of the “goods” that were for
(Assorted Pies in a Case), 1962
sale. The Store and an earlier environment called the Street
Burlap soaked in plaster,
painted with enamel, with pie were extensions, in a way, of the happenings organized at
tins, in glass-and-metal case, the end of the 1950s and early 1960s by Oldenburg, Robert
0.476 x 0.311 x 0.276 m Rauschenberg (see page 20), and others. In fact, Oldenburg’s
(183/4 x 121/4 x 107/8 in.) environments served as locales for happenings. But the Store
Gift of Leo Castelli, in Honor
and its commodities offered the artist one great advan-
of the 50th Anniversary
of the National Gallery of Art
tage—something he could sell.
SLIDE 14 The brightly painted plaster goods, executed in differ-
ent scales, were inspired by things Oldenburg saw in shop
windows of his neighborhood in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Unlike the slick, mechanical appearance of some pop art, The Store, 107 East Second Street,
New York, December 1961
they are splotchy and tactile. Oldenburg’s manipulation
(photo courtesy Claes Oldenburg
of scale and material unsettle our expectations about the
and Coosje van Bruggen)
objects he makes, forcing us to see them within a different
frame of reference.
I want these pieces to have an unbridled intense satanic vulgarity

unsurpassable, and yet be art.
—Claes Oldenburg, 1967
33
David Smith
David Smith (Photographs expressionist painters. In the mid-1930s he was

of Artists Collection One, increasingly devoted to sculpture, and he rented
studio space from a commercial welding operation
in Brooklyn, the Terminal Iron Works. He used this
name for his studio, which he ran like a factory,
and continued using it even after he moved to
upstate New York.
In the 1940s Smith’s sculpture was a highly
personal exploration of primitive mythologies. Into
the 1950s he continued to make works—totemlike
human figures—that have been called abstract
anthropomorphisms. During the 1950s and 1960s
Smith worked on a larger scale. He often erected
his pieces outdoors, where they were silhouetted
against the open sky of his rural home. He died in
1965 in an automobile accident.
David Smith, Sentinel I,

1956, steel, 2.276 x 0.429 x
0.575 m (895/8 x 167/8 x 225/8
in.), Gift of the Collectors
Committee
David Smith was born in Decatur, Indiana. He

briefly attended art school in Ohio, but his real Tw e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y s c u l p t u r e
training began when he moved to New York in
1926 and took painting classes at the Art Students Because it is not on a pedestal, Voltri VII establishes a dif-
League. He never studied sculpture formally and ferent kind of relationship with the viewer. Not simply
said he always belonged with the painters. It was something we look at, it is in the same space we ourselves
while he was studying with a cubist painter that inhabit. The use of space as an active element in sculpture
he began to make painted reliefs and works in the had begun to occupy constructivist sculptors (see glos-
round. He was strongly influenced by photographs sary) earlier in the century. Before that, sculpture had
he saw in an art magazine of welded metal sculp- usually been defined in terms of mass rather than space—
ture by Picasso and the Mexican artist Julio of substance rather than void. Mass was either subtracted
González. By 1933 Smith was making his own (as in stone carving, for example) or added (as in model-
welded sculpture of found materials, using skills ing clay or wax for a bronze casting). Smith’s dynamic bal-
he had acquired during a summer job as a metal- ance of void and solid uses form to shape space itself.
worker in a Studebaker automobile plant.
His friendship with connoisseur and collector
John Graham introduced Smith to the ideas of
Carl Jung, to tribal, particularly African, art, and
to non-Western mythologies—an experience he
shared with Jackson Pollock and other abstract
34
David Smith
Voltri VII, 1962
Iron, 2.158 x 3.116 x 1.105 m
(85 x 122 x 431/2 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund
SLIDE 15
35
David Smith
If you ask me why I make sculpture, I must answer that it is my way of life,
my balance....
—David Smith, 1952
During thirty days in May and June 1962, Smith pro- one of surprise, not one rehearsed.... In a sense it
duced an astonishing twenty-six sculptures, all but is never finished. Only the essence is stated, the key
four of which are large scale, like Voltri VII. He had presented to the beholder for further travel.”
been invited to Italy to participate in the Spoleto In Smith’s constructions, found objects are
Festival of Two Worlds by organizer and composer given a whole new identity that has nothing to do
Gian Carlo Menotti. Smith set up shop with several with their original purpose or scale. New relation-
Italian assistants in an abandoned factory in the ships and unexpected juxtapositions turn them into
small town of Voltri. He used only the materials he something else. This sense of risk and possibility
found in the factory—sheet metal, wheels from further connects them to the work of contemporary
discarded machinery, old tools, and the like. abstract expressionist painters.
The works were first exhibited together on the When he arrived in Italy, Smith was planning to
David Smith’s Voltri VII in
the Roman amphitheater in steps of Spoleto’s Roman amphitheater, and many work in steel and to set up shop in a modern fac-
Spoleto, 1962 (© Archivio of them seem to respond to the region’s ancient tory. Before going to Spoleto, he had been working
Ugo Mulas) past. Smith said: “Voltri VII is a chariot ram with in stainless steel, and once back in New York, he
5 bar forgings—they are not personages—they are returned to this highly reflective material. Cubi
forgings.” The writhing shapes nonetheless evoke XXVI is one of his last sculptures.
an image of wailing mourners. When an interviewer The simple forms of Cubi XXVI may suggest the
pressed Smith about whether his abstract forms severe geometry of minimalist works (see page 44)
were personages, he said, “They don’t start off that made about the same time, but Smith’s intention
David Smith, Cubi XXVI, 1965, way. But how can a man live off of his planet? ... and approach were different. Not only do the long
steel, 3.034 x 3.834 x 0.656 m
He can’t get away from it. There is no such thing extensions of the work suggest the limbs of a running
(1191/2 x 151 x 257/8 in.), Ailsa
as truly abstract. Man always has to work from his and jumping human figure—a reference to narra-
Mellon Bruce Fund
SLIDE 16 life.” The swaying rhythm of these uprights has also tive avoided by minimalists—but Smith’s approach
been likened to the undulating curves that decorate to his materials is also at odds with minimalism’s
some Roman sarcophagi. And the cart’s austerity impersonal industrial production. Because of the
and attenuation seem, in themselves, to have the technical difficulty of working with stainless steel,
bleakness of a funeral caisson (wagon). Smith had individual elements fashioned outside his
Smith’s sculptures often layer on visual allusions shop. However, he assembled the works and finished
in this way, without making any specific reference. their surfaces by hand. Throughout his career Smith
There are no subjects, only suggestions that are paid particular attention to the surfaces of his works,
allowed to play out. He described how he got ideas sometimes painting them. Remarking on the surfaces
for his works: “They can begin with a found object, of Cubi XXVI, Smith said, “I made them and I polished
they can begin with no objects. They can begin them in such a way that on a dull day they take on
sometimes even when I’m sweeping the floor and I a dull blue, or the color of the sky in the later after-
stumble and kick a few parts and happen to throw noon sun, the glow, golden like the rays, the colors of
them into an alignment that sets me off thinking nature.”
and sets off a vision of how it would finish if it all
had that kind of accidental beauty to it.”
To this degree, like the action painters, Smith let
chance and the process of creation play a role: “I do
not work with a conscious and specific conviction
about a piece. . . . It is always open to change and
new association. It should be one of celebration,
36
Ellswor th Kelly
American, born 1923
Ellsworth Kelly was born in Newburgh, New

York, and grew up in northern New Jersey. He
studied at the Pratt Institute in New York City,
concentrating, because of parental pressure,
on industrial arts. During part of his time in the
army, he worked in a camouflage unit at Fort
Meade, Maryland, and in 1944 and 1945 saw duty
in England and France. After his discharge, Kelly
studied briefly at the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston. In 1948 he returned to France, where he
stayed for the next six years.
A devoted museumgoer in Paris, Kelly was
most attracted to the formal qualities of Byzantine
and Romanesque art. He also visited sculp-
tors Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi and was
influenced by a chance meeting with John Cage
and Merce Cunningham. Kelly later recalled that
seeing the geometric grid of a window in Paris’
Museum of Modern Art prompted him to paint his
Ellsworth Kelly (right) and Jim first abstract work, and he has continued to draw
Reid at Gemini, canceling print inspiration from things he sees around him. Since
from Portrait series, February 1949, when Kelly made that first abstract painting,
1990 (© Sidney B. Felsen, he has never veered.
1990, courtesy Gemini G.E.L.,
He moved back to the United States in 1954,
Los Angeles, California)
and by 1960 all the elements of his style were
firmly in place: large canvases, simple shapes in
black and white or in flat color, explorations of
figure and ground. He often used nonrectangular
canvases and showed them in groups. In the 1970s
these shapes frequently became curves and arcs.
His reduced forms would prove to be a bridge
between 1950s abstraction and the minimal art
made in the 1960s and 1970s.
37
Ellsworth Kelly
White Curve VIII, 1976
(961/16 x 7615/16 in.)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph
Helman
SLIDE 17
38
One of Kelly’s preoccupations has been to explore the tension in our
perceptions of volume and plane, foreground and background. He uses
perceptual ambiguities and optical effects to force us to acknowledge their
simultaneous presence and recognize the play between them.
The painting White Curve VIII seems to be of The ambiguity of curved versus flat plane is
utmost simplicity. A rectangular canvas is divided underscored by our ambivalent perception of
into two roughly equal-size blocks of black and which color is “in front.” Normally dark colors
white, both masses of flat color. The boundary recede. Looking only at the vertical edge of White
between them carves only the slightest of curves, Curve VIII gives the impression that the black
its arc barely greater than that of the horizon section is set back from and actually smaller than
over the ocean. The dark mass above seems the white area below it. Looking instead at the
heavy, as if the white below were bowed under center of the painting, the two blocks seem to
the strain of supporting it. The colors seem to alternate in moving forward and back.
be stretched tight—we could almost believe the In White Curve VIII, Kelly is both asserting and
canvas itself is curved. No longer perceived as denying the flatness of the surface. This optical
flat, it seems to flex from the sides. Suddenly it effect could never happen with a more tactile
seems more like a sculpture attached to the wall. painting style. It relies on the matte sameness
Kelly does, in fact, make sculpture—and he of his textureless colors.
sets up canvases outdoors so they become reliefs Kelly is one of the artists often identified with
against the sky. He does not make a distinction hard-edge abstraction, but he is adamant about
between painting and sculpture. For minimalists, his dislike of this association. “I’m not interested
this view would be a point of departure, as would in edges. I’m interested in the mass and color,
the seeming impersonality of the paintings. “I the black and white. The edges happen because
want to eliminate the ‘I made this’ from my work,” the forms get as quiet as they can be. I want
Kelly said. the masses to perform. When I work with forms
White Curve VIII appears to have been con- and colors, I get the edge.... In my work, it is
structed out of pure geometry—more like a impossible to separate the edges from the mass
Platonic ideal existing solely in the realm of and color.”
ideas than, say, a paper cup. But, in fact, it was
a crushed paper cup that inspired its design.
Hard-edge abstraction
Imagine the curve of a cup’s flattened base held
a scant inch or less before your eyes. On a huge The term hard edge was first used in 1959. Shortly there-
Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled,
scale it loses its identity and assumes almost after Lawrence Alloway described the style: “[F]orms
1988, bronze, 3.035 x
0.622 x 0.025 m (1191/ architectural form. are few in hard-edge and the surface immaculate.... The
2
x 241/4 x 1 in.), Gift of the whole picture becomes the unit; forms extend the length
Artist, in Honor of the 50th Kelly’s development seems, above all, the record of of the painting or are restricted to two or three tones. The
Anniversary of the National a series of encounters with visual phenomena he felt result of this spareness is that the spatial effect of figures
Gallery of Art
the urge to seize permanently and turn into art. . . . on a field is avoided.” Hard-edge painters were uninter-
SLIDE 18
they stem initially—no matter how far they ested in the brushy gestures of abstract expressionism
Untitled, ten feet tall, seems ultimately diverge—from encounters with reality. . . . and pursued a unified surface.
to rest magically on its —Barbara Rose, 1979 Hard-edge is one aspect of what critic Clement
one-inch thickness. Its
Greenberg called postpainterly abstraction. The other is
unequal curves suggest its
continuation in an unseen
the color-field painting of artists such as Morris Louis (see
part. Kelly described it as page 58).
stemming from a memory
he had of a shark fin cutting
through the water.
39
“Ultimate” painting
Early in the 1950s, about the time Rauschenberg exhibited a

series of monochrome canvases, Ad Reinhardt also restricted
himself to single colors and eventually only to shades of
black. His all-black paintings were laboriously made. He mixed
reds, blues, and other colors with black, creating subtly differ-
entiated hues that seem to unfold as the viewer looks at the
canvas, and he minimized the signs of his brush. His pictures
are static—“timeless” he called them. He insisted they were
the ultimate paintings. Reinhardt’s incisive criticism about
“art as art”—in which anything outside the painting was
excluded—and the severe reduction of his works influenced
minimal and conceptual artists in the 1960s, including Joseph
Kosuth (see page 49). “Ad Reinhardt’s paintings, for many of
us, were a kind of passage,” Kosuth said. “His contradictions
were the contradictions of modernism being made visible to
itself. After Reinhardt, the tradition of painting seemed to be
in the process of completion, while the tradition of art, now
unfettered, had to be redefined.... That tradition ... had to
negate painting in order to proceed.”
Ad Reinhardt
Black Painting No. 34, 1964
(601/4 x 601/8 in.)
Gift of Mr. and
1. Art is art. Everything else is everything else.
Mrs. Burton Tremaine 11. Painting as central, frontal, regular, repetitive.
SLIDE 19
18. Brushwork that brushes out brushwork.
20. The strictest formula for the freest artistic freedom.
21. The easiest routine to the difficulty.
23. The extremely impersonal way for the truly personal.
24. The completest control for the purest spontaneity.
—Ad Reinhardt, from “25 lines of words on art: Statement,”1958
40
Fra n k Ste l l a
American, born 1936
Frank Stella (Hans Namuth thickly painted, Stella applied his paint flatly and
Photographs and Papers, with little inflection, keeping it within lines he had
penciled at two-and-a-half-inch intervals on the
canvas. The regular units echoed the rectangular
shape of the canvas and gave the impression of
pinstripes. He wanted the work to be grasped as
a whole immediately: “My painting is based on the
fact that only what can be seen there is there....
All I want anyone to get out of my painting . . . is
the fact that you can see the whole idea without
any confusion.... What you see is what you see.”
In the early
1960s Stella began
notching the edges
of his canvases, still
letting the shape
of a canvas dictate
the configuration of
the painted bands,
which were now filled
with brilliant color.
In subsequent years
Frank Stella was born in Walden, Massachusetts. Frank Stella, Chyrow II, 1972, he elaborated the
He was already studying art while still in high mixed media, 2.845 x 2.540 shapes into interlock-
school. After graduating from Princeton in 1958, m (112 x 100 in.), Gift of the ing polygons and
Collectors Committee
he went to New York, planning to stay only the curves.
SLIDE 20
summer. He had been painting in an abstract Between 1970
expressionist manner but was struck when he and 1973 Stella made
saw an exhibition of Jasper Johns’ works (see more than 130 painted reliefs in what he called
page 23). Johns’ flags and targets were factual, the Polish Village series. Like Chyrow II, each is
direct, and their geometric stripes and rings made titled after a Polish synagogue destroyed by the
an impact as abstract pattern. “What struck me Nazis in World War II. Stella has said that these
most,” Stella recalled, “was the way he stuck to works opened “a second career.” They employ
the motif . . . the idea of stripes—the rhythm and a variety of materials in interlocking forms and
interval—the idea of repetition.” planes. Unlike his earlier works, their complex
When Stella was not drafted after college, as relationships are not apprehended all at once
he had expected to be, he decided to remain in but seem to unfold. Stella has continued to make
New York and pursue painting seriously. For the painted reliefs in series. Their forms have become
first sixteen months he worked on a group of looser and more sinuous and their colors, in graf-
black paintings. Unlike Johns, whose pictures were fiti-like patterns, more vivid.
41
Frank Stella
Jarama II, 1982
Mixed media on etched magnesium,
3.199 x 2.539 x 0.628 m
(126 x 100 x 24 3/4 in.)
Gift of Lila Acheson Wallace
SLIDE 21
42
In the 1960s Stella seemed to straddle modernist abstraction and
minimalist reduction. More recently he has appeared to challenge
the distinction between abstraction and representation.
Jarama II—it is as much wall sculpture as it is The model was then sent to a metal fabricator.
painting—comes from a series named after Grand In the studio Stella assembled the individual
Prix racecourses around the world, this one out- pieces and painted them. Although works like
side Madrid. Long interested in racing, Stella had Jarama II blur the line between painting and
even painted a racing car for BMW in 1974. He was sculpture, Stella’s concerns remain those of a
friends with drivers on the circuit, including Peter painter. His cutout forms are like sinuous lines
Gregg and Brian Redman, who drove Stella’s car patterned by paint.
in the 24-hour LeMans race.
The actual track’s twists and turns are
echoed—to a degree mapped out—in Stella’s
elaborate curves. His nonrepresentational shapes,
in a way, physically reproduce the track—estab-
lishing an identity, a kind of oneness, between the
track in Madrid and Stella’s on the wall. Form and
content in Jarama II converge to a point where
the distinction between painting as an object and
painting as an image is blurred.
Opposition of rigid and swerving forms, bright
colors, and emphatic patterns impart a sense of
energy and dizzying motion. The evident weight
of the metal relief is negated by its exuberance,
and paradoxically, the entire object seems light.
Stella designed Jarama II on paper using a flex-
icurve and other drafting tools. From this design
he cut a model in polystyrene foam board.
By reincorporating some of the cutaway parts, he
reinforced the play of positive and negative space.
Critics comment
Early in his career, Stella was courted and claimed by critics and apologists of both modernism and minimalism. Minimalists were
attracted to his modular units, flat and impersonal application of paint, and rigorous geometry. At the same time, however, his
apparent dedication to the internal logic of painting—its reliance on color, line, and form and its exclusion of illusion—appealed
to modernist critics. Both Carl Andre, who would become a minimalist sculptor, and writer Michael Fried, who would be extremely
critical of minimal art, contributed statements about Stella’s work to exhibition catalogues.
Commenting on the pinstripe paintings, in which Stella let the dimensions of the canvas dictate the size and path of the stripes,
Fried wrote, “Stella is concerned with deriving or deducing pictorial structure from the literal character of the picture support.”
Andre remarked, “Art excludes the unnecessary. . . . Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his
painting. Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting.”
43
VIEWPOINT Minimal art
Donald Judd, American, Minimal artists sought to avoid the broad gestures—what they regarded as the
1928–1994, Untitled, 1969, excessive personality—of abstract expressionism by repeating neutral forms
brass and colored fluorescent
and employing impersonal methods of fabrication.
plexiglass on steel brackets,
Beginning in the 1950s, several artists had produced works that could be
ten pieces, each 61/8 x 24 x
27 in., Hirshhorn Museum and considered forerunners of minimalism. Among the first were the all-white pic-
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian tures of Rauschenberg (see page 20) and the all-black ones of Reinhardt (see
Institution, Gift of Joseph H. page 40). Minimalist Donald Judd, active as a critic and an artist, was struck by
Hirshhorn, 1972 Stella’s pinstripe pictures—by their monochromeness, by the way the stripes
reiterated the shape of the canvas to produce repeating modules, and by the
fact that Stella had made the canvases deeper than normal. They projected a
full inch or more from the wall than most other paintings did. Nevertheless, a
painted picture on the wall could still be imagined as illusion, an illusion of some
object that really existed in three dimensions. If the point was to rid painting of
illusion, it had to occupy real space.
About 1962 Judd, who had been painting up to that point, decided to
abandon canvas for more objectlike surfaces he constructed first from wood
or Masonite and later from painted metal, stainless steel, Plexiglas, and other
hard, reflective materials. The critical debate about the nature of painting had
led, perhaps ironically, to a renewed appreciation for sculpture.
“Three dimensions are real space,” said Judd. “That gets rid of the problem
of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors—which
is one of the most salient and objectionable relics of European art. The several
limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it is
thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint
on a flat surface.”
Stacked and cantilevered on the wall, the boxes in Untitled avoid what Judd
held to be outmoded concerns of a fine-art tradition. By virtue of their system-
atic repetition, they avoid “composition,” and by being machined objects, they
avoid the “artist’s mark.” Nor did Judd use his stacked boxes to express either
himself or some meaning. His task instead was an ordering of space in the way
abstraction is an ordering of the surface. It is in this sense that minimalism has
been described as “painting by other means.”
44
Inscrutable forms
The polygonal blocks Tony Smith used in his sculpture were

influential on younger minimalist artists. He had been a
painter and had studied architecture. For a while he was
apprenticed to architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but by the late
1950s Smith had turned to sculpture, limiting himself to
elemental forms.
Smith’s aims were rather different from those of minimal-
ist artists. “I am interested in the inscrutability, the mys-
teriousness of the thing,” he said. By virtue of its title, for
example, this work points—in nonminimal fashion—to
referents outside itself. Moondog was the name of a blind
singer who was a fixture on New York streets in the 1960s.
Smith also said that when he named his sculpture he was
thinking of the title of a painting by Joan Miró. And on
other occasions, he noted the resemblance of Moondog
to a Japanese lantern and human pelvis. These layered
allusions give Smith’s best work poetic dimension.
In 1966 Smith said his sculptures were “part of a continu-
ous space grid. . . . voids are made up of the same compo-
nents as the masses. In this sense [the sculptures] may be
seen as interruptions in an otherwise unbroken flow of space.
If you think of space as solid, they are voids in that space.
While I hope they have form and presence, I don’t think of
them as being objects among other objects. I think of them
as being isolated in their own environments.”
Tony Smith
Moondog, conceived 1964,
fabricated 1998
Painted aluminum, 5.213 x
4.147 x 4.788 m (205 1/4 x
1631/4 x 1881/2 in.)
Gift of The Morris and
Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation
SLIDE 22
45
Sol LeWitt
by the time-sequence photographs of Eadward

Muybridge that showed animals and men in
motion. LeWitt wanted to explore similar kinds of
predictable series. Based on systematic intervals
and projections, his cube structures can be com-
pleted to infinity by the viewer, who extrapolates
the “missing” parts from what is already there.
Superficially, LeWitt’s structures seem to share
the look of minimal art—multiples of impersonal
grids finished in hard enamel (white or black)—
but LeWitt specifically rejects the idea. His
tongue-in-cheek comment was that he had to
assume “minimal” was some code used by art
critics to mean “small.” Instead, since his struc-
tures are physical expressions of an idea, they are
among the first pieces of conceptual art, and
LeWitt, through his writings as well as his work,
has been important in defining its theoretical
foundations.
Sol LeWitt during installation Sol LeWitt was born in

of Wall Drawing No. 681 C Hartford, Connecticut,
at the National Gallery of Art
and he studied art at
(photo by Rob Shelley,
National Gallery of Art)
Syracuse University.
After a tour of duty in
the army from 1951 to
1952, he moved to
New York, where he
attended the
Cartoonists and
Illustrators School. For the next few years, LeWitt Sol LeWitt, Floor Structure The repeated shape—it seems
worked as a graphic designer, including a stint Black, 1965, painted wood, almost self-replicating—
0.470 x 0.457 x 2.083 m becomes, LeWitt said, “deliber-
from 1955 to 1956 in the office of architect I.M.
(181/2 x 18 x 82 in.), The ately uninteresting so that
Pei. Until the early 1960s, LeWitt was primarily Dorothy and Herbert Vogel it may more easily become
interested in painting. About 1962 he started Collection, Ailsa Mellon Bruce an intrinsic part of the entire
applying wood frames to his canvases, and in 1964 Fund, Patrons’ Permanent work. . . . Using a simple form
he began constructing the freestanding boxlike Fund and Gift of Dorothy repeatedly narrows the field
and Herbert Vogel to the work and concentrates
frames he calls “structures.”
SL ID E 23 the intensity to the arrange-
Unhappy with sculpture that emphasized sur-
ment of the form. The arrange-
face, he “decided to remove the skin altogether ment becomes the end while
and reveal the structure.” He was inspired, in part, the form becomes the means.”
46
Sol LeWitt
Wall Drawing No. 681 C, 1993
Colored ink washes, image:
3.048 x 11.278 m (120 x 444 in.)
The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel
Collection, Gift of Dorothy Vogel
and Herbert Vogel, Trustees
SLIDE 24
47
Sol LeWitt
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the
work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the
planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunc-
tory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art
is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive.
—Sol LeWitt, 1967
In August 1993 LeWitt’s Wall Drawing No. 681C was The diagram and certificate
painted directly onto a wall in the East Building of supplied by Sol LeWitt for Wall
Drawing No. 681 C
the National Gallery of Art—but not by the artist.
The actual painting was carried out entirely by
assistants according to LeWitt’s written instruc- band was built up with as many as four separate
tions. This is the first installation of the work. colors applied in three coats each—up
It can be painted over with the neutral tones of to twelve separate applications in all. Water was
the museum’s exhibition spaces. It will continue applied between each coat. LeWitt instructed the
to exist as a work of art even after the physical assistants to make a few final adjustments, adding
object is destroyed because the art exists in the ink washes in certain areas. He then gave the
form of an idea as set out in a certificate and work his approval, and a varnish was applied. The
An assistant paints Sol instructions from the artist. It can be recreated resulting colors are deep and subtly modulated.
LeWitt’s Wall Drawing indefinitely because it is both a thing and an idea. LeWitt began to do wall paintings in 1967. Like
No. 681 C in the National
The wall surface was carefully prepared accord- his floor structures, their designs derive from a
Gallery of Art (photo
ing to LeWitt’s specifications before his assistants system. LeWitt explores the permutations possible
by Rob Shelley, National
Gallery of Art) arrived. The assistants then established the lines within a set of parameters defined at the outset.
of the composition with graphite and masked off He works through them systematically, but the
areas with tape. They applied washes of colored result is far from dry or mechanical. Wall Drawing
ink with a circular motion using cloths that had No. 681 C has surprising mystery, and its rich
been soaked in the ink and wrung out. Each color colors have sensual appeal.
48
A role for language
Ideas had never been absent from art, but for conceptual
artists like Joseph Kosuth they overtook the object in impor-
tance. He was one of several artists who were influenced
by the investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de
Saussure, and other philosophers into the relationship of idea
and language. Their work examined the linkage between a
concept as we think it, the words we use to name it, and the
symbols we assign to it—between reality, our mental image
of it, and its representation (or, in the terms of semiotics,
of signified, signifier, and sign). And so it is not surprising,
perhaps, that language itself became a subject and even a
medium for the artist to use.
Joseph Kosuth’s reputation rests as much on his critical
writings as on his production as an artist. In works like this
one, the two converge. Nothing is from a series entitled Art
as Idea. The works are all dictionary-type definitions pro-
duced as photo negatives, with white letters against a black
background. Kosuth insisted that the ideas represented in the
words, not the print, were the art. The word nothing itself
challenges us to think about what we are seeing. Surely, the
mere fact that we are looking means that we are looking at
something. No-thingness involves viewers in a paradoxical
way. They must construct the art object.
The object only exists in a certain place and for a
certain time, as each viewer engages it. For some critics,
like Michael Fried, this reliance on the viewer made art
“theatrical”—and problematic. Fried had already recognized
the theatricality in minimal art, not only in the movement
Joseph Kosuth All I make are models. The actual into physical space of its object-forms but in the mental
American, born 1945
projections of a viewer called on to “complete” a logical
Art as Idea: Nothing, 1968 works of art are ideas.... sequence. If art did not exist immediately and as a whole,
Silver gelatin photographic
print, 0.914 x 0.914 m (36 x 36
—Joseph Kosuth, 1967 if it had duration, how was it to be distinguished from dance
in.), The Dorothy and Herbert or theater? How could it remain universal? There was a new
Vogel Collection relationship being created between the artist and the art
SLIDE 25
and between the audience and the art.
Conceptual artists increasingly abandoned the object.
It was a mere residue of the real work, which was an
artist’s idea or activity. What they exhibited was, instead,
documentation representing their ideas, often in the form
of photographs, sketches, or written records.
49
Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse was born in Hamburg, Germany. Her quality, of change and life. Some of her forms make
family fled Germany to escape Nazi persecu- reference to the body, especially the female body,
tion when she was three years old, going first to and her work remains of particular importance to
Amsterdam and settling finally in New York. She later women artists. She died at age thirty-four of
took classes at the Pratt Institute and Cooper a brain tumor.
Union in New York and attended graduate school
at Yale. She considered herself a painter—she
worked in an abstract expressionist vein—until Eva Hesse, Contingent,
1965. Then, while living in Germany, she began 1969, cheesecloth,
translating two-dimensional drawings and washes latex, and fiber-

glass, various sizes,
into reliefs, using cord and rope to replace lines
National Gallery of
on paper. Art, Canberra (© The
When Hesse returned to New York, her work Estate of Eva Hesse)
grew in scale, and she explored nontraditional
materials such as latex and fiberglass, letting their Suspended from a dowel,
Eva Hesse (© The Estate of
intrinsic qualities play out in the finished work.
Eva Hesse, photo courtesy
Robert Miller Gallery) Many of Hesse’s pieces were made as collections of Hesse’s latex-on-cheesecloth panel has the look of
individual elements and related in that way to mini- a living thing, of a translucent skin peeled away.
malism. Yet her work is embedded with a personal Its softness and colors suggest impermanence
tactility absent from the machine aesthetic of mini- and change. The folded, free-hanging shape
mal art. Although created largely with manufac- seems provisional and indeterminate. While the
tured materials, her constructions have an organic hard surfaces of minimal sculptures seem to have
When Contingent was first exhibited, Hesse MORATORIUM DAY try some distant far spaced.
wrote the following statement: Piece is in many parts. they are tight and formal but very ethereal.
Each in itself is a complete statement, sensitive. fragile.
Hanging. together am not certain how it will be. see through mostly.
Rubberized, loose, open cloth. A fact. I cannot be certain yet. not painting, not sculpture, it’s there though.
Fiberglass—reinforced plastic. Can be from illness, can be from honesty. I remember I wanted to get to non art,
irregular edges, six to seven feet long. non connotive [sic],
Began sometime in November-December 1968. textures coarse, rough changing. non anthropomorphic, non geometric,
Worked. see through, no see through, consistent, non nothing.
Collapsed April 6, 1969. I have been very ill. inconsistent. everything, but of another kind, vision, soft.
... enclosed tightly by glass like encasement just from a total other reference point. Is it possible?
Resuming work on piece. hanging there. I have learned anything is possible. I know that.
have one complete from back then. then more, other. Will they hang there in the that vision or concept will come through total
Statement, October 15, 1969, out of hospital. same way? risk, freedom, discipline.
short stay this time. try a continuous flowing one. I will do it.
third time. try some random closely spaced.
...
50
Eva Hesse
Test Piece for “Contingent,” 1969
Latex over cheesecloth, 3.658 x
1.118 m (144 x 44 in.)
Gift of the Collectors Committee
SLIDE 26
51
Eva Hesse
Hesse was among the artists whose works were featured in Eccentric
Abstractions, an exhibition organized by critic Lucy Lippard, who
had seen several artists pull away from what she had described as
the “dematerialization” of the object in minimal and conceptual art.
been stamped by fiat, in Hesse’s work we sense VIEWPOINT PROCESS ART

process, chance, and freedom. It is as if she, the
work, and the actions of nature have collaborated Hesse’s works are sometimes identified as process art, one
to create the form. of the reactions to minimalism that appeared after the mid-
Test Piece is a panel Hesse used to test her 1960s. Process art borrowed the repetitions of minimalism but
materials and technique for Contingent, a larger, replaced the exactness of the minimalist machine aesthetic
multipanel work. Hesse called Contingent a series with an organic, handmade quality. It allowed for mistakes
of “hung paintings” and believed that it was nei- and corrections, indeterminacy, and chance occurrence. Its
ther sculpture nor painting. More than anything materials were often nontraditional, many of them ephemeral
else, it is a collection of oppositions: hard and soft, and subject to variations through the action of time or weather.
repetition and difference, change and sameness. Once the idea and the materials were settled upon, the work
These qualities emerge from Hesse’s nontraditional of the artist was essentially complete. Their techniques, the
materials and her process of using them, which she materials’ inherent qualities, and natural forces took care of
described in an interview with Cindy Nesmer not the rest.
long before her death. In 1966, the year of the Eccentric Abstractions exhibition,
Richard Serra was studying in Italy, where arte povera shared
E.H.: It was latex rubber over a cloth called ripple cloth many of the same goals as process art in the United States.
Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, which resembles another version of cheesecloth. It When Serra returned to New York, he produced a number of
1981, Cor-Ten steel, 12 has a more interesting weave . . . and reinforced fiber- works either by suspending rubber belts, by pouring molten
ft. x 120 ft. x 21/2 in., lead, or by propping up metal pipes. By 1970 he was working
glass—clear. Actually it is a casting. . . . And I believe they
installed Federal Plaza, with huge steel plates precariously balanced by gravity and
all have some kind of differences which was all right. I
New York, General
used them. They were supposed to fit. There were eight their own weight. Their surfaces were patinated by the effects
Services Administration,
Washington, D.C.; of them and they hang fairly regularly of moisture, corrosion, and rust. The size of these pieces alone
destroyed March 15, 1989 but there is great divergency from one to the next. forced them to be shown in public space rather than galleries.
C.N.: They are serial but they are not serial? Tilted Arc, a twelve-foot wall of Cor-Ten steel, was commis-
E.H.: Right. They are geometric but they are not. sioned by the General Services Administration for the plaza
They are the way they are and the way the material in front of a federal court building in New York. When it was
and the fiberglass worked out. Maybe a little installed in 1981, it nearly bisected the plaza and became the
self-conscious. . . . They are all different sizes and subject of a bitter debate about public art. Many workers in
heights. . . . One was too long and I could have cut it off the courthouse and nearby offices disliked the look of it and
but I said, No. felt it prevented their access to the plaza. Moreover, they
resented the fact that they had not been involved in its selec-
tion. After lengthy legal proceedings Tilted Arc was destroyed.
It could not be erected elsewhere because it was made for
just that one place. Serra’s outdoor work has a specific site
and specific context. He tries to reveal a site’s “ideology”
with his sculpture.
52
Richard Long
British, born 1945
Richard Long was born in Bristol, England. He

studied art in Bristol and at the St. Martin’s School
of Art in London. Soon after he left St. Martin’s
in 1968, he became part of the emerging land-art
movement.
Long’s art includes walks he has taken through
the countryside. He said in 1983, “I have taken the
simple act of walking, which is common to every-
one, ritualized it, and made art out of it.... The
function of art is to invent new ways to deal with
the world.” Long has trekked in locales as distant
as Lapland and the Himalayas. To mark his passage
through these landscapes, he has undertaken a
number of different activities. He has, for example,
made lines in the soil by retracing his steps until
their imprint remained. He has picked up stones as
he went and dropped them at certain intervals. And
he has plucked the heads from field daisies in arbi-
trary patterns. He documents his activities, his art,
in photographs and written accounts.
Richard Long standing in
front of his piece Mud Works
My work is visible or invisible. It can be an
(photo by Sahm Doherty/
Time Magazine) object (to possess) or an idea carried out and equally
shared by anyone who knows about it.
—Richard Long, 1980
In the 1970s Long began bringing his walks

into museum settings in a more concrete way. He
makes sculptures assembled from stones he has
collected. In the 1980s he began making mud wall
paintings as well. They are not landscapes. Rather,
Richard Long, England [formerly titled
they make his action in a landscape visible.
Plucked Daisies, Durham Downs,
Bristol], 1968, silver gelatin photo-
graphic print mounted on Fome-Cor,
0.762 x 1.016 m (30 x 40 in.), The
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
53
Richard Long
Whitechapel Slate Circle, 1981
Slate, dimensions vary
SLIDE 27
54
I like common materials, whatever is to hand, but especially stones.
I like the idea that stones are what the world is made of.
—Richard Long
With works like Whitechapel Slate Circle, Richard if nonpermanent, modification of the landscape.
Long translates his long walks through landscapes Long’s lighter touch is both an ethical and aes-
across the globe. Some critics have tried to see thetic choice. He has said he uses the land “with
him as an heir to the tradition of English romantic respect and freedom. I use materials, ideas, move-
landscape painting. But his is not a representation ment and time to express a whole view of my art
of the landscape. It is an evocation of Long’s pres- and the world. I hope to make images and ideas
ence in it, a memory and record of his engage- which resonate in the imagination, which mark the
ment. earth and the mind. . . . I like the idea of using the
Long’s simple forms—circles, straight lines, land without possessing it.”
spirals—echo his steps and his movements.
Combined with his elemental materials, these
forms suggest, for many viewers, the presence
and powerful resonance of ancient monuments.
The slate stones, from an English quarry, are
placed in an informal arrangement within a circle
that is about fifteen feet in diameter. Each time
Whitechapel Slate Circle is installed, the positions
of individual elements vary. Not all stones are
used each time—there are always some extras.
The artist provided only a general sketch and brief
written description of how the work was to look.
Long’s work differs from most American land-
art projects because of its minimal impact on
the environment. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,
which coiled fifteen hundred feet into the Great
Salt Lake, is more typical of American land art.
Diagram and instructions
Over the years, as the water level has changed, the provided by Richard Long
work has disappeared. But, it represented a major, for Whitechapel Slate Circle
VIEWPOINT Land art
When minimal artists started to insist on moving into the viewer’s physical space with objects, the setting for their art—in time
and place—assumed new prominence. Conceptual artists had, meanwhile, begun to question whether an object was needed at
all. For them, it was merely a “residue” of the idea that was the true work, and its very existence contributed to the undesirable
tendency to make art a commodity. Both process and performance art used time and a certain unpredictability as compositional
elements. And in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was also growing awareness about the environment—the first Earth Day
Robert Smithson, American, was celebrated in 1970. All of these impulses coincide in what is called land or earth art. It removed the fetish surrounding the art
1938–1973, Spiral Jetty, 1970, object and was subject to time and nature. In many cases it was time and nature.
Estate of Robert Smithson (photo
by Gianfranco Gorgoni, courtesy
John Weber Gallery, New York)
55
Sam Gilliam
American, born 1933
Sam Gilliam (photo © Carol Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and
Harrison, courtesy Sam grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where he studied
Gilliam)
at the University of Louisville. In 1962 he moved to
Washington, D.C., and began teaching high school.
His early paintings, influenced by the German
expressionists, were often broodingly expres-
sive and dark. Once in Washington, however, his
paintings became airier, more optimistic. In the
early 1960s Gilliam, who traveled to New York to
keep up with the art scene, was impressed by the
work of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko (see
pages 16–19), particularly their uses of color and
edge and their sensitivity to mood. At this point,
though, Gilliam’s own paintings were not
yet abstract.
Gilliam took up a purely abstract style when
he connected with artists of the so-called
Washington Color School. About 1964 he adopted
the Color School practice of staining unprimed
canvas, letting the color bleed into the fabric so
that the canvas was not so much painted as dyed.
In 1966 Gilliam began to fold and manipulate
the canvas while it was still wet. Pigments were
pressed into new areas or blotted by contact with
unpainted areas. In this way, chance and the art-
ist’s process became elements of design, altering
the intensity and placement of the color.
In 1967 Gilliam left teaching to devote himself
completely to work in the studio. His major break-
through was to free the canvas from its rectan-
gular support. Still using his staining technique,
he gave both paint and surface a third dimen-
sion when he suspended the loosely folded and
bunched lengths of fabric on the wall.
Gilliam continues to live and work in
Washington, D.C. In the intervening years he has
explored new possibilities of abstraction. In his
most recent work he has incorporated computer
images that are enlargements and details from his
earlier paintings.
56
Sam Gilliam
Relative, 1969
Acrylic on canvas, suspended (installed) canvas:
3.048 x 4.115 m (120 x 162 in.)
Anonymous Gift
SLIDE 28
57
Sam Gilliam
The history of Western art is filled with beautifully painted drapery—shot silks,
rich velvets, fictive tapestries. Gilliam reinvents the notion: instead of being
beautifully painted drapery, Relative is drapery that is both beautiful and paint-
ed.
The airiness of Relative defies its true size and

weight. It extends over thirteen feet on the wall.
If unfolded, it would be closer to forty-four feet
long. Gilliam used a rich range of colors—rose
and turquoise splashed with accents of brilliant
orange. He poured the paint on the flat unprimed
canvas or applied it more thinly, allowing it to seep
into and stain it. The paint does not sit on the
canvas. Canvas and color merge to become one.
While the fabric was still wet, Gilliam folded
and bunched it, tying it at points to create cowls
of cloth. Suspended on the wall, its rhythmic folds
exist in three dimensions. Their graceful curves
temper the chaotic “messiness” of the paint,
giving the whole piece a lightness and even lyrical
quality.
Gilliam’s technique of staining the canvas was
pioneered by Helen Frankenthaler. It was also
used by artists of the Washington Color School,
including Morris Louis. Louis’ thin colors appear
to billow out toward the viewer. One of the advan-
tages of the technique, as far as Louis was con-
cerned, was that color could flow into color. He did
not paint with line, even in the way Pollock had,
Morris Louis, American, 1912–
but flooded his pigments into the fabric or rubbed
1962, Beth Chaf, 1959, acrylic on
them away. He often manipulated the canvas canvas, 3.531 x 2.603 m (139 x
instead of the paint, tilting and tipping it to let the 1021/2 in.), Gift (Partial
pigments run. In this way, drawing and brushwork and Promised) of Gisela and
were eliminated—painterliness was gone. This is Dennis Alter

SLIDE 29
what prompted Clement Greenberg’s use of the
term postpainterly abstraction.
58
Susan Rothenberg
American, born 1945
Susan Rothenberg, Susan Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New

Boneman, 1986, York. She began studying art at an early age in
mezzotint on wood-
museum classes and later studied sculpture at
veneer paper, sheet:
Cornell University. She was briefly enrolled in
0.763 x 0.513 m
(30 x 20 3/16 in.), Gift of other schools, including the Corcoran School and
Gemini G.E.L. and the George Washington University in Washington,
Artist, in Honor of the D.C., but her experiences as part of a community
50th Anniversary of the of artists after she moved to New York in 1969
National Gallery of Art
were probably of greater influence on her work.
SLIDE 31
She assisted Nancy Graves in making multimedia
sculpture and performed in a number of happen-
ings and performance pieces. In these years, while
she was discovering her own unique style, minimal
and conceptual art were dominant forces, and
process art was attracting interest. Recognizable
imagery was virtually taboo.
With her 1974 painting of a horse, Rothenberg
became one of the first artists of her generation
to return to recognizable images. Since that time
her repertoire of subjects has expanded and her
work has become more atmospheric.
Critics comment
Critic Hilton Kramer praised the formal qualities in Rothenberg’s work. (This was something that worried her initially,
she recalled.) He suggested that describing her work as “consisting of horses would be literally correct, but somehow
misleading. For it is the quality of the painting that is so impressive—the authority with which a highly simplified image is
transformed into a pictorial experience of great sensitivity, even grandeur.”
Richard Marshall, the curator of the New Image exhibition, stressed the abstract qualities of the works being exhib-
ited—their arbitrary scale and color—and their connection to minimal art. Rothenberg’s horse, he pointed out, is
abbreviated and removed from any context, running without explanation. The new images, he wrote, “fluctuate between
abstract and real. They clearly represent things that are recognizable and familiar, yet they are presented as isolated and
removed. . . . ” The images, however recognizable, are ambiguous. They are not necessarily the main point at all.
59
Susan Rothenberg
Butterfly, 1976
Acrylic on canvas, 1.765 x 2.108 m
(691/2 x 83 in.)
Gift of Perry R. and Nancy Lee Bass
SLIDE 30
60
In 1978 New Image Painting opened at the Whitney Museum in New York.
The exhibition revealed that a number of artists had started using
recognizable imagery again. Among the works shown were Susan
Rothenberg’s enigmatic horses.
In 1974 Rothenberg was drawing on a scrap intended to flatten and clarify what is happening
of canvas when, as if by instinct, the image with the image.”
of a horse began to emerge. There were other Rothenberg has been asked the obvious ques-
objects as well, but she focused on the horse, tion, Why horses? “The horse was a vehicle for
enlarging it, letting it take up the entire field. She me . . . ,” she explained. “I think it was a surrogate
decided it was a subject she wanted to pursue, for dealing with a human being, but at the same
although she realized at the time that time it was neutral enough and I had no emo-
it was “right out of the ballpark in terms of the tional relationship to horses, so it really was a
New York art scene.” powerful object that divided asymmetrically but
For six years she made the horse her only seemed to present a sold symmetrical presence. I
subject, initially using the animal’s complete form, needed something alive, I guess. I couldn’t use an
as in Butterfly, and then reducing it to disem- object. . . . The horse was just a quiet image. I was
bodied legs and heads. They were always painted able to stick to the philosophy of the day—keeping
starkly over a dense web of background color the painting flat and anti-illusionist—but I also got
overlaid with Xs and diagonal bars. to use this big, soft, heavy, strong, powerful form.”
Despite her fear that her new work was “out Rothenberg continued painting horses until
of the ballpark,” it fit easily within the process art about 1980, when she turned to the human figure.
she had been making earlier. This is indicated, for The figures, not preconceived, are arrived at intui-
example, by her descriptions of how her images tively, developing out of the web of expressive
started and developed according to conditions of marks in the background. In Boneman (see page
the canvas, the paper, the center lines, the posi- 59) the background appears like a force field, an
tion of tears, and so on. Rothenberg was also still electrified space in which the enigmatic human
very much concerned with formal problems. She seems to coalesce.
combined a recognizable image with abstraction. Ambiguity and spectral lighting invest all
The blunt geometry of the X keeps the back- Rothenberg’s work with mystery and link her,
ground flat. Downplaying the figure in favor of though perhaps only tenuously, with the neo-
the formal, Rothenberg noted in the New Image expressionists of the 1980s (see page 71). In 1982
catalogue, “The geometries in the painting—the she wrote that when asked if she was an expres-
center line and other divisions—are the main sionist, she typically answered, “I suppose so . . .
fascinators. They were there before the horse. . . . I guess. I’m a semi-expressionist in terms of the
First I do the lines and then the horse may have visuals and surface. . . . I’m interested in essences
to push, stretch, and modify its contours to suit too, which minimalism was certainly about, taking
the ordered space; the space, in turn, may have to things from the particular rather than the gen-
shift to accommodate a leg or split a head, until eral.”
a balance is achieved. . . . The lines and bars are
61
Te l l i n g s t o r i e s a g a i n
Philip Guston’s late works were a key inspiration for the new
image and neo-expressionist painters of the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1928 he had been expelled from a Los Angeles high school
with his friend Jackson Pollock (see page 12). After following
Pollock to New York in the 1950s, Guston became one of the
most poetic of the abstract expressionist painters, producing
soft latticelike webs of color. The paintings he made during
the last decade of his life—he died in 1980—could hardly
seem more different. “I got sick and tired of all that purity,”
he said. “Wanted to tell stories.”
Guston put people and things back in his pictures,
inventing ominous narratives with hooded figures of Ku Klux
Klansmen. He had been haunted by the KKK since he was
a child, he said, and sometimes the hooded figure is the
artist himself. In Painter’s Table, the chain-smoking Guston
is represented by a full ashtray. Guston’s table is filled with
disconnected objects that nevertheless relate to his life: his
own eye on a canvas, a shade and lightbulb that invoke his
persistent insomnia.
Guston’s use of reds and pinks with heavy outlines of
black is deliberately crude and cartoonish. Seeing these
pictures in their first exhibition in 1969, the artist’s admirers
were bewildered, and some even felt betrayed. Many thought
Philip Guston
Guston was giving in to the popularity of pop. But his own
Painter’s Table, 1973
vision was much darker. Guston had reached the point, he
Oil on canvas, 1.962 x 2.286 m said, where he viewed abstract expressionism as “an escape
(771/4 x 90 in.) from the true feelings we have, from the ‘raw’ primitive feel-
Gift (Partial and Promised) ings about the world—and us in it.” His painting, at once
of Mr. and Mrs. Donald M.
grotesque and tender, playful and pessimistic, exposes the
Blinken in memory of Maurice
incongruities in society and in art.
H. Blinken and in Honor
of the 50th Anniversary
of the National Gallery of Art
SLIDE 32
62
Chuck Close
American, born 1940
which was typically more than fifty square feet. He

had been influenced by the theoretical approaches
of minimal art: to work within a system, serially and
mechanically. The artist’s mark—a literal hallmark
of abstract expressionism—was applied more than
a million times per canvas but was reduced, in each
instance, to a faint trace.
Close-up faces continue to be Close’s only
subject, but he has explored various techniques
and different media over the years. In the early
1970s he worked in
color, making sepa-
rate passes to apply
touches of the three
colors—cyan, magen-
ta, and yellow—that
are used in color
printing. Close has
also used a variety of
printing techniques,
and even torn bits of
paper, always produc-
ing an image that is
Chuck Close at work on Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington. Chuck Close, Study for Keith, startlingly “real.”
Elizabeth, 1989 (photo He attended the University of Washington before 1970, transparent plastic sheet Close began to
by Bill Jacobson, courtesy with ink and black grease pencil
going on to graduate school at Yale. In 1967 he use a more mosaic-
PaceWildenstein) annotations, adhered by masking
moved to New York. tape with graphite annotations
like grid in the 1980s.
Close’s early painting, influenced by Jackson to two silver gelatin photographic In 1988 a collapsed
Pollock, was abstract expressionist in style. In prints, adhered by masking tape blood vessel in his
1967, in a radical departure, Close started to paint to paperboard with air brush spine left him partial-
paint marks overall, 0.559 x 0.432
highly realistic black-and-white images based on ly paralyzed. Since
m (22 x 17 in.), The Dorothy and
photographs. He used a grid system to enlarge the then Close has been
Herbert Vogel Collection
image and transfer it to canvas. The first of these confined to a wheel-
realistic paintings, twenty-one feet long, was of chair and paints with
a nude woman. Nudes, however, had “hot spots” a brush strapped to
for the viewer that worked against the allover his wrist. His most recent paintings, like the one
response Close was looking for. He decided to of Elizabeth Murray (see page 77) above, are com-
concentrate on tightly compressed frontal faces posed of amoeba-like lozenges of brilliant color,
in extreme close up. each of which can be seen as a miniature painting
Close painted his first “heads” with an airbrush. in itself. These small color studies test the limit
He applied pigment so sparingly that no more than of what is required for us to perceive an image
tablespoon or so would be used for the whole work, before it dissolves into pure pattern.
63
Chuck Close
Fanny/Fingerpainting, 1985
Oil on canvas, 2.591 x 2.134 x 0.063 m
(102 x 84 x 21/2 in.)
Gift of Lila Acheson Wallace
SLIDE 33
64
This is my wife’s grandmother Fanny. She died just two weeks ago.
She was amazing. She was the only one of ten brothers and sisters to sur-
vive the Holocaust. She was a very modest person, very kind, very patient.
—Chuck Close, 1995
Since the mid-1960s Chuck Close has concentrated the rigid grid he had used earlier. Still, Fanny, like all
on one thing: dramatically compressed close-up of Close’s work, consists of information that is reas-
images of faces. Fanny, like all of his heads—Close sembled in the mind from its discrete units.
avoids calling them portraits—began with a pho- Despite its convincing “reality,” Close resists
tograph, which he transferred to a huge canvas. description of his work as either portraiture or pho-
Fanny is eight and one-half feet tall and nearly as torealism. His interest was not verisimilitude but a
wide. Its highly realistic image is formed complete- systematic exploration of materials and process. Of
ly by Close’s own whorled fingerprints. He pressed the airbrush pictures, Close said, “I wanted to make
his fingers first on a pigment-soaked pad and pieces in which each square inch was physically
then on the canvas, applying different pressure to exactly the same.... I wanted a stupid, inarticulate,
achieve subtle modulations of light and dark. uninteresting mark, that in and of itself could not
Chuck Close, Fanny/ This is a more sympathetic image than most be more interesting than the last mark or more
Fingerpainting (detail)
of Close’s paintings done at the same time, which beautiful than the next.... It was about the impo-
SLIDE 34
typically trap their subjects with ID-photo stares. sition of rigorous, self-imposed limitations that
Fanny seems to float with an ethereal softness. seemed to open doors.” His investigations combine
Here, Close’s fingerprints have been likened to the concerns of abstract expressionism with those
the touch of a blind man who “sees” by feeling, by of minimal, conceptual, and process art, straddling
caressing the contours of a face he knows and even abstraction and figuration.
loves. This softness comes about, in part, because
in fingerprint works like this one Close loosened
VIEWPOINT Realism in the late twentieth century
Audiences were shocked by Close’s heads—their huge scale and unremitting focus on every pore and blemish. After a
solo exhibition in 1971, New York Times critic Hilton Kramer complained acerbically about their hyperrealism, even calling
Close “a particularly gruesome practitioner” of photorealism. For many years, realism had been seen as the opposite of
“modern” art. It was despised as a sterile rehash of obsolete conventions with no new ideas to offer.
Realists were scorned for their slavish fidelity to nature, for adding nothing and taking nothing away. But as art histo-
rian Linda Nochlin pointed out in a 1973 essay, “that was the point. . . . To ask why realist art continues to be considered
inferior to nonrealist art is really to raise questions of a far more general nature: Is the universal more valuable than the
particular? Is the permanent better than the transient? Is the generalized superior to the detailed? Or more recently:
Why is the flat better than the three-dimensional? Why is truth to the nature of the material more important than truth
to nature or experience? Why are the demands of the medium more pressing than the demands of visual accuracy? Why
is purity better than impurity?”
As Philip Guston had noted already in 1958, “I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our
time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and
poetry at its heart.”
65
Martin Puryear
American, born 1941
Martin Puryear was born The strongest work for me embodies

and raised in Washington,
D.C., the oldest child in a
contradiction, which allows for
large family. Beginning in emotional tension and the ability
1958, he studied art and
aesthetics at Catholic
to contain opposed ideas.
University. After graduating, —Martin Puryear
he went to Sierra Leone as
a Peace Corps volunteer and
taught biology, English, and
French. Impressed by local Lever No. 3, like much of Puryear’s sculpture, is
craft traditions, he studied elegant and abstract, yet rooted in a utilitarian
woodworking techniques. object. Puryear’s works evoke multiple associa-
Puryear had an interest in tions. In the sweeping, organic forms of Lever No.
handwork and had even 3, we can imagine an animal with a long graceful
made the guitar that he “neck” and slightly awkward “body” (Nellie the
took with him to Africa. At Loch Ness monster perhaps?). Maybe we sense
the time, however, he still a plant tendril reaching out, the planed curves
thought of himself primarily of a wooden dinghy, or an object of some ancient
as a printmaker. ritual whose purpose is no longer known to us
After leaving the Peace but whose presence we still feel. It is beautiful—
Corps, Puryear attended the and surprising.
Swedish Royal Academy from Part of the mystery in Puryear’s objects
1967 to 1968. In Scandinavia derives from his materials and his treatment of
he continued his exploration them. He began making sculpture when galleries
of craft by working with a and museums were showing minimalist construc-
Martin Puryear in his studio, noted furniture maker. His growing appreciation for tions made of machined metal. Puryear, by
Chicago, 1987 (photo by Ron the tools, materials, and processes of woodworking contrast, committed himself to organic materials
Bailey, courtesy Martin Puryear)
led him eventually to set aside printmaking in favor and, equally, to the discipline of craft. While
of three-dimensional works. Toward the end of his minimalist sculptors sent their work to metal
stay in Europe, Puryear was impressed by the sim- fabricators for production, Puryear made his
plified forms of sculptors Tony Smith and minimalist by hand, using the skills of wheelwright, cooper,
artist Donald Judd (see pages 44–45), whose works shipwright, and cabinetmaker. He combines the
he saw exhibited in Venice. craft traditions of modern Western society with
When he returned to the United States, Puryear those he has studied from non-Western cultures,
entered graduate school at Yale. He subsequently including Africa and Japan.
taught at Fisk University in Nashville and at the Lever No. 3 is made of laminated strips of pon-
University of Maryland. His first exhibited works were derosa pine that have been carved and painted.
minimal stackings of wood, but about 1972 his new Its surface bears the marks of the artist’s craft. “I
style began to emerge. Puryear puts the skills and was never interested in making cool, distilled, pure
material of craft to work in making complex art. His objects,” he said. “Although idea and form are
forms have become more biomorphic, sometimes ultimately paramount in my work, so too are
almost whimsical yet possessed of a certain gravity. chance, accident, and rawness.”
66
Martin Puryear
Lever No. 3, 1989
Carved and painted wood,
2.146 x 4.115 x 0.330 m
(841/2 x 162 x 13 in.)
SLIDE 35
67
Louise Bourgeois
American, born 1911
Louise Bourgeois (Lenore Seroka Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris, where her
Papers, Archives of American Art, family had a small tapestry repair business. She
studied philosophy and mathematics, especially
geometry, at the Sorbonne, and she took art
classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Académie
Julian, and elsewhere. Bourgeois’ early works,
primarily paintings and prints, were influenced by
cubism. She remained in France until she married
an American and moved to New York in 1938. Once
in New York she continued studying at the Art
Students League and began exhibiting her work.
Bourgeois was greatly influenced by the surre-
alist artists then living in New York. The emphasis
of surrealism on the unconscious encouraged
her to ground her art in the complex, emotional
fabric of her personal life. Bourgeois points to her
childhood as the psychological wellspring of her
art, especially the unresolved conflicts in her rela-
tionship with her father, a volatile and demanding
man who carried on an affair with the children’s
English nanny.
Bourgeois began making sculptures in the late
1940s, showing them for the first time in 1949.
She was not satisfied, she said with the “level of
reality” of painting. She wanted to convey her
symbolic meaning as directly, as concretely, as
possible. “I could express much deeper things in
three dimensions,” she said.
Over her long and inventive career, Bourgeois
has worked in a wide range of styles and media,
including wood, plaster, latex, bronze, and marble.
Her imagery is more symbolic than abstract, and
in the 1960s, it became more overtly sexual. In the
two succeeding decades she produced a number
of environmental and architectural pieces, many
of which explore feminist themes. Now in her
eighties, Bourgeois continues to explore psycho-
logically complex motivations.
68
Louise Bourgeois
Spider, 1996/1998
Bronze with silver nitrate patina,
2.819 x 8.331 x 7.925 m
(111 x 328 x 312 in.)
Gift of The Morris and
Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation
SLIDE 37
69
Louise Bourgeois
The spider is my mother, the both of them victims of their fragility and size,
the daintiness of lace like that of a web.
—Louise Bourgeois
Since, for many of us, the spider prompts fear

and repulsion, we might be tempted to think that
Bourgeois chose it as an image of her mother out
of anger or resentment. But instead she views
the spider as a maternal figure, nurturing and
protective of its young. It is fragile and vulner-
able yet enduring. Because Bourgeois’ mother,
who died when the artist was twenty-one, had
run the family’s tapestry repair business, her
comparison to the web-spinning arachnid is more
appropriate than might first appear. Images of
spiders are seen in Bourgeois’ earliest prints and
drawings, and so this “thread” is also a connec-
tion to her past and to memory. In 1994 the artist
began making a number of spider pieces. She
showed them in 1997 in an exhibition titled Ode à
ma mère (Ode to my mother). This spider, newly
acquired by the National Gallery of Art for an
outdoor sculpture garden that opened in spring
1999, measures more than ten feet high and
twenty-four feet across. Its long legs create a
delicate bowerlike space.
It is Bourgeois’ role as a daughter, not as a
mother herself, that she explores. She looks to
childhood experience and childhood anguish. The
polarities of her mother’s love and father’s betrayal
have shaped her work for six decades. “The subject
of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and
shape to frustration and suffering,” she said.
Bourgeois’ work is strongly communicative of
Louise Bourgeois, above: These four sculptures were
her psychological motivations. Her powerful forms
Mortise, 1950, painted wood, made between 1949 and 1952
have been likened to exorcisms that grip the 1.524 x 0.457 x 0.381 m as Bourgeois was just turning
viewer with anxiety. They have the interior force (60 x 18 x 15 in.), Gift of the to sculpture. Referring to them
of amulets or ritual objects. Collectors Committee; Spring, as “personages,” she prefers
1949, balsa wood, 1.537 m to see them grouped. They
(601/2 in.), Gift become real presences inhabit-
of the Collectors Committee; ing the same space as the
below: Untitled, 1952, painted viewer. The personages are
wood and plaster, 1.619 m abstract and often also organic.
(633/4 in.), Gift of the Collectors Spring appears like a form
Committee; The Winged Figure, budding with new life, Untitled
1948, cast 1991, bronze, 1.791 x like fossilized vertebrae, and
0.953 x 0.305 m (701/2 x 371/2 The Winged Figure like some
x 12 in.), Gift of Louise Bourgeois mythical creature.
SLIDE 36
70
Anselm Kiefer
German, born 1945
Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen,

Germany, and studied law in Freiburg from 1965
to 1966 before turning to art. In 1970 he moved
to Düsseldorf, where he became a student of the
controversial and charismatic Joseph Beuys at the
Kunstakademie. Beuys had abandoned painting in
favor of performance and installations, and in 1969
Kiefer had produced performances in which he was
photographed in several European cities in a Nazi-
style salute—a shocking, even illegal, act. Like
Beuys, Kiefer wanted to confront the Nazi past
and to look at the historical processes in German
culture, myth, and history that made it possible. Anselm Kiefer, Angel of
In 1971 Kiefer began a series of huge land- History, 1989, lead, glass,
and poppies, 4.001 x 5.004
scapes. He followed it in 1973 with a series of
x 2.000 m (1571/2 x 197 x
wooden interiors resonant of ancient Teutonic 78 3/4 in.), Eugene L. and
traditions and their use in Nazi propaganda. After Marie-Louise Garbáty Fund
a trip to Israel in 1984, Kiefer turned to themes
from the Old Testament. His images and his
materials—straw, mud, lead, ashes, and blood—
are equally symbolic.
Kiefer has also made sculpture, including mas-
sive lead books stacked on shelves. Weighing as
much as several thousand pounds, they have the
literal weight of history. He has, in addition, made
three-dimensional works incorporating airplanes,
using flying as another way to approach the
themes he wishes to explore.
VIEWPOINT N e o - e x p r e s s i o n i s m
About 1980 in Germany and Italy and somewhat later in the United States, a number of mostly young artists turned away
from the impersonal restraint and coolness of minimalism and conceptual art. Their new works featured charged images of
emotion-laden—often taboo—subjects and were painted in highly expressive ways. As critic Kay Larson noted, “Artists
are desperate to reconnect with feeling. . . . There is a compulsion to make contact—whether with materials, or with the
heroic possibilities of painting, or with the myth of the artist-creator, dormant during twenty-odd years of irony and intel-
lectual distance in art.” These artists are generally called neo-expressionists. It is a broad label, however, and many artists
to whom it is applied dislike it. They do not consider themselves to be part of any specific movement.
71
Anselm Kiefer
Zim Zum, 1990
Acrylic, emulsion, crayon, shellac, ashes,
and canvas on lead, 3.803 x 5.601 m
(1493/4 x 2201/2 in.)
SLIDE 38
72
In Kiefer’s paintings, heavy with lead, earth, and ashes, the drama and trag-
edy of history have physical presence.
Zim Zum is some eighteen feet long and weighs

close to one thousand pounds. It is constructed of
Critics comment
interlocking lead sheets that have been textured
and corroded. Over them Kiefer applied acrylic The expressive force of Kiefer’s work and the abiding
paint, ashes, and other materials. At the bottom horror and pain of the Holocaust are so overpowering that
he affixed a separate landscape painting on a tat- many critics have been driven to probe—in sometimes
tered canvas. These materials evoke a range of painful ways—the artist’s relationship to his subject and
symbolic meanings, from the scorched earth of its implication for audiences, especially German ones.
war and apocalypse to the regenerative promise Some critics, including Donald Kuspit writing in
of the land. Lead, the stuff of medieval alchemy’s 1983, have suggested that works like Kiefer’s can have
quest for gold is, in our own time, a shield against redemptive and transformative power: “The new German
the hazards of radiation and nuclear destruction. painters perform an extraordinary service for the German
It is malleable yet enduring. people. They lay to rest the ghosts—profound as only the
The title Zim Zum, scrawled in childish script monstrous can be—of German style, culture, and history,
across the top of the work, refers to the concept so that the people can be authentically new. They are
of tsimstum, described in the mystical and esoteric collectively given the mythical opportunity to create a
interpretation of Judaic scripture, the Kabala. fresh identity. . . . They can be freed of a past identity by
Tsimstum is a divine contraction of God, likened artistically reliving it.”
to a breath. It made possible the emanation that Others question, or even fear, the recycling of German
was the instant creation of the universe, but it also nationalistic myths and images—the evocation of the
admitted the possibility of evil. Kiefer, whose pic- charged landscape of the German heath in Zim Zum, for
ture incorporates both land and sky, investigates example. And they question whether, in any case, art can
not only the relationship between earth and spirit offer such hope for atonement or peace.
but the coexistence of good and evil.
Kiefer’s works attempt to confront the nature
of evil and, specifically, the evil of the Holocaust,
whose memory he invokes through his materials
and pictorial references to German architecture
and the German heath and woodland. In the
smaller inset landscape, which resembles those
he painted in the early 1980s, a lake and vast
plain recede sharply into the distance, meeting
the horizon and receiving a reflection of its light.
If Kiefer’s whole landscape is the field of history,
this smaller one is touched by beauty and a force
outside of time.
73
Sigmar Polke
German, born 1941
Sigmar Polke was born Original and Forgery. Prompted by the theft of a
in what became East Rembrandt, the series included photographs of
Germany. In 1953 he older, often stolen, works, mirror fragments, writ-
moved to the west ten commentary, and collage elements. It was a
with his family. After vehicle for Polke to reevaluate concepts about
apprenticing as a painter originality and authorship, copy and imitation,
of stained glass, and even vandalism and appropriation.
he entered the In the 1980s Polke produced large works in
Kunstakademie in which he used resins, chemicals, minerals, and
Düsseldorf in 1961 and other
became a student of materials that reacted with each other and with the
Joseph Beuys. In 1963 atmosphere to pro-
Polke and two fellow duce various colors
students launched what and effects that
they called capitalist changed over time.
realism in response to These “alchemical”
pop art in the United paintings recast the
States. Polke’s contri- artist into a new
butions used isolated role as witness to
depictions of sausages the creation of his
and other foods. Shortly art, not simply its
afterward, he began maker. In them, art
to use photographic becomes a mys-
images, often from terious process of
Sigmar Polke, Bunnies, 1966, newspapers, overlaid Sigmar Polke, Höhere Wesen transformation.
acrylic on linen, 58 3/4 x with a large-scale pattern of printer’s Benday befahlen (Higher Powers Polke has
391/8 in., Hirshhorn Museum Command), 1969, Van
dots, in a sense combining the techniques worked in a
and Sculpture Garden, Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
of Rauschenberg and Warhol with that of number of different
Smithsonian Institution,
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Lichtenstein (see pages 20, 30, and 26). The styles—so much so
Fund, 1995 dots so abstracted the images that they become that he has been
almost unrecognizable up close. These paintings called a “slippery character” and even a “merry
upend the relationship between an artist’s sub- Prankster.” By refusing to establish a single style,
jective treatment and objective source, between he uses painting as a means to investigate paint-
copy and original. Polke’s pictures are unique ing. By refusing to adopt a look, he suggests that
paintings of photographs. In other works, he the look of art may not be its primary character-
seems to suggest control by forces outside. istic, that perhaps there is no single essence but
In 1973 Polke began a series he called many.
74
Sigmar Polke
Hope is: Wanting to Pull Clouds, 1992
Polyester resin and acrylic on canvas,
3.000 x 5.004 m (1181/8 x 197 in.)
SLIDE 39
75
Sigmar Polke
Polke, using a light touch laced with irony and wit, has been said to “use
painting to deconstruct painting.”
Polke’s image of a boy roping two clouds is copied a romantic wish to harness and even change the
from a sixteenth-century German woodcut. It world. This notion is centuries removed from
appears in the so-called Glücksbuch, a book of the sixteenth-century youth. For viewers today,
epigrams, or sayings, illustrated by the Master of Polke’s youth is more likely to evoke the ideas of
Image not available. Petrarch (possibly Hans Weiditz II of Augsburg). German idealist philosophers, who saw all reality
“Hope is a long rope, with which many pull them- as a creation of the mind or spirit.
selves toward Death,” the epigram that the wood- Polke’s picture, unlike the original image, simply
cut illustrates, is a reminder of man’s ultimately looks buoyant. Its shimmery lightness is insubstan-
futile struggle against fate. But Polke’s painting tial, almost dreamy. Moreover, it seems fugitive,
is not about this saying. His appropriation of the always changing with our angle of sight. The back-
Glücksbuch woodcut, image has given it a new context and a whole new ground was stitched together from lengths of com-
16th century, from W. Fraenger, set of possible meanings. In an epigram-like ques- mercially printed fabric and attached to a stretcher.
Altdeutsches Bilderbuch
tion Polke himself used to introduce an essay, the Polke treated the surface with a polyester resin
(Leipzig, 1930), pl. 67
issue is raised: “Does meaning generate relation- that made it somewhat transparent. In places the
ships or do relationships generate meaning?” resin has collected to form shiny spatters and
Polke’s and our relationship to this image are pools. Once the resin had hardened he poured
not that of its original audience. First, Polke chose paint onto the back of the work, tilting it to let the
to reproduce only parts of his source, which few pigments flow into various shapes. Only then did
of us would specifically recognize in any case. He he return to the front and paint the image.
omitted, for example, the god of winds, who blows
storm gusts to thwart the (literally) fiery passion
of the youth’s desire, which is also not part of
Polke’s picture. Instead, Polke seems to suggest
VIEWPOINT A p p r o p r i a t i o n
Poststructuralist thinkers in the late 1960s and 1970s suggested that what had been understood as structures underlying culture
and society—things like language and art—are conventions instead. Rather than natural fact, each of these is a mere overlay,
only one of many that are possible and susceptible to multiple interpretations. The multiple meanings in a “text”—whether it
is a custom or a work of literature or art—can be deconstructed by analyzing underlying assumptions. Any one meaning is as
valid as another. The understanding of a work of art is no longer a writerly process (issuing from the artist who makes it) but a
readerly one (dependent on the viewer who sees and interprets it). As French philosopher Roland Barthes had it, “The birth of
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film the Reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Meaning is not to be found in the work or its creator’s intention but
Still, 1978, black-and-white only in its interpretation.
photograph, 8 x 10 in. This concept has freed works of art from their original contexts, their original meanings. They are now available to be used
(courtesy Cindy Sherman and in new ways, to be appropriated. Some appropriation artists so nearly capture the style of their sources that it is difficult to see
Metro Pictures, New York)
any difference. But seeing difference is not the issue. Things that look alike are not necessarily alike at all. We understand Polke’s
Cindy Sherman photographs
woodcut youth in an entirely different way from its original audience—if only because we are aware that we are not its original
herself in what look like scenes audience and so are obligated to consider new sets of questions when we look at it.
from well-known movies.
These fictional stills are so con-
vincing that many viewers feel
they can identify the movie a
particular scene comes from.
Sherman’s work places the
responsibility for “scripting”
76 with the viewer.
Elizabeth Murray
American, born 1940
Elizabeth Murray was born in Soft and undulating with a trumpet-shaped

Chicago, where she studied spout, Careless Love (page 78) projects several
at the Art Institute before inches from the wall. Pink and fleshy, it seems to
going to graduate school pulsate with life, organic and womblike. Murray
in fine arts at Mills College says the image metamorphosed from that of a
in California. She moved cup, a symbol she calls “extremely female.” It has
to New York in 1967, a time appeared often in her work since the early 1980s.
when minimal and concep- The dark blue interior spaces of Careless Love are
tual art were at their height glimpsed in a square cutout, and through the
and painting was consid- various openings, a long reddish-pink coil weaves
ered to be outmoded, if not in and out like an umbilical cord. Murray sees the
dead. She decided to pursue cup as a male symbol too: “[T]he winner of an
a more deeply personal athletic event gets a cup.” Her work is meticulous-
style and identity. Murray’s ly constructed with a vertical fracture and pieced
work evokes human char- together again like a puzzle—like the two comple-
acteristics, personalities, or mentary halves of male and female.
pure emotions through an The title comes from music—”Careless Love,”
abstract interaction of shape a jazz piece by Ben Webster that Murray was lis-
and color. Since 1976 she tening to as she worked on the painting. It under-
Elizabeth Murray during has become best known for scores
proofing session at Gemini canvases that she fractures and reunites as inter- the painting’s personal meaning for the artist.
G.E.L., March 1993
locking units of a single whole. They create a play “Interiority, what was going on emotionally for
(© Sidney Felsen, 1993,
between the painted image and the object itself. myself,” she said, “is what I paint.... I try to objec-
courtesy Gemini G.E.L.,
Los Angeles, California) Much of Murray’s imagery is considered tify it with the images.” Her forms do not simply
“female,” relying on the female body or such embrace male and female, but suggest entrap-
stand-ins as domestic vessels. Her concerns with ment and estrangement as well. The two halves of
the themes of conflict and conflict resolution are Careless Love come together and simultaneously
also frequently associated with women’s art. It threaten to pull apart. They reflect her concerns
would be easy for Murray’s work to be trapped in about conflict and resolving shattered parts. “All
a women’s-art box. Instead, her inventiveness and my work is involved with conflict,” Murray says,
power have helped destroy some of its clichés. “trying to make something disparate whole.”
Murray has noted that her art attempts to
perpetuate a sense of order and beauty, but she
invites many interpretations. The order and beauty
she is after is something that will be made by each
individual. “I can only know what I knew when I
was doing [a work]. When my experience with it
is done, it keeps getting remade and finished and
that is what people do when they are looking....”
77
Elizabeth Murray
Murray called this piece Labyrinth when she first made
Careless Love, 1995–1996
Oil on shaped canvas, it, and its original color scheme conveyed a mood
2.705 x 2.527 x 0.686 m
(1061/2 x 991/2 x 27 in.) she described as a “tortured place.” In one “thrilling
The Aaron I. Fleischman Fund
SLIDE 40 moment” she saw it in an entirely different way, and it
came alive.
78
Teaching activities
Teaching Activities
A: Advanced Discussion activities Controversy has surrounded public funding of

I: Intermediate Show slides of Fanny/Fingerpainting, Number 1, art thought to be obscene or offensive—the
E: Elementary 1950 (Lavender Mist), and Hope is: Wanting to Pull furor caused over the photographs of Robert
Clouds (slides 33, 1, and 39). Ask students Mapplethorpe is only one example. Another well-
to arrange them in chronological order. Compare publicized dispute involved the placement of a
their order with the actual dating of the works work. People working in and near the federal
and use the results as the platform for discussion. courthouse in New York objected to the size and
How close have they come to guessing correctly? look of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (see page 52)
On what basis did they decide the order? Did the and to the way it changed their use of a public
results surprise them or not? Do they think works plaza by dividing it in two. And, most important
from earlier centuries would be easier to sort in for some of the protesters, they felt this work was
this way? an unwanted intrusion, something that had been
A/I imposed on them without their consultation. Have
students research this controversy, which was well
In the 1960s customs agents in Canada seized documented in newspaper and online sources.
Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (see page 32), insisting Then suggest the following scenario or a similar
that it was subject to the normal duties applied one. A wealthy alumna has donated $1.2 million
to the cleaning product. They refused, that is, to for a work of art to be installed, either indoors or
recognize it as a work of art. Divide the class into outside, at her alma mater—your school. Have
two teams, one assigned to each side of this dis- the students draw up a plan to decide how these
pute. They should prepare their arguments as if issues will be resolved. Who will select the work?
they were making oral presentations at a customs Will outside experts be included? What will deter-
hearing, justifying the position that Brillo Boxes mine who an expert is? What different constituen-
either is or is not art. The two teams may want cies within the school and local community should
to research statements made at the time. be involved? How will decisions be publicized, and
Alternatively, this activity can be an individual to what extent will they be subject to veto or revi-
assignment in which the students write newspaper sion by the parties?
editorials expressing their views on the matter. A
(Robert Rauschenberg’s Cardbird Door [slide 5]
can be used in classroom discussion of this issue.) Devise a time-capsule project for your school.
A/I The capsule will preserve various kinds of objects
to be revealed seventy-five years in the future.
In connection with this project, have the students
visit a local art museum and make predictions
about five works of art they think will still be on
view at that future date. Have them write down
their predictions and the reasons for their choices
in a letter addressed to the students who will open
the capsule. (If a museum collection is not locally
available, this activity can be done with books
and catalogues.)
A/I/E
80
Have students consider Andy Warhol’s career Richard Long’s Whitechapel Slate Circle (slide 27)
and his statement that “in the future everyone is installed on the floor and is composed of quarry
will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Why do they stones—not a traditional fine-art medium. Have
think so many of Warhol’s subjects were celebri- students discuss the implications of his use of
ties (including Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, materials. Because these stones are in a museum,
Elvis Presley, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, it is easy to see them, even initially, as art. What if
among others)? Who would Warhol be painting if students instead came across these same stones
he were still alive today? Ask students to compare in this same arrangement in another setting?
Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe with Let us What would they think then? Have the students
Now Praise Famous Men (slides 12 and 13) and describe what they think their reactions might be.
discuss whether the artist had different intentions A/I
in the two works. Students might also compare
photographs from the James Agee-Walker Evans Jackson Pollock did not originally assign the title
book (see page 32). Lavender Mist to his painting (slide 1). He had
A called it simply Number 1, 1950. Critic Clement
Greenberg suggested Lavender Mist because of
Ellsworth Kelly’s White Curve VIII (slide 17) is not the painting’s “subtle, delicate, pastel-tinted sur-
a picture that many students naturally linger over. face.” Have students think about what is added
At first glance, it seems as if there is little to see. by the titles of various works in the packet.
Devise strategies that compel students to look (Alternatively, students could discuss what they
more closely and with more thought. You can, think about a work before knowing what the title
for example, offer the following list of words and is and then talk about how their reactions differed
ask students to select the one (or another they once the title was revealed.) Do they find a title
supply) that best describes what Kelly is con- helps them look at a painting, or does it limit their
cerned about in the painting: thinking? Does it make a difference if the work is
representational or not? If they were artists, how
Balance Gesture would they feel if someone else later titled their
Edge Weight works?
Depth Pressure A/I/E
Surface Anonymity
Shape Personality
Tension Black
Flatness White
Movement Space
Stillness
Emotion
A/I/E
81
Art activities After dividing the class into five groups, have
Have students create a work of art that “appropri- students create five front pages for an imaginary
ates” art from a published source. The appropri- newspaper that appears once a decade (one page
ated work does not have to be a visual image. It for the 1950s, the 1960s, and so one). The news
could be a sampled passage from a music record- stories and images should reflect what they feel
ing. In an accompanying “museum label” or “liner are the most significant events, and the typogra-
note”—whichever is appropriate—students must phy and design should reflect the different tastes
explain why they chose to appropriate the particu- of each decade.
lar work and how it relates to the own new work. A/I
Music sampling has caused legal difficulties for
some young recording artists. This activity could Arrange a field trip to a gallery to see contem-
be expanded to include an investigation of these porary art in your area. If possible have the class
issues. speak with artists, dealers, and an art critic for
A/I the local newspaper.
A/I
Have students devise a proposal for a land-art
project at your school. It could be as simple as Chance elements in the music of composer John
an arrangement of stones, a ditch, or a pile of Cage and others had an important influence on
earth. If possible install the project and record several artists, including Robert Rauschenberg.
the changes brought about by weather and time Have the class compose its own chance musical
during the course of the year. These changes work. Have available dice in several colors so that
can be documented with photographs and diary each student can have a unique color/number
entries. The land-art project can be coordinated combination. Students sit in a circle, and each is
with natural science curricula. Robert Smithson “assigned” a particular sound—a note played on
(see page 55) related his artworks to the second an instrument, a hand clap (or several), a birdlike
law of thermodynamics and the concept of entro- whistle—to be played when his or her number
py. is rolled on the dice by the student who is the
A/I/E “composer.” The composer can control the tempo
and introduce pauses to vary the sound. Does the
Philip Guston’s Painter’s Table (slide 32) is as work they compose in this way seem more like
much a self-portrait as it is a still life. Have stu- some of the works illustrated in this packet than
dents devise similar self-portraits using objects others? Why or why not?
that reveal or symbolize aspects of their own A/I/E
lives. The self-portraits can be produced as draw-
ings, paintings, collages, photographs, or perfor-
mances involving the objects.
A/I/E
82
Have students investigate the relationship Research/writing activities
between materials and methods for one of the
artists listed below. They should consider how the Most of the works discussed in this packet were
intrinsic qualities of the materials or technique produced by Americans. Pop art seems quintes-
contributed not only to the way the finished work sentially American, but in fact the first artists to
looks but also to what the artist is communicat- experiment with pop styles were English. Select
ing. Then have the students create a work of their five works and have students research what
own using their selected artist’s materials. European artists were producing during the same
years. They should be prepared to show reproduc-
Jackson Pollock tions of their comparisons for discussion by the
Mark Rothko entire class.
Robert Rauschenberg A
Roy Lichtenstein
Sam Gilliam Have students select one work of music and one
A/I work of literature that were created within five
years of one work of art in the packet. In addi-
Have the class play a kind of charades in which tion to being contemporaneous, the three works
each student acts out one of the works illustrated of art, music, and literature should be related on
in the packet. Instead of simply using the “first some level—in their structure, method of compo-
word, sounds like” method, they should attempt sition, or perhaps only in the student’s subjective
to convey the look of the work or the meaning or view
emotion they associate with it. This activity could of them. Have the students present their three
be introduced by discussion of what mood is works to the class, explaining in what ways
created by different works. their selections are similar or different in terms
E of mood, motivation, approach, and so on. To
enhance the discussion, you may want to limit the
number of artworks to only a few options so that
several students present different musical or liter-
ary works relating to the same work of art. In a
related activity, students could be asked to create
their own work of literature or music to accom-
pany the artwork they chose.
A/I
83
Several of the artists discussed in this packet Anselm Kiefer has been both praised (by American
attended Black Mountain College in western North critics) and reproached (by some German critics)
Carolina, and a number of well-known artists, for his use of German icons and themes as vehi-
musicians, dancers, and writers were teachers cles for Vergangentheitsbewältigung, or “coming
there. Others attended graduate school at Yale. to terms with the past.” Have students continue
For a class project, have students research various their exploration of materials by asking them to
local or national art schools, creating a notebook identify a set of materials that would reflect some
that will be a resource for the entire school (it dark chapter in American history—for example,
could be kept in the classroom or guidance office). the treatment of American Indians by European
Students should decide what information they settlers, slavery, or the internment of Japanese
would want to know—for example, number of Americans during World War II.
students, facilities, whether there is a gallery or A
museum, and so on.
A Works of art are sometimes narrative, and some
can even inspire storytelling in viewers. Have
For many artists, their materials, working meth- students write a story that explains what is
ods, and intended meanings are inextricably happening in Roy Lichtenstein’s Look Mickey
bound. Anselm Kiefer (see page 71), for example, (slide 9). They should include events both before
has devoted much of his work to themes in and after the scene Lichtenstein painted. With
German history, exploring myths of national younger students, this activity can be done as
identity and the Holocaust. Ask students to inves- a classroom storytelling exercise.
tigate and report on Kiefer’s materials, emphasiz- E
ing their properties and associations over time.
Because some of Kiefer’s materials have particu-
lar significance in German history, have students
conduct their research along with a study of
Germany’s land, natural resources, and political
history. Materials to consider include:
Lead
Coal
Straw
Wood (forests)
Glass
Sand
Ashes
Soil (land)
A/I
84
Glossary
Abstract expressionism describes a number of hybrid works that defy categorization as painting,
individual styles used by painters (see Jackson sculpture, or even performance.
Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and
Willem de Kooning, pages 12–19) in the 1950s and Automatic imagery and automatic writing were
1960s, especially in the United States. Employing techniques used by the surrealists to access the
mostly nonrepresentational imagery, they aimed unconscious by suspending the conscious mind’s
to convey their emotions and to recreate them for control over their actions.
the viewer directly through color and form. Some
artists, particularly Rothko and Newman, also Black Mountain College was a progressive
invoked a range of other meanings that embraced and innovative school in Black Mountain, North
myth and religious themes. Also called the New Carolina, that operated from 1933 to 1956. Art was
York School. at the core of its curriculum. The faculty included
such figures as artists Josef Albers, Willem de
Action painting describes the work of abstract Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, dancer Merce
expressionists who used techniques such as drip Cunningham, composer John Cage, and architects
painting and gestural brushstrokes that reflect the Buckminster Fuller and Walter Gropius.
physical activity of painting itself. In action paint-
ing the work and the process of painting merge. Color field (1) distinguishes the primarily chro-
Critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term. matic effects of abstract expressionist painters
such as Mark Rothko (see page 16) from those of
Appropriation is a strategy used by some post- the abstract expressionist action painters such
modern artists, including Sigmar Polke (see page as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock (see
74), to create a new work of art by recycling an pages 12–15); (2) describes the allover flat color
existing image, often an existing art image, from of postpainterly abstractionists such as Ellsworth
another time, context, or medium. This “taking” Kelly (see page 37). In this regard it is more
by the artist flouts the modernist tradition of specifically used to identify the stained-painting
originality and the uniqueness of the art object. techniques of Helen Frankenthaler and members
The roots of appropriation lie in the early twen- of the Washington Color School, including Morris
tieth century with the readymades of Marcel Louis (see page 58).
Duchamp and in the 1960s with the use of every-
day objects in pop art. It is informed by the criti- Conceptual art suggests that the artist’s original
cal dialogue surrounding deconstruction. idea—his conception—is the true work of art.
The art object is incidental. The idea might be
Arte povera was an Italian movement related presented to the public in many ways not previ-
to process art in the United States. As defined ously regarded as art per se. Conceptual artists,
in 1970 by Italian critic Germano Celant, “arte working primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, include
povera expresses an approach to art which is Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt (see pages 46–49).
basically anti-commercial, precarious, banal, and
anti-formal, concerned primarily with the physical
properties of the medium and the mutuality of
the materials.” These artists used unconventional
materials, many of them ephemeral, and produced
85
Constructivism is a term most often applied to Happenings were a hybrid art, primarily of the
the styles developed in Russia at the turn of the 1960s, that combined visual art with performance
century that sought to reflect revolutionary ideals. or theater, often involving the spectator directly.
Instead of achieving form by modeling or carving They sought spontaneity and valued transience.
a single unit, constructivist sculptors assembled Artists closely associated with happenings in the
parts to make a whole. United States include Claes Oldenburg and Robert
Rauschenberg (see pages 33 and 20). See also
Dada means “hobbyhorse” in French. The term performance art.
was chosen, in large part for its playfulness, by
a group of artists in Europe in the early part of Hard-edge painting distinguishes the work of
the twentieth century to express their anti-art younger abstractionists like Ellsworth Kelly (see
purpose. They emphasized irrationality and imper- page 37), whose paintings were strictly geometri-
manence. Their disregard for the elevated status cal and planar, from the preceding generation of
of the art object is reflected in Marcel Duchamp’s abstract expressionists. See also postpainterly
exhibition of readymades (see page 22). abstraction.
Deconstruction is a tool of interpretation, most Land art is another term for earth art.
closely associated with French philosopher
Jacques Derrida, to uncover multiple meanings Minimal art describes works of extremely reduc-
in a work of art or literature or in a societal con- tive forms produced in the middle and late 1960s
struct. It suggests that meaning is not fixed or by artists such as Donald Judd (see page 44), who
“located” in the object and that no one meaning is eschewed the emotional effects and subjectivity
“privileged” over any other. Derrida himself sug- of abstract expressionism. Minimal art is austere
gested that deconstruction might be described as in terms of form, color, and materials and is often
a suspicion of one question: “What is the essence made by impersonal mechanical means. Some-
of?” times called primary structure or ABC art.
Earth art arose in the 1960s, when several artists Modernism, among other common uses, generally
moved art outside galleries and museums and into defines a set of artistic goals pursued by artists
the environment. Earth artists might build mam- from the late nineteenth century through the
moth works using industrial earthmoving equip- mid-twentieth century that depend primarily
ment or, like Richard Long (see page 53), simply on the formal vocabulary of painting (line, color,
rearrange elements found naturally outdoors or surface, shape) and on the inherent qualities of
record their actions in the landscape. Also called the medium—for example, “flatness” in painting.
land art. Modernism also emphasizes the originality of the
artist and uniqueness of the work.
Gesture painting is another term for action
painting.
86
Neo-expressionism is a term used for widely dis- Pop art describes the work of artists, primarily
parate works, most on canvas and from the 1980s, in the 1960s, who used popular culture and the
that emphasized emotive qualities and helped materials of mass media. Although some of the
restore figural imagery, which had largely been earliest of these artists, notably Richard Hamilton,
eliminated in minimalism and conceptual art. It were English, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and
can be seen as an expansion of trends begun in Claes Oldenburg (see pages 26–33) made pop a
new image painting. Neo-expressionism was rec- particularly American phenomenon. Its question-
ognized first in the works of Italian and German ing of modernist assumptions about originality
artists, including Anselm Kiefer (see page 71), and and authorship paved the way for many of the
slightly later in the United States in the works of ideas seized upon by artists in the 1980s and
several young painters. Most of these artists do 1990s.
not like the term.
Postminimalism describes a number of highly
New image painting describes the work of artists diverse styles, including process, land, and
in the late 1970s who first returned to a more rep- conceptual art, that emanated loosely from
resentational style that included figures and other minimalism. While often retaining elements asso-
recognizable objects. New image works, like those ciated with minimalism, such as geometric forms
of Susan Rothenberg (see page 59), typically and serial presentations, postminimalists turned
focus on a single motif in an expressionist ground. away from minimalism’s machine aesthetic.
Postminimal production embraced an expanded
New York School is another term for abstract range of materials and activity. Photography,
expressionist painters. figurative elements, and illusionistic reference to
landscape were self-consciously integrated with
Performance art is a loose term that describes such conventional systems as grids to underscore
various types of dance, theater, mime, music, the abstract quality of representation. The radical
video, and multimedia performances related expansion of forms in postminimalism generally
to the earlier happenings. In the late 1960s reflected the social and political climate of the
and 1970s, its most influential practitioner was late 1960s.
German artist Joseph Beuys, a controversial and
charismatic figure. He wanted to produce what he Postmodernism describes a diversity of styles
called social sculpture: “Sculpture as an evolution- and critical approaches that originated in reac-
ary process; everyone is an artist.” tion to modernism. The term was first applied to
architecture—for example, Robert Venturi’s goal
Photorealism is a hyperrealistic style that seeks of adding “richness” and “messy vitality” to the
to replicate exactly the detailed content and “purity” of severe modern architecture (“Less is
momentary composition of photographs. a bore,” he said). The term was applied to neo-
expressionist painters, but since the 1980s it
has been more closely linked to eclectic works
informed by deconstruction.
87
Postpainterly abstraction is a term coined by Surrealism seeks to access and express the
critic Clement Greenberg to describe the work unconscious mind through dreamlike images,
of painters who rejected action painting’s automatic writing, startling juxtapositions, and
dramatic gesture and illusion of depth. These other techniques. Surrealism, as André Breton
artists avoided distinctions between the fore- and wrote in the first surrealist manifest, rested “on
background. By extending their colors over all the belief in the higher reality of certain neglected
or most of the canvas, or opening the center to forms of association, in the omnipotence of
“white space,” they emphasized the painting’s dreams, in the disinterested play of thought.”
flatness. Encompasses hard-edge abstraction.
Poststructuralism relies on the writings of

mainly French thinkers, including Roland Barthes
and Michel Foucault, that have opened works of
art to various interpretations by calling into ques-
tion such notions as the intentionality of the artist
and the unity of a work of art. This view suggests
that different interpretations are all equally valid,
freed as they are from the concept of author. See
also deconstruction.
Process art replaced the rigidity and stability

of minimal art with impermanence and change.
The perishability of materials, which sometimes
included ice, earth, or food, and their susceptibility
to the effects of weather and other natural forces,
are part of the process artist’s “palette.” Process-
art works become a metaphor for the life pro-
cesses that go into their creation. Eva Hesse and
Richard Serra (see pages 50–52) are usually called
process artists. Elements of process can also be
detected in such disparate artists as Chuck Close,
Sam Gilliam, and Martin Puryear (see pages 63,
56, and 66). Sometimes called anti-form art.
Readymade is a term used for the everyday

objects that Marcel Duchamp presented as art.
Semiotics is the theory and analysis of signs and

their significations.
88
Bibliography
Books Video interviews

Anfam, David. Abstract Expressionism. London, 1990. The Gallery’s Department of Education Resources lends
videos of interviews with artists. At current writing
Arnason, H. H., and Marla F. Prather. History of Modern (1999), interviews with the following artists are available
Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography. (those with an asterisk are discussed in this packet):
4th ed., New York, 1998.
David Hockney
Crow, Thomas. The Rise of the Sixties: American and Roy Lichtenstein*
European Art in the Era of Dissent. New York, 1996. Scott Burton
Pat Steir
Fineberg, Jonathan. Art since 1940: Strategies of Being. Robert Rauschenberg*
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1995. Jim Dine
Nancy Graves
Lippard, Lucy R. Pop Art. 1966. Reprint, London, 1985. Helen Frankenthaler
Claes Oldenburg* and Coosje van Bruggen
Sandler, Irving. Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Wayne Thiebaud
Late 1960s to the Early 1990s. New York, 1996.
For information about recent artists and movements,

catalogues published in conjunction with
exhibitions are good sources. They also contain
extensive references.
Online and new media resources

Many museums and galleries post information on their
Web sites about current exhibitions. Exhibition bro-
chures, virtual tours, and extended descriptions
are often available.
Recommended Web sites

National Gallery of Art: www.nga.gov
Andy Warhol Museum: www.warhol.org
Museum of Modern Art: www.moma.org
DIA Arts Center: www.diacenter.org
Images of twentieth-century art in the National Gallery

of Art and information about the works are provided
on the CD-ROM National Gallery of Art, Washington
(available for purchase in the Gallery Shops) and on the
videodiscs American Art and European Art (available for
free loan from the Department of Education Resources,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 20565).
89
Quotation Sources
Theodor Adorno: Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London, College, 1969; interview in Cindy Nesmer, Conversations with 12
1984). Women Artists (New York, 1975), 220–221.
Lawrence Alloway: quoted in H. H. Arnason and Marla F. Allan Kaprow: Some Recent Happenings (New York, 1966),
Prather, History of Modern Art, 4th ed. (New York, 1998), 563. quoted in Dore Ashton, ed., Twentieth-Century Artists on Art
(New York, 1985), 221.
Carl Andre: writing in catalogue, Sixteen Americans, Museum
of Modern Art, 1959, quoted by Charles Stuckey, Affinities and Jasper Johns: quoted by Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” Other
Intuition: The Gerald S. Elliot Collection of Contemporary Art Criteria (New York, 1963), cited in Richard Francis, Jasper
(Chicago, 1990), 18. Johns (New York, 1984), 10; “Sketchbook Notes,” 0–9 (July
1969), quoted in Art for the Nation, National Gallery of Art
Walter Benjamin: “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (Washington, D.C., 1991), 456; interview with Richard Francis,
quoted by Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant Garde,” Jasper Johns (New York, 1984), 98.
reprinted in Brian Walls, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking
Representation (New York, 1984), 14. Donald Judd: “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 78.
Louise Bourgeois: quoted in Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures, Ellsworth Kelly: quoted in Ellsworth Kelly: Recent Paintings
environments, dessins, 1938–1995, Musée d’Art moderne de la and Sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1979),
ville de Paris (Paris, 1995), 218; quoted in Deborah Wye, Louise 7; interview with Henry Geldzhaler in catalogue, Washington
Bourgeois, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1982), 18. [D.C.] Gallery of Art, 1963, quoted in Dore Ashton, ed., Twentieth-
Century Artists on Art (New York, 1985), 223.
André Breton: quoted in H. H. Arnason and Marla F. Prather,
History of Modern Art, 4th ed. (New York, 1998), 275. Joseph Kosuth: “On Ad Reinhardt,” reprinted in Art after
Philosophy and After: Collected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.,
John Cage: quoted in Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: 1991), 192; speaking in the 1960s, quoted in From Minimal to
Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1989), 13. Conceptual Art: Works from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel
Collection, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1994), 107.
Germano Celant: quoted in Dore Ashton, ed., Twentieth-Century
Artists on Art (New York, 1985), 266. Hilton Kramer: review of New Image Painting, New York Times,
quoted in Joan Simon, Susan Rothenberg (New York, 1991), 47;
Chuck Close: interview, New York Times, 30 July 1995; quoted review of 1971 Chuck Close exhibition, quoted in Chuck Close,
in Sasha M. Newman and Lesley K. Baier, eds., Yale Collects Yale Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1998), 205.
(New Haven, 1993), cited in Chuck Close, Museum of Modern
Art (New York, 1998), 30; interview in Chuck Close, Museum of Donald Kuspit: “Flak from the ‘Radicals’: The American Case
Modern Art (New York, 1998), 89. against Current German Painting,” reprinted in Brian Walls, ed.,
Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York,
Arthur Danto: “The Abstract Expressionist Brillo Box,” in Arthur 1984), 141.
Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box (New York, 1992), 139–140.
Kay Larson: “Art Pressure Points,” New York (28 June 1982),
Elaine de Kooning: “Kline and Rothko: Two Americans in quoted in Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era (New York,
Action,” Art News Annual 27 (1958): 176. 1996), 223.
Willem de Kooning: interview, New York Times, 21 January 1951. Sol LeWitt: “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum (Summer
1967): 79–83.
Maurice Denis (as Pierre Louis): Art et critique (August 1890),
quoted in Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Richard Long: catalogue statement, Guggenheim Museum, New
1874–1884: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., York, 1986, quoted in Neal Benezra, Martin Puryear (Chicago,
1966), 187. 1993), 34; catalogue statement, Anthony D’Offay Gallery,
London, 1980, quoted in Dore Ashton, ed., Twentieth-Century
Michael Fried: writing in catalogue, Three American Painters, Artists on Art (New York, 1985), 150; writing in Art Monthly
Fogg Art Museum, 1965, reprinted in Michael Fried, Art and (July–August 1983): 20; quoted in National Gallery of Art curato-
Objecthood (Chicago, 1998), 251; “Art and Objecthood,” reprinted rial file.
in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago, 1998), 148–175.
Richard Marshall: New Image Painting, Whitney Museum of
Henry Geldzahler: quoted in Michael Archer, Art since 1960 American Art (New York, [1978]), 7.
(London, 1997), 14.
Elizabeth Murray: quoted in Paul Gardner, “Elizabeth Murray
Clement Greenberg: “Modernist Painting,” in Arts and Shapes Up,” Artnews (September 1984), reprinted in Elizabeth
Literature (New York 1963), reprinted in Sally Everett, ed., Art Murray: Drawings 1980–1986, Carnegie Mellon University Art
Theory and Criticism (Jefferson, N.C., 1991), 110–118. Gallery (Pittsburgh, 1986), 17, 22; telephone interview with Marla
Prather, National Gallery of Art, 9 October 1996.
Philip Guston: quoted in John Baur, Nature in Abstraction: The
Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture in Twentieth-Century Linda Nochlin: “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law,”
American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1985, cited Art in America (September–October 1973): 55.
in Robert Storr, Philip Guston (New York, 1986), 93; quoted in
Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era (New York, 1996), 196. Claes Oldenburg: Store Days: Documents from The Store (1961)
and Ray Gun Theater (1962) (New York, 1967), quoted in Claes
Richard Hamilton: letter to Alison and Peter Smithson, quoted Oldenburg: An Anthology, Guggenheim Museum (New York,
in Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (New York, 1996), 45. 1995), 104, 254.
Eva Hesse: catalogue statement, Art in Process IV, Finch Sigmar Polke: in Sigmar Polke: The Three Lies of Painting,
90
Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundsrepublik Deutschland, Frank Stella: broadcast interview (NET), 1966, quoted by Helen
Bonn (Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997), 285. Franc, An Invitation to See (New York, 1992), 162; quoted in
Bruce Glasner, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” reprinted in
Jackson Pollock: narration in film by Hans Namuth, cited in Gregory Babcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New
Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting (New York, York, 1968), 157–158.
[1970]), 116; “My Painting,” Possibilities (Winter 1947–1948).
Andy Warhol: quoted in Ned Finkelstein, “Inside Andy Warhol,”
Martin Puryear: quoted in Guggenheim A to Z (New York, 1992), Cavalier Magazine (September 1966), cited in Andy Warhol:
222; quoted in Nancy Princenthal, “Intuition’s Disciplinarian,” Art Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1989),
in America (January 1990): 133. 56 n. 58.
Robert Rauschenberg: catalogue statement, Sixteen Americans,

Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1959), quoted in Dore Ashton,
ed., Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (New York, 1985), 243;
quoted in ROCI: Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange,
National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1991), 167.
Ad Reinhardt: “25 lines of words on art: Statement,” It Is (Spring

1958), reprinted in Barbara Rose, ed., Art as Art: The Writings of
Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1975), 51–52.
Barbara Rose: in Ellsworth Kelly: Painting and Scultpure 1963–

79, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 1979), 9.
Harold Rosenberg: “The American Action Painter,” Artnews

(September 1952), reprinted in Sally Everett, ed., Art Theory and
Criticism (Jefferson, N.C., 1991), 57.
Robert Rosenblum: “The Abstract Sublime,” Artnews (February

1961): 56.
Susan Rothenberg: quoted in Joan Simon, Susan Rothenberg

(New York, 1991), 29; catalogue statement, New Image Painting,
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, [1978]), 56; writing
in Art in America (December 1982): 65.
Mark Rothko: “Statement on His Attitude in Painting,” quoted in

Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko, National Gallery of Art (Washington,
D.C., 1998), 307; “A Symposium on How to Combine Architecture,
Painting and Sculpture,” Interiors (May 1951), quoted in Jeffrey
Weiss, Mark Rothko, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.,
1998), 307; correspondence with Katharine Kuh, quoted in Art
for the Nation, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1991),
412; quoted in Guggenheim A to Z (New York, 1992), 228.
David Smith: in Cleve Gray, ed., David Smith by David Smith

(New York, 1968), quoted in Dore Ashton, ed., Twentieth-Century
Artists on Art (New York, 1985), 253; “Report on Voltri,” in
Garnett McCoy, ed., David Smith (New York, 1973), 162; quoted
in Jeremy Strick, Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture,
National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1989), 105; interview
in “Who is the Artist, How Does He Act?” Everyday Art Quarterly
(Minneapolis) 23 (1952), quoted in Dore Ashton, ed., Twentieth-
Century Artists on Art (New York, 1985), 251; quoted in Karen
Wilken, David Smith (New York, 1984), 72; quoted in Guggenheim
A to Z (New York, 1992), 248.
Tony Smith: catalogue statement, Tony Smith, Wadsworth

Athenaeum, Hartford, Conn., 1966, quoted in Edward Lucie-
Smith, Movements in Art since 1945, 3d ed. (London, 1995), 171–
172; interviewed in Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., “Talking to Tony Smith,”
Artforum (December 1966), quoted in Dore Ashton,
ed., Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (New York, 1985), 253.
91
1950 1960
Jackson Pollock • Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

Expressionism
Willem de Kooning • Study for Woman Number One

Abstract
Mark Rothko • Untitled
Barnett Newman • Yellow Painting
David Smith • Voltri VII • Cubi XXVI
Robert Rauschenberg
Jasper Johns
Roy Lichtenstein • Look Mickey • Brushstroke
• A Boy for Meg • Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Pop Art Andy Warhol
• Green Marilyn (Rauschenberg Family)
Claes Oldenburg • Glass Case with Pies (Assorted Pies in a Case)
Ellsworth Kelly
Morris Louis • Beth Chaf

Postpainterly
Abstraction
Ad Reinhardt • Black Painting No. 34
Frank Stella
Tony Smith • Moondog
Sol Lewitt • Floor Structure Black

Conceptual Art
Joseph Kosuth
Sam Gilliam
Process Art
Eva Hesse
Land Art Richard Long

Postminimalism
New Image Susan Rothenberg
Philip Guston
Chuck Close
Martin Puryear
Louise Bourgeois • Mortise
Neo-Expressionism Anselm Kiefer
Sigmar Polke
Elizabeth Murray
92
1970 1980 1990
• Cardbird Door • Copperhead Grande/ROCI CHILE
• Flags I • Perilous Night
• White Curve VIII • Untitled
• Chyrow II • Jarama II
• Wall Drawing No. 681C
• Art as Idea: Nothing
• Relative
• Test Piece for “Contingent”
• Whitechapel Slate Circle
• Butterfly • Boneman
• Painter’s Table
• Fanny/Fingerpainting
• Lever No. 3
• Spider
• Zim Zum
• Hope is: Wanting to Pull Clouds
• Careless Love
93
List of slides
1 14
Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950, oil, Claes Oldenburg, Glass Case with Pies (Assorted Pies in a Case),
enamel, and aluminum on canvas, 2.210 x 2.997 m (87 x 118 in.), 1962, burlap soaked in plaster, painted with enamel, with pie tins,
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund in glass and metal case, 0.476 x 0.311 x 0.276 m (183/4 x 121/4 x
107/8 in.), Gift of Leo Castelli, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary
2 of the National Gallery of Art
Willem de Kooning, Study for Woman Number One, 1952, pastel,
crayon, and graphite, 0.229 x 0.285 m (9 x 11 1/4 in.), Andrew W. 15
Mellon Fund David Smith, Voltri VII, 1962, iron, 2.158 x 3.116 x 1.105 m
(85 x 122 x 431/2 in.), Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund
3
Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1953, oil on canvas, 1.951 x 1.723 m 16
(763/4 x 67 3/4 in.), Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. David Smith, Cubi XXVI, 1965, steel, 3.034 x 3.834 x 0.656 m
(1191/2 x 151 x 257/8 in.), Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund
4
Barnett Newman, Yellow Painting, 1949, oil on canvas, 17
1.71 x 1.33 m (67 1/2 x 52 3/8 in.), Gift of Annalee Newman Ellsworth Kelly, White Curve VIII, 1976, oil on canvas, 2.440
x 1.954 m (961/16 x 7615/16 in.), Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph
5 Helman
Robert Rauschenberg, Cardbird Door, published 1971, cardboard,
paper, tape, wood, metal, offset lithography, and screenprint, 18
2.032 x 0.762 x 0.279 m (80 x 30 x 11 in.), Gift of Gemini G.E.L. Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled, 1988, bronze, 3.035 x 0.622 x 0.025 m
(1191/2 x 241/4 x 1 in.), Gift of the Artist, in Honor of the 50th
6 Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
Robert Rauschenberg, Copperhead Grande/ROCI CHILE, 1985,
acrylic and tarnishes on copper, 2.286 x 3.658 m (90 x 144 in.), 19
Gift of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Ad Reinhardt, Black Painting No. 34, 1964, oil on canvas,
1.530 x 1.526 m (601/4 x 601/8 in.), Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
7 Burton Tremaine
Jasper Johns, Flags I, 1973, screenprint on J. B. Green paper,
sheet: 0.699 x 0.900 m (271/2 x 357/16 in.), Robert and Jane 20
Myerhoff Collection Frank Stella, Chyrow II, 1972, mixed media, 2.845 x 2.540 m
(112 x 100 in.), Gift of the Collectors Committee
8
Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1982, encaustic on canvas with 21
objects, 1.705 x 2.442 x 0.159 m (671/8 x 961/8 x 61/4 in.), Frank Stella, Jarama II, 1982, mixed media on etched magne-
Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection sium, 3.199 x 2.539 x 0.628 m (126 x 100 x 243/4 in.), Gift of
Lila Acheson Wallace
9
Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961, oil on canvas, 1.219 x 1.753 m 22
(48 x 69 in.), Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, Gift of the Artist, in Tony Smith, Moondog, conceived 1964, fabricated 1998, painted
Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art aluminum, 5.213 x 4.147 x 4.788 m (205 1/4 x 1631/4 x 1881/2
in.), Gift of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation
10
Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke, 1965, color screenprint on heavy, 23
white wove paper, image: 0.564 x 0.724 m (223/16 x 281/2 in.), Sol LeWitt, Floor Structure Black, 1965, painted wood, 0.470 x
Gift of Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein 0.457 x 2.083 m (181/2 x 18 x 82 in.), The Dorothy and Herbert
Vogel Collection, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, Patrons’ Permanent
11 Fund and Gift of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel
Andy Warhol, A Boy for Meg, 1962, oil on canvas, 1.829 x 1.321 m
(72 x 52 in.), Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine 24
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 681 C, 1993, colored ink washes,
12 image: 3.048 x 11.278 m (120 x 444 in.), The Dorothy and
Andy Warhol, Green Marilyn, 1962, silkscreen on synthetic Herbert Vogel Collection, Gift of Dorothy Vogel and Herbert
polymer paint on canvas, 0.508 x 0.406 m (20 x 16 in.), Vogel, Trustees
Gift of William C. Seitz and Irma S. Seitz, in Honor of the
50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art 25
Joseph Kosuth, Art as Idea: Nothing, 1968, silver gelatin
13 photographic print, 0.914 x 0.914 (36 x 36 in.), The Dorothy
Andy Warhol, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Rauschenberg and Herbert Vogel Collection
Family), 1963, silkscreen on canvas, 2.082 x 2.082 m (82 x
82 in.), Gift (Partial and Promised) of Mr. and Mrs. William 26
Howard Adams Eva Hesse, Test Piece for “Contingent,” 1969, latex over cheese-
cloth, 3.658 x 1.118 m (144 x 44 in.), Gift of the Collectors
Committee
27
Richard Long, Whitechapel Slate Circle, 1981, slate, dimensions
vary, Gift of the Collectors Committee
94
28
Sam Gilliam, Relative, 1969, acrylic on canvas, suspended
(installed) canvas: 3.048 x 4.115 m (120 x 162 in.), Anonymous Gift
29
Morris Louis, Beth Chaf, 1959, acrylic on canvas, 3.531 x
2.603 m (139 x 1021/2 in.), Gift (Partial and Promised) of Gisela
and Dennis Alter
30
Susan Rothenberg, Butterfly, 1976, acrylic on canvas, 1.765 x
2.108 m (691/2 x 83 in.), Gift of Perry R. and Nancy Lee Bass
31
Susan Rothenberg, Boneman, 1986, mezzotint on wood-veneer
paper, sheet: 0.763 x 0.513 m (30 x 203/16 in.), Gift of Gemini
G.E.L. and the Artist, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the
National Gallery of Art
32
Philip Guston, Painter’s Table, 1973, oil on canvas, 1.962 x 2.286
m (771/4 x 90 in.), Gift (Partial and Promised) of Mr. and
Mrs. Donald M. Blinken in memory of Maurice H. Blinken and
in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
33
Chuck Close, Fanny/Fingerpainting, 1985, oil on canvas,
2.591 x 2.134 x 0.063 m (102 x 84 x 21/2 in.), Gift of Lila Acheson
Wallace
34
Chuck Close, Fanny/Fingerpainting (detail)
35
Martin Puryear, Lever No. 3, 1989, carved and painted wood,
2.146 x 4.115 x 0.330 m (841/2 x 162 x 13 in.), Gift of the
Collectors Committee
95

Art Since 1950

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Art since 1950

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Slides, reproductions, and timeline

The 1950s premise that “existence precedes essence” meant

Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, and

broader splotches and softer colors below, and

painted with several thin layers applied in differ-

In contrast to the gestural energy of works by Pollock

American, born 1925

Robert Rauschenberg at Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas.

American, born 1930

One of Johns’ overriding interests has been to Mathias Grünewald, Isenheim

Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City. In

Andy Warhol with assistants employs photographs and ready-made images in

Andy Warhol, Brillo Box, 1964, In 1965 Warhol’s Brillo Boxes

Claes Oldenburg described his environment, the Store, on a

This store will be constantly supplied with new objects

The store may be thought of as a season-long exhib-

I want these pieces to have an unbridled intense satanic vulgarity

David Smith (Photographs expressionist painters. In the mid-1930s he was

David Smith, Sentinel I,

David Smith was born in Decatur, Indiana. He

American, born 1923

Ellsworth Kelly was born in Newburgh, New

Early in the 1950s, about the time Rauschenberg exhibited a

American, born 1936

The polygonal blocks Tony Smith used in his sculpture were

by the time-sequence photographs of Eadward

Sol LeWitt during installation Sol LeWitt was born in

translating two-dimensional drawings and washes latex, and fiber-

been stamped by fiat, in Hesse’s work we sense VIEWPOINT PROCESS ART

British, born 1945

Richard Long was born in Bristol, England. He

In the 1970s Long began bringing his walks

VIEWPOINT Land art

American, born 1933

The airiness of Relative defies its true size and

were eliminated—painterliness was gone. This is Dennis Alter

American, born 1945

Susan Rothenberg, Susan Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New

American, born 1940

which was typically more than fifty square feet. He

VIEWPOINT Realism in the late twentieth century

American, born 1941

Martin Puryear was born The strongest work for me embodies

American, born 1911

Since, for many of us, the spider prompts fear

German, born 1945

Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen,

Zim Zum is some eighteen feet long and weighs

German, born 1941

American, born 1940

Elizabeth Murray was born in Soft and undulating with a trumpet-shaped

A: Advanced Discussion activities Controversy has surrounded public funding of

Poststructuralism relies on the writings of

Process art replaced the rigidity and stability

Readymade is a term used for the everyday

Semiotics is the theory and analysis of signs and

Books Video interviews

For information about recent artists and movements,