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American Art: 1908-1940

• While artists elsewhere moved increasingly toward abstraction, ASHCAN SCHOOL OR american painters kept alive the realist tradition and portrayed THE EIGHT American life with utmost fidelity. LOCALE: • The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined New York City, 1908-13 as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the BEST-KNOWN ARTISTS: United States during the early twentieth century, best known for Henri, Sloan, Bellows works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer STYLE: neighborhoods. The movement is most associated with a group Realistic, sketch-like known as The Eight, whose members included five painters SUBJECT: associated with the Ashcan school: William Glackens (1870- Urban grit and vigor 1938), Robert Henri (1865-1929), George Luks (1867-1933), WHY CONDEMNED: Everett Shinn (1876-1953) and John French Sloan (1871-1951), “Sordid,” low-life subjects along with Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928), Ernest Lawson (1873- WHY PRAISED: 1939) and Maurice Prendergast (1859-1924). First uniquely American art

 The Eight are remembered as a group, despite the fact that their work was very diverse in terms of style and subject matter—only five of the artists (Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Shinn, and Luks) painted the gritty urban scenes that characterized the Ashcan School.  As noted, the Ashcan School was not an organized group. The first known use of the "ash can" terminology in describing the movement was by Art Young, in 1916, but the term was applied later to a group of artists, including Henri, Glackens, Edward Hopper (a student of Henri), Shinn, Sloan, Luks, George Bellows (another student of Henri), Mabel Dwight, and others such as photographer Jacob Riis, who portrayed urban subject matter, also primarily of New York's working class neighborhoods. (Hopper's inclusion in the group [which he forswore] is ironic: his depictions of city streets are almost entirely free of the usual minutiae, with not a single incidental ashcan in sight.)  The artists of the Ashcan School rebelled against the American Impressionism that represented the vanguard of American art at the time.  Their works, generally dark in tone, captured the spontaneous moments of life and often depicted such subjects as prostitutes, drunks, butchered pigs, overflowing tenements with laundry hanging on lines, boxing matches, and wrestlers.  It was their frequent, although not total, focus upon poverty and the daily realities of urban life that prompted American critics to consider them the fringe of modern art.

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John Sloan (1871-1951), was an Early 20th Century Realist of the JOHN SLOAN: STREET LIFEAshcan School, whose concerns with American social conditions led him to join the Socialist Party in 1910. From 1912–1916, he contributed illustrations to the socialist monthly The Masses. Sloan disliked propaganda, and in his drawings for The Masses, as in his paintings, he focused on the everyday lives of people. He depicted the leisure of the working class with an emphasis on female subjects. Among his best known works are Picnic Grounds and Sunday, Women Drying their Hair. He disliked the Ashcan School label, and expressed his annoyance with art historians who identified him as a painter of the American Scene: "Some of us used to paint little rather sensitive comments about the life around us. We didn't know it was the American Scene. I don't Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street (New York City) by John Sloan. Oil 30 x 40. like the name ... A symptom of 1928. nationalism, which has caused a great deal of trouble in this world.”

John Sloan (American, 1871–1951) The Picnic Grounds epitomizes the urban comedies of manners on which Sloan's reputation rests. Working, as The Picnic Grounds, 1906–7 usual, from memory, Sloan enlists an informal composition, jagged forms, and vigorous brushwork to express the Oil on canvas; 24 x 36 in. (61 x 91.4 cm) youngsters' liveliness. The girls' dresses, makeup, and cheerfulness identify them as working class, and their cricket caps hint that their flirtation is merely a game.

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About 1900 the growing middle John Sloan (American, 1871–1951) class, the new employment Chinese Restaurant, 1909 opportunities for women, and Oil on canvas; 26 x 32 1/4 in. (66 x 81.9 cm) the influx of immigrants led to the proliferation of ethnic eateries, which extended New York's dining culture beyond private homes, clubs, and exclusive establishments. Sloan noted in his diary in February 1909: "Felt restless so went to the Chinese restaurant and was glad I did for I saw a strikingly gotten up girl with dashing red feathers in her hat playing with the restaurant's fat cat." He concluded: "It would be a good thing to paint." Sloan's canvas, on which he worked from memory, may portray a woman of easy virtue, as her flamboyant attire and heavy makeup suggest. Yet, instead of any hint of reproach, Sloan conveys a lighthearted acceptance of her droll little performance as she feeds the cat while her slovenly companion feeds himself and two men look on with amusement.

Sloan's painting features working women cleaning themselves on a city rooftop. Rather than engaging in polite rituals in the elegant or exotic private habitats that American academics and Impressionists preferred to portray, these lightly clad Three Graces exhibit a forthright relationship to the viewer. Sloan later described these women as unselfconscious performers in "another of the human comedies which were regularly staged for my enjoyment by the humble roof-top players of Cornelia Street," referring to the view from his studio on John Sloan (American, 1871–1951) Sixth Avenue at West Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, 1912 Fourth Street. Oil on canvas; (66.4 x 81.6 cm)

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GEORGE BELLOWS: BOXING

George Bellows (1882-1925), painted city life in New York City. He portrayed the pulsating life of New York docks, gutters and bars with a heroic vitality. His paintings had an expressionist boldness and a willingness to take risks. In his painting titled Cliff Dwellers, (next slight) we find a cityscape that is not one particular view but a composite of many views.

George Bellows, New York (1911)

George Bellows (American, 1882–1925) Cliff Dwellers, 1913 Oil on canvas; (102.1 x 106.8 cm)

Between 1880 and 1910, many immigrants—including thousands of Eastern European Jews—found temporary or permanent shelter on the Lower East Side, along streets such as East Broadway, the setting for Cliff Dwellers. Bellows acknowledges that much life in the neighborhood was lived in the street or on stoops and fire escapes, as residents sought respite from dark, poorly ventilated, overcrowded apartments. Yet he minimizes hardship, using bright colors and showing children at play, laundry snapping in a passing breeze, and other cheerful details. While Jacob Riis made a disquieting photographic record of New York's slums about 1890 and social commentators urged tenement reform, Bellows offers a genial narrative.

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He had a fascination with violence as seen in his paintings, thematized “Boxing.” George Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo (1924), Whitney Museum of American Art

He was a professional baseball player, but as a painter he preferred to represent the dynamism and energy of sport into art.

The setting is Sharkey's, a sleazy athletic club located across Broadway from Bellows's studio on Sixty-sixth Street. Bellows summarizes with ferocious painterly shorthand the two pugilists' boxing at peak intensity. He increases the drama by condensing the ring to a bright sliver of space, compressing the towering men's agitated forms with the upper edge of the canvas, illuminating the smoky interior with hellish light, and placing the observer in the second row amid the bloodthirsty crowd. Some seamy neighborhood saloons like Sharkey's were destinations for slumming, as the spectators in evening dress on the far side of the ring indicate. This detail invites bourgeois viewers of the painting to experience the gritty scene as if they, too, were slumming swells. Like contemporaneous images of cowboys and cavalrymen, Bellows's boxing scenes—with which he became identified— glorify virile action more than quiet thought, and popular experience more than highbrow culture.

George Bellows (American, 1882–1925) Club Night, 1907 Oil on canvas; 43 x 53 1/8 in. (109.2 x 135 cm)

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Art as Activism: Two Forms of Realism during Depression

AMERICAN SCENE: SOCIAL REGIONALISM REALISM • The American Scene School was an art movement in America • Term used to refer to the work of painters, printmakers, film during the Great Depression. It features scenes of everyday makers and photographers who draw attention to the everyday American Life and romanticized the American spirit to encourage conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are people during the Depression. Prominent artists were Thomas Hart critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions. Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood. Wood described • Social realism, in contrast to Socialist Realism, represents a himself and his movement, essentially, as the American dream led democratic tradition of independent socially motivated artists, by the American dreamer at a time when popular sentiment was usually of left-wing or liberal persuasion. looking hard for a positive national note. • For Grant Wood, Regionalism was a simple concept: artists should • Their preoccupation with the conditions of the lower classes was a paint what is around them, what they know and what they see. result of the democratic movements of the 18th and 19th Wood’s dogmatism remained focused on subject matter; only centuries, so social realism in its fullest sense should be seen as appropriate was what the artist personally knew about. an international phenomenon, despite the term’s frequent association with American painting. • Hart Benton offered the rationalization for this: "distinctly indigenous art forms would arise...from ‘an American way of looking at things, • Social realism’s origins are traceable to European Realism, and a utilization of the materials of our own American scene.” An including the art of Honoré Daumier, Gustave Courbet and Jean- "American way of looking at things" might well be seeing an François Millet. In 19th-century, the Industrial Revolution aroused idealized and usable past in a difficult and uncertain present, as a concern in many artists for the urban poor. Grant Wood did in his many landscape paintings. • In the USA during the first decades of the 20th century, Ashcan • By contrast, however, the other two members of the regionalist school painting, including George Luk’s Breaker Boy (1921) and triumvirate, Benton and John Steuart Curry, painted pictures that John Sloan’s Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street (1928), reflected not only events of the 1930's but also a national mood. depicted the unattractive reality of city and working life. The Curry tended towards representations of families surviving natural Ashcan school influenced the art of the Depression era, for disaster, certainly a prevailing theme of the Depression years as the example Thomas Hart Benton’s mural City Activity with Subway dustbowl and farm foreclosure drove the Midwest into an economic (1930). tailspin.

AMERICAN SCENE SCHOOL : REGIONALISM

Both Tornado Over Kansas and The Mississippi reflect this inclination in Curry's art of the period. Benton, the most stylistically flamboyant of the three, tackled issues even more ↑ Tornado Over Kansas, 1929 , by John Steuart Curry directly; he fearlessly ↓ Politics and Agriculture, 1936, by Thomas Hart Benton The Mississippi, 1935, by John Steuart Curry addressed the relationship between the farmers and the government (Politics and Agriculture), racism (A Lynching), and sexuality (Hollywood). Where Wood's Hollywood, 1937, by Thomas Hart paintings reflectBenton a kind of pastoral serenity that seems to have been pointedly absent from the 1930's, both Curry and Benton painted action, movement and obvious emotion, be it fear, lust, excitement, or despair.

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Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930), Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Hart Benton, People of Chilmark (Figure Composition), 1920, Hirsh horn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.

However, Regionalism bridged the gap between a completely Abstract art and Academic realism. The Regionalists prepared the way for Abstract Expressionists to emerge in America. Jackson Pollock’s power as an artist was reinforced and he was encouraged and he benefited from the influence of Thomas Hart Benton in the art classes that Pollock took under Benton; while a student at the Art Students League of New York. Regionalism had a catalytic effect on later American art in a similar way that Post-Impressionism in Europe did via Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism and other movements. In Grant Wood's pamphlet Revolt Against the City, published in Iowa City, 1935, he asserts that American artists and buyers of art were no longer looking to Parisian culture for subject matter and style. Wood wrote that Regional artists interpret physiography, industry, and psychology of their hometown, and that the competition of these preceding elements creates American culture. He wrote that the lure of the city was gone, and hopes that art of the widely diffused "whole people" would prevail. He cites Thomas Jefferson's characterization of cities as "ulcers on the body politic.“ Regionalism had a strong influence on popular culture.

SOCIAL REALISM

Aspiration, 1936 Cover for Arthur Huff Fauset, Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) For Freedom: A Biographical Story Oil on canvas, (152.4 x 152.4 cm) of the American Negro , c. 1927 Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) They were realist in terms of the “story,” propagating political issues. A smaller group of muralists, including Aaron Douglas, worked to highlight social problems and attack social injustices within the very fabric of American society. Deeply committed to social change, these painters attacked evils of capitalism in a semi-realistic style that exaggerated features, color and scale for emotional impact.

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Abstract Expressionism

• A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world's focus. • Never a formal association, the artists known as "Abstract Expressionists" or "The New York School" did, however, share some common assumptions. Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock , Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Clyfford Still advanced brave formal inventions in a search for significant content. • Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches— and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. • These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: – an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode.

Context: Abstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and inspirations. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. The Great Depression yielded two popular art movements, Regionalism and Social Realism, neither of which satisfied this group of artists' desire to find a content rich with meaning and redolent of social responsibility, yet free of provincialism and explicit politics. The Great Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in which many of the group participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a career path.

But it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for the most advanced American art. There were several venues in New York for seeing avant-garde art from Europe. MoMA opened in 1929, and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. They were also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and retrospectives of Matisse, Léger, and Picasso, among others. Another forum for viewing the most advanced art was Albert Gallatin's Museum of Living Art, which was housed at New York University from 1927 to 1943. There the Abstract Expressionists saw the work of Mondrian, Gabo, El Lissitzky, and others. The forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—the Museum of Non-Objective Painting—opened in 1939. Even prior to that date, its collection of Kandinskys had been publicly exhibited several times. The lessons of European modernism were also disseminated through teaching. The German expatriot Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) became the most influential teacher of modern art in the United States, and his impact reached both artists and critics.

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The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists were troubled by man's dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability. They wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Direct contact with European artists increased as a result of World War II, which caused so many—including Dalí, Ernst, Masson, Breton, Mondrian, and Léger—to seek refuge in the U.S. The Surrealists opened up new possibilities with their emphasis on tapping the unconscious. One Surrrealist device for breaking free of the conscious mind was psychic automatism—in which automatic gesture and improvisation gain free rein.

Early Work: Early on, the Abstract Expressionists, in seeking a timeless and powerful subject matter, turned to primitive myth and archaic art for inspiration. Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Newman, and Baziotes all looked to ancient or primitive cultures for expression. Their early works feature pictographic and biomorphic elements transformed into personal code. Jungian psychology was compelling too, in its assertion of the collective unconscious. Directness of expression was paramount, best achieved through lack of premeditation. In a famous letter to the New York Times (June 1943), Gottlieb and Rothko, with the assistance of Newman, wrote: "To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is critical."

Mature Abstract Expressionism: Gesture

In 1947, Pollock developed a radical new technique, pouring and dripping thinned paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground (instead of traditional methods of painting in which pigment is applied by brush to primed, stretched canvas positioned on an easel). The paintings were entirely nonobjective. In their subject matter (or seeming lack of one), scale (huge), and technique (no brush, no stretcher bars, no easel), the works were shocking to many viewers. De Kooning, too, was developing his own version of a highly charged, gestural style, alternating between abstract work and powerful iconic figurative images. Other colleagues, including Krasner and Kline, were equally engaged in creating an art of dynamic gesture in which every inch of a picture is fully charged. For Abstract Expressionists, the authenticity or value of a work lay in its directness and immediacy of expression. A painting is meant to be a revelation of the artist's authentic identity. The gesture, the artist's "signature," is evidence of the actual process of the work's creation. It is in reference to this aspect of the work that critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting" in 1952: "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."

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Mature Abstract Expressionism: Color Field

Another path lay in the expressive potential of color.

Rothko, Newman, and Still, for instance, created art based on simplified, large-format, color-dominated fields. The impulse was, in general, reflective and cerebral, with pictorial means simplified in order to create a kind of elemental impact. Rothko and Newman, among others, spoke of a goal to achieve the "sublime" rather than the "beautiful," harkening back to Edmund Burke in a drive for the grand, heroic vision in opposition to a calming or comforting effect. Newman described his reductivism as one means of "… freeing ourselves of the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend … freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myth that have been the devices of Western European painting." For Rothko, his glowing, soft-edged rectangles of luminescent color should provoke in viewers a quasi-religious experience, even eliciting tears. As with Pollock and the others, scale contributed to the meaning. For the time, the works were vast in scale. And they were meant to be seen in relatively close environments, so that the viewer was virtually enveloped by the experience of confronting the work. Rothko said, "I paint big to be intimate." The notion is toward the personal (authentic expression of the individual) rather than the grandiose.

In his fascination with landscape and figurative subjects, Willem de Kooning has always veered away from mainstream Abstract Expressionism, a movement of primarily abstract painting, in which he was nevertheless a leader. The Glazier belongs to an early series of men—placidly sitting or standing, singly or in pairs—which were painted in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Later, in the 1950s, his subjects favored fierce female characters (such as Woman, 1950), for which he is still best known.

The Glazier has a ghostly, elusive quality. Parts of the body, especially the arms and head, seem to evaporate into veils of color, while other sections of the picture—the face, right shoulder, trouser creases, and table covering—are quite solidly modeled. The representation of space is equally ambiguous, vacillating between what de Kooning called the "no- environment" of color fields and abstract rectangles, and the specificity of an elegant ewer placed on a table and reflected in a mirror. The artist said that his palette of somber earth tones was inspired by the Boscoreale frescoes that he had often come to see at the Metropolitan Museum.

The Glazier, 1940 Willem de Kooning (American, born The Netherlands, 1904–1997) Oil on canvas (137.2 x 111.8 cm) From the Collection of Thomas B. Hess, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, 1941–42 Richard Pousette-Dart (American, 1916–1992) Oil on canvas (218.4 x 356.9 cm)

With this work of 1941–42, Pousette-Dart, then twenty-five years old, became the first of the Abstract Expressionists to make a mural-size painting. The monumental, heroic scale is integral to the artist's fundamental goals, expressive of highly personal, mystical beliefs that are as all-encompassing and vast as the work itself seemed at the time. Pousette-Dart worked in several media simultaneously, including painting and photography, and he also wrote a great deal, includingpoetry, art theory, and a host of other observations.

Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, 1941–42 Richard Pousette-Dart (American, 1916–1992) Oil on canvas (218.4 x 356.9 cm)

Like other Abstract Expressionists during the 1940s, Pousette-Dart looked to the art of other cultures for inspiration in seeking meaningful content.

African, Pacific, Pre-Columbian, and American Indian art were seen as vehicles to express what Pousette-Dart described as "transcendent"—beyond empirical experience.

This densely packed composition is organized around a structured grid that emerges sporadically. But Pousette-Dart breaks away from a basic Cubist structure to develop a new artistic vocabulary.

Circles, teardrops, ovals, arcs, diamonds, and crosses evoke cosmic and organic forms, a rhythmic spread in black, white, and earth tones with points of bright color.

Here and there, a nuanced reference to something identifiable emerges: perhaps a bird at the lower left, or some primitive weaponry at the upper left. The paint surface is layered, reworked, evidence of the artist's process of decision making in creating the work of art. The linear grid is apparent and principle elements are all outlined. But the image as a whole seems to pulsate in and out of focus. Pousette-Dart wanted an art that was "mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.”

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Black Untitled, 1948 Willem de Kooning (American, born the Netherlands, 1904–1997) Oil and enamel on paper, mounted on wood 29 7/8 x 40 1/4 in. (75.9 x 102.2 cm)

The Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning was a masterful and prolific draftsman throughout his seven-decade-long career. His first known drawings were realistic still lifes, done in about 1921, while he was a young art student in Rotterdam. Following his arrival in the United States (in 1926), he supported himself as a house painter, then moved to New York City (in 1927), where he soon became friends with other ascendant artists, including John Graham, Stuart Davis, David Smith, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. The gestural style of painting and the visual vocabulary of forms that he began to develop at this time continued to inform his later work. From the late 1930s through the '50s, his biomorphic abstractions (which allude to figures and landscapes) and his figurative series Woman (see 1984.613.6) placed him at the center of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Between 1946 and 1949, de Kooning created a series of paintings on canvas and paper that explored biomorphic abstraction with a restricted palette of mostly black and white. Black Untitled of 1948 is a prime example of the allover compositions he produced that cohesively integrate positive and negative spaces, without representational allusions. Like his friend Franz Kline, de Kooning used both black and white paint, rather than letting the white of the paper show through. Sweeping white rivers of paint rush across the dark black ground, creating writhing intertwining shapes that suggest figures in a landscape setting, but without any specificity whatsoever.

Untitled, ca. 1948–49 Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956) Dripped ink and enamel on paper (56.8 x 76.2 cm)

In the mid-1940s, when he became dissatisfied with representational art, Pollock began to conceive of a way to render things imagined, rather than things that were seen. In 1947, he devised a radically new technique whereby paint was dripped and poured (as well as spattered, flung, and pooled) over canvas or paper using a variety of unconventional tools (e.g., sticks, brush handles, cans, etc). Although such works employed paint media, his means of applying this media and his reliance on line as his primary means of expression brought these works into the realm of drawing. They redefined the parameters of traditional painting and drawing, and proposed instead a new and innovative direction for modern art.

As Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife and fellow Abstract Expressionist painter, noted, his work "seemed like monumental drawing, or maybe painting with the immediacy of drawing—some new category“ (quoted in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, New York, 1972, p. 182).

This large untitled work on paper displays the great control and facility that Pollock also applied to his considerably larger canvases.

Dripping skeins of bright red enamel over a linear understructure of black ink, his hand moved like a virtuoso around the sheet. Lines thicken and thin, punctuate and envelop, with poetic grace. The dynamic abstract composition that results embodies a sense of harnessed energy and rapid motion.

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Concord, 1949 Barnett Newman (American, 1905–1970) Oil and masking tape on canvas (228 x 136.2 cm)

Newman was interested in creating an art of "pure idea" that could speak to man's tragic condition, yielding metaphysical understanding. To reach that state, the art would have to jettison all narrative, all figuration, and even pare down detail and painterly incident. By 1948, he had honed his concept of "pure idea." He explored the philosophical notion articulated by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century that the merely beautiful be renounced in favor of something greater and more meaningful: the sublime. Newman spoke of artists' need for "freeing ourselves of impediments" in order to produce images of "revelation, real and concrete." And by 1948, Newman had developed his own unique format, designed to express these concerns of meaning and content.

Newman's compositions are built around a strict format: a field of color is bisected vertically by one or a few bands (narrow or wide) that he referred to as "zips." Such extreme minimalism, though, derives from an approach described by the artist as intuitive: "I start each painting as if I had never painted before. … I have no formal solutions … I paint out of high passion, and although my way of working may seem simple, for me it is difficult and complex." Concord is not a geometric picture. The colored field is not meant as a void on which a simple boundary is delineated. Pictures like this one ask the viewer to consider whether space alone, without narrative detail, can convey meaning. In Newman's words, "Instead of using outlines, instead of making shapes or setting off spaces my drawing declares the space." The zip is "a field that brings life to the other fields, just as the other fields bring life to this so-called line."

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956) Enamel on canvas (266.7 x 525.8 cm)

Pollock had created his first "drip" painting in 1947, the product of a radical new approach to paint handling. With Autumn Rhythm, made in October of 1950, the artist is at the height of his powers. In this nonrepresentational picture, thinned paint was applied to unprimed, unstretched canvas that lay flat on the floor rather than propped on an easel. Poured, dripped, dribbled, scumbled, flicked, and splattered, the pigment was applied in the most unorthodox means. The artist also used sticks, trowels, knives—in short, anything but the traditional painter's implements—to build up dense, lyrical compositions comprised of intricate skeins of line. There's no central point of focus, no hierarchy of elements in this allover composition in which every bit of the surface is equally significant. The artist worked with the canvas flat on the floor, constantly moving all around it while applying the paint and working from all four sides.

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Woman, 1950 Willem de Kooning (American, born the Netherlands, 1904–1997) Oil, cut and pasted paper on cardboard (37.5 x 29.5 cm)

Between 1950 and 1953, de Kooning made the series for which he is best known, the Women, and this painting of 1950 is a fine example of the subject. The small scale of this painting on paper belies both the potency of the iconic image and the dramatic dynamism of the vigorous, gestural brushwork. De Kooning himself summed up the impulse in 1951: "Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think of inside or outside—or art in general—as a situation of comfort." The image seems to assemble itself before our eyes—a palpable testimony to the process of its creation. Akin to other Abstract Expressionists, de Kooning here rejects conventional notions of "finish" in painting. Every stroke is a visceral record of speed, energy, agitation, and tension. But the tensions are coupled with humor in equal measure. A garish woman, her hair a gaudy, flaming orange, stares out at the viewer, her oversized eyes having been incised into the wet paint with a pencil point to reinforce the effect. Her eye-like, prominent breasts stand as beacons in the very center of the sheet. Very few other body parts are as clearly delineated—instead, much of the figure merges into its indeterminate space, a suggestive jumble of strokes and color. De Kooning incorporates collage elements, which intensifies the jarring effect of this blend of delineated and inchoate elements.

Number 28, 1950, 1950 Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956) Enamel on canvas (173 x 266.7 cm)

Jackson Pollock painted this mural-size canvas early in the summer of 1950. Having moved from Manhattan to eastern Long Island, in 1947 he returned to the drip and pour techniques that he may have learned ten years earlier from David Alfaro Siquieros. The resulting "allover" paintings, made from 1947 to 1950, constitute his greatest achievement. Like almost all his New York colleagues, Pollock began his abstractions with drawings of figures, which were subsequently abstracted or obliterated. This canvas shows on its verso traces of drawing in black and yellow that are no longer visible on the surface, having been obscured by layers of other colors. Executed on the floor of his studio on a canvas roll that he later cut and stretched, the composition was worked on from all four sides of the rectangle. Using various techniques—pouring enamel paint from a hole in the can, dropping from a stick, flinging, and drizzling—he applied paint from a distance above the surface, using gravity and motion to form linear skeins. The dominant critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, called such works "polyphonic." "Knit together of a multiplicity of identical or similar elements," he wrote, this art "repeats itself without strong variation from one end of the canvas to the other, and dispenses, apparently, with beginning, middle, and ending."

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The Flesh Eaters, 1952 William Baziotes (American, 1912–1963) Oil and charcoal on canvas (152.4 x 183.2 cm)

Baziotes made a particular study of French Symbolist poetry and developed a lifelong affinity for the work that contributed importantly to his own stance as an artist. In his own work, he adapted the Symbolist poets' idea of "correspondences," in which multiple references could be suggested by a single form. Another key inspiration came from contact with several Surrealist artists, notably Matta (Roberto Matta Echaurren) and Gordon Onslow-Ford. Large in scale, The Flesh Eaters is one of Baziotes' most ambitious works. In a scene that evokes a sense of an underwater world, the undulating, biomorphic imagery is suggestive rather than explicit. On the left, positioned in front of colors and shapes that evoke seaweed, a form suggests either an armless seated figure or a huge, single- eyed head with gaping mouth. Another one-eyed creature floats in a pink hazy amorphousness. On the right, a shape suggestive of a figural bust is shown in contour against a dark ground, with either pointed headgear or wild hair extending up into the pink haze. In a characteristic paradox, the imagery is threatening, menacing, but it exists in a framework of frankly pretty colors. Like others of the period, this artist is creating an art in which content aspires to the universal.

No. 13 (White, Red, on Yellow), 1958 Mark Rothko (American, born Russia, 1903–1970) Oil and acrylic with powdered pigments on canvas (242.2 x 206.7 cm)

Rothko's signature compositions after 1950, and for the rest of his career, consisted of three or four horizontal bands of color. Works like No. 13 (White, Red, on Yellow) epitomized what he said was "the simple expression of the complex thought." The simplification of means and structure was not a formal exercise, but a vehicle through which to experience powerful, unverbalized emotion and revelation. Rothko's forms are reduced, but they are not geometric. Edges and boundaries are soft, frayed, feathered—merging imperceptibly as one ethereal field of color transitions into another, producing an effect that is almost halo-like. Luminosity is achieved with translucent veils of diluted pigment, sometimes applied with rags and sponges rather than brushes. In some areas, the paint is scumbled; in other places, it acts as a stain, saturating the canvas fibers. Using various types of wet media and varying the thickness of his paint layers, he sometimes changed the orientation of his pictures in the studio, depending on how their colors harmonized. Indeed, in No. 13 (White, Red, on Yellow), some drips travel upward, indicating that Rothko worked on this picture upside down for a period of time. In Rothko's work, the large scale of his paintings envelops the viewer, thereby creating a palpable and intimate experience. "Historically," he said, "the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however . . . is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human."

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DS 1958, 1958 David Smith (American, 1906–1965) Spray and stenciled enamel on paper (44.5 x 29.2 cm)

Although it is unanimously agreed that Abstract Expressionism was the province of painters, one sculptor— David Smith—stands out as an important exception. Initially trained as a painter in New York City in the late 1920s to early '30s, he continued to paint and associate with painters (including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock) even after he turned to sculpture in 1931. Like these painters, Smith espoused the role of spontaneity in the creative process, and viewed his mature creations (abstract welded metal sculptures) as representations of energy rather than mass. Starting in the late 1950s, and continuing until his death in 1965, Smith produced a unique series of preparatory studies for his sculptures that no longer relied on traditional drawing methods or tools. Instead of applying brush and ink to paper, he sprayed enamel paint over cutout pieces of cardboard or metal that had been arranged into a sculptural form on a sheet of paper. When the cutouts were removed, the unpainted paper color was revealed, silhouetted against a halo of spray paint. DS 1958 is one of the first studies of this type to be made and displays Smith's experimentation with different media. Here, he sprays metallic paint over the enamel for a shimmering painterly effect; subsequent spray drawings used only matte paint. The totemic structure of this proposed sculpture, made up of a few geometric elements along a vertical axis, coincided with what he was doing in his monumental steel sculptures.

Black Reflections, 1959 Franz Kline (American, 1910–62) Oil and pasted paper on paper, mounted on Masonite (48.3 x 49.2 cm)

Kline arrived at Abstract Expressionism later than others. By that time, he was ready to concentrate on formal concerns, and his friendship with Willem de Kooning helped pave the way. In 1956, Kline reintroduced color. Black Reflections, an intensely colored small work on paper, may in fact relate to an earlier black and white piece. Kline's work, so apparently spontaneous or impulsive in its emphasis on highly dramatic gestural brushstrokes, is, in fact, carefully considered. The sweeps and rapid brushings of both thick and diluted paint are the product of much meditation. He often drew inspiration for large compositions from small studies, and he also continued explorations of key elements in works even years after their creation. In this case, the central black shape is a mirror image of the shape in a black and white untitled painting of 1954.

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Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 70, 1961 by Robert Motherwell (American, 1915–1991) Oil on canvas (175.3 x 289.6 cm) Motherwell's path to becoming an abstract artist was through philosophy, art history, and poetry. He studied at Stanford, Harvard, and then Columbia, where he was introduced to émigré Surrealists (including Matta) by art historian Meyer Schapiro. His particular genesis as an abstractionist has its basis in Mallarmé, whose dictum "To paint, not the thing, but the effect it provides" was pivotal.

These abstract meditations on life and death share a common structure in compositional form. The horizontal white canvas is divided by two or three vertical black bars or bands. Those are punctuated at various intervals by ovoid shapes—stark blots of black. The whole is a dialogue of formal opposites—straight, curved, black, white—executed in a painterly, brushy manner in which the act of creation is evident. For Motherwell, as for so many other Abstract Expressionists, this is a search for universal content that stems from form itself: in his words, "…the Elegies use an essential component of pictorial language that is as basic as the polyphonic rhythms of Medieval or African or Oriental music."

Becca, 1965 David Smith (American, 1906–1965) Stainless steel (287.7 x 312.4 x 77.5 cm)

Even though Becca’s life was cut short, the artist's output was prodigious and his many innovations were unparalleled; Smith's legacy of influence is unmatched in American sculpture. Smith came to sculpture through painting, having trained at the Art Students League from 1927 to 1932. When he saw magazine illustrations of welded sculpture by Pablo Picasso and Julio González, he himself began welding metal constructions. Smith found a way to bridge seemingly irreconcilable worlds. There is often in the artist's sculptural work a decidedly frontal orientation (almost two- dimensional), and a feel for the calligraphic (series of works from the 1940s and '50s were open "drawings in metal"). Later in his career, Smith would note the overwhelming potency of steel as a medium: "What it can do in arriving at a form economically, no other medium can do. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, brutality." During the last fifteen years of his life, Smith's sculpture was characterized by overlapping rectangular plates of highly polished steel. Becca, named after one of Smith's two daughters, is monumental in scale but at the same time buoyant and graceful. Pristine geometric components have been assembled in a massive yet elegant configuration, all compressed into a relatively flat plane. The surface is exuberant, wire brushed in elaborate scribblings resembling brushstrokes. The sense of touch and gesturalism is preeminent on these dazzling, burnished surfaces.

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Night Creatures, 1965 Lee Krasner (American, 1908–1984) Acrylic on paper (76.2 x 108 cm)

A work of raw intensity, Night Creatures is comprised of a crowded, allover whirl of gestural strokes of paint in which every inch of the surface is fully activated in a rhythmic patterning. This painting on paper is an abstract work, but the curving, linear forms however seem to coalesce into a web of vaguely suggestive imagery. Menacing (disembodied) eyes and heads emerge out of the crush of primarily black and white brushwork. Somber and haunting, the piece makes a highly emotional impact through its gestural paint handling, rich surface texture, density of interlocking form, and suggestive and menacing nuances of imagery. Krasner always maintained that her life and work were inseparable. She spoke of the necessity for art to communicate on a profound level: "I am preoccupied with trying to know myself in order to communicate with others. Painting is not separate from life. It is one." Later, she made the connection more explicit: "My painting is so autobiographical, if anyone can take the trouble to read it." Krasner had married fellow artist Jackson Pollock in 1945.

• The Aftermath

The first generation of Abstract Expressionism flourished between 1943 and the mid-'50s. The movement effectively shifted the art world's focus from Europe (specifically Paris) to New York in the postwar years. The paintings were seen widely in traveling exhibitions and through publications. In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, new generations of artists—both American and European—were profoundly marked by the breakthroughs made by the first generation, and went on to create their own important expressions based on, but not imitative of, those who forged the way.

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• 1898–1905 Exhibitions of modernist design by the Vienna • 1908 Viennese architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933), an early proponent • 1908 The Hochzeitsturm ("wedding tower") at Darmstadt, the Secession are held in the group's building, designed by of Functionalism, writes the essay "Ornament and Crime." It focal point of the artists' colony founded there by Archduke Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867–1908). At the head of the group, will be taken up by some modernist architects as a manifesto Ernst Ludwig of Hesse (1868–1937), is completed by Joseph founded in 1897, is Gustav Klimt (1862–1918). Josef and a denunciation of the supposedly decorative traditional Maria Olbrich (1867–1908). Darmstadt becomes the center of Hoffmann (1870–1956) is also a founding member. In 1907– architecture they despise. In 1910, Loos completes the Steiner the Jugendstil, the German equivalent of the Art Nouveau 8, Klimt will paint one of his best-known works, The Kiss House in Vienna, which, despite its unornamented facade, movement. (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna). includes Arts and Crafts elements such as paneling and large • 1909 Peter Behrens (1868–1940) completes the AEG Turbine • 1900 German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) formulates fireplaces in the interior. Factory, Berlin. Behrens also designs some of the products quantum theory. His work marks a turning point in the • 1908 The Hochzeitsturm ("wedding tower") at Darmstadt, the focal manufactured by the AEG, as well as the company's development of physics in the twentieth century. In 1918, point of the artists' colony founded there by Archduke Ernst publicity materials. In this connection, as well as through Planck receives the Nobel Prize for physics. Ludwig of Hesse (1868–1937), is completed by Joseph Maria training a number of modernist architects, Behrens plays a • 1900 Sigmund Freud's (Austrian, 1856–1939) Interpretation of Olbrich (1867–1908). Darmstadt becomes the center of the central role in design and architecture in the first quarter of Dreams is published, followed in 1905 by Three Essays on Jugendstil, the German equivalent of the Art Nouveau the twentieth century. Sexuality. These are among the texts in which Freud movement. • 1910 The journal Der Sturm begins publication in Berlin, develops the new discipline of psychoanalysis. • 1909 Peter Behrens (1868–1940) completes the AEG Turbine Factory, combining essays on topical issues such as women's rights • 1903 The Weiner Werkstätte is founded in Vienna by Josef Berlin. Behrens also designs some of the products and nationalism, cutting-edge art criticism, and work by Hoffmann (1870–1956) and Kolo Moser (1868–1918), manufactured by the AEG, as well as the company's publicity leading European avant-garde artists and writers. Editor embracing both machine production and the Arts and Crafts materials. In this connection, as well as through training a Herwarth Walden (1878–1941) opens Galerie Sturm in 1911. principles of William Morris (1834–1896). number of modernist architects, Behrens plays a central role in • 1911 The arrival of the German gunboat Panther in Agadir, • 1904 Construction of the Postal Savings Bank, designed by Otto design and architecture in the first quarter of the twentieth Morocco, which represents a threat to French interests Wagner (1841–1918), is begun in Vienna. The building century. there, creates an international crisis. War is averted when represents the architect's incorporation of rationalist • 1910 The journal Der Sturm begins publication in Berlin, combining the Germans relinquish claims to Morocco in exchange for elements, such as frankly expressed modern materials like essays on topical issues such as women's rights and French-controlled land in the Congo with access to the sea. steel, within an overall conception that is classical in nationalism, cutting-edge art criticism, and work by leading • 1911 The paintings of Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886– inspiration. European avant-garde artists and writers. Editor Herwarth 1980) are included in the Hagenbund exhibition in Vienna. • 1905 Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of painters and Walden (1878–1941) opens Galerie Sturm in 1911. Critic Arthur Roessler (1877–1955) refers to them as printmakers who contribute to the development of • 1911 The arrival of the German gunboat Panther in Agadir, Morocco, "massacres in paint." Kokoschka is the leading exponent of Expressionism, is founded in Dresden, continuing there and which represents a threat to French interests there, creates an Austrian Expressionism, along with Egon Schiele (1890– in Berlin until 1913. Members include Ernst Ludwig Kirchner international crisis. War is averted when the Germans 1918), whose erotically charged figurative works cause a (1880–1938), Erich Heckel (1883–1970), and Emil Nolde relinquish claims to Morocco in exchange for French-controlled sensation. (1867–1956). Unlike the French avant-garde, Expressionists land in the Congo with access to the sea. • 1911 The Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group of avant-garde artists is privilege the artist's inner emotional state, focusing on the • 1911 The paintings of Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) founded in Munich and will continue until 1914. Among its anxieties of modern life and taboo subjects such as are included in the Hagenbund exhibition in Vienna. Critic members are Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), sexuality, expressed in bright, unnatural colors and Arthur Roessler (1877–1955) refers to them as "massacres in the title of whose painting gives the group its name, as well distorted forms. paint." Kokoschka is the leading exponent of Austrian as German artists Franz Marc (1880–1916), Paul Klee (1879– • 1905–7 The Palais Stoclet in Brussels is constructed by German Expressionism, along with Egon Schiele (1890–1918), whose 1940), and August Macke (1887–1914). The group is united, architect Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956), embodying the erotically charged figurative works cause a sensation. not by a single style or theme, but by a search for aesthetic contemporary German concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk • 1911 The Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group of avant-garde artists is forms through which to convey spiritual ideals. ("total work of art") with furnishings designed by the founded in Munich and will continue until 1914. Among its • 1913 A concert of atonal musical works by Arnold Schoenberg architect and murals by Gustav Klimt (1862–1918). members are Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), (1874–1951) and followers Alban Berg (1885–1935), and • 1907 The Deutscher Werkbund, predecessor of the Bauhaus, is the title of whose painting gives the group its name, as well as Anton Webern (1883–1945), held in Vienna, so incenses the founded in Munich, led by Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919), German artists Franz Marc (1880–1916), Paul Klee (1879–1940), audience that fights break out and police are called in to Karl Schmidt (1873–1954), and Hermann Muthesius (1861– and August Macke (1887–1914). The group is united, not by a subdue the fracas. After World War I, Schoenberg will 1927). Dedicated to combining the skills of art, craft, and single style or theme, but by a search for aesthetic forms develop the twelve-tone method; he and his followers, who industry, the Werkbund's membership includes architects, through which to convey spiritual ideals. comprise the Second Viennese School of composers, are industrialists, economists, artists, and craftsmen. Its initial • 1913 A concert of atonal musical works by Arnold Schoenberg deeply influenced by the Expressionist movement. goals are modest ornamentation and functionalism in all (1874–1951) and followers Alban Berg (1885–1935), and Anton • 1914 The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863– aspects of the decorative arts, but a rapidly expanding Webern (1883–1945), held in Vienna, so incenses the audience 1914) and his wife in Sarajevo sets off World War I. Austria- membership will lead to disputes over mass production and that fights break out and police are called in to subdue the Hungary attacks Serbia, and Germany invades Belgium. The standardization. In 1914, the Deutscher Werkbund fracas. After World War I, Schoenberg will develop the twelve- Germans defeat the Russians in the Battle of Tannenberg Ausstellung exhibition of modern decorative arts is held in tone method; he and his followers, who comprise the Second and the Russians defeat the Austrians at the Battle of Cologne. Viennese School of composers, are deeply influenced by the Lemberg. Also in 1914, the First Battle of the Marne is Expressionist movement. fought. Although German troops are prevented from entering Paris, the successful German retreat means that the war will be prolonged.

• 1916 The Dada movement begins in Zurich at the Cabaret • 1920s The Weimar Republic proves more hospitable to elements of • 1925 The Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) exhibition opens in Voltaire—a gathering place for artists, performers, and the old military-industrial regime than socialists and other Mannheim. The socially engaged movement is based on the intellectuals—and flourishes in France, Switzerland, and proponents of radical change. Artists respond with use of stark realism to convey the sense of disillusionment Germany until about 1920. Romanian-born poet Tristan Tzara increasingly harsh pictorial attacks on the "New Germany" engendered by the Great War and the failures of the Weimar (1896–1963) writes the founding manifesto. Appalled by the through prints, broadsides, and illustrated magazines. Berlin Republic. Among the artists associated with the movement destruction of World War I and the nationalist and materialist Dadaists George Grosz (1893–1959) and John Heartfield is Max Beckmann (1884–1950). values that produced it, Dadaists celebrate irrationality and (1891–1968), both members of the Communist party, • 1926 Germany is admitted to the League of Nations but anarchy in works of visual art and staged events. Austrian collaborate on various publications featuring bitter withdraws in 1933, the year in which Adolf Hitler (1889– artist Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971) and German artists Kurt caricatures of the "pillars of bourgeois society"—corrupt 1945) is declared chancellor, combining that position with Schwitters (1887–1948) and Hannah Höch (1889–1978) are capitalists, the military, and the clergy—for which they incur that of president in 1934 to become Führer ("Leader"). In among those associated with the movement. the wrath of authorities. Both artists are also early and 1938, Hitler declares himself war minister. • 1918 German artist Christian Schad (1894–1982) creates his first vociferous critics of the Nazis, who organize as a party in • 1926 The Bauhaus school building, designed by Walter Gropius "Schadograph," a cameraless photograph that reproduces the 1920. (1883–1969), is completed in Dessau, Germany. First negative image of textures placed on photosensitive paper. • 1920 The League of Nations is established in Paris, with established in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus relocates to • 1918–19 The November (German) Revolution is triggered by a mutiny Switzerland as one of the original members. Austria becomes Dessau in 1925, then to Berlin in 1932. It will be closed by of sailors in Kiel who set up Soviet-style workers' councils. a member later in the same year. the Nazis in 1933 because its progressive education The kaiser abdicates and the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) • 1920 Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922) devises program and modernist aesthetics are considered threats to heads the new government, fracturing left unity by allying the "inkblot" test. His book Psychodiagnostik is published in the regime. Among the teachers at the Bauhaus is painter with conservative forces. The rebellion spreads to major ports 1921 and quickly becomes a classic psychoanalytic text. Paul Klee (1879–1940), who joined in 1921 and teaches in a and cities, including Berlin, where the Spartacist Uprising is • 1920 Erwin Piscator (1893–1966) opens the Proletarian Theater in variety of fields, including bookbinding, painting, and led by socialists Rosa Luxemburg (1870–1919) and Karl Berlin. Pioneering the use of mechanized sets and films in his weaving, through 1931. Liebknecht (1871–1919), both of whom are assassinated by dramatic productions, Piscator envisions an agitational, • 1926 The film Metropolis by German director Fritz Lang (1890– government militia. The revolt is ultimately suppressed and propagandistic theater whose sociopolitical context 1976) premieres in Berlin. The popular futuristic film the Weimar Republic proclaimed. supersedes emotive content or aesthetics. imagines a world transformed by modern production • 1918 Allied with the November Revolution and its ideals, artists • 1920 German-born choreographer Mary Wigman (1886–1973), methods in which capitalists live comfortably on the surface and architects form the Novembergruppe (November Group) creator of Expressionist dance, opens a school in Dresden. of the Earth while workers toil in deprivation below ground. and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers' Council for Art) in Employing spontaneous movement, repetitive pattern, and • 1927 Berlin, Symphony of a City, a film directed by Walter Berlin. Their programs for state support of art and other often musicless choreography, Wigman's innovations will Ruttmann (1887–1941), premieres. The film documents one projects are later taken up at the Weimar Bauhaus, founded in influence European and American modern dance for decades. day in the life of contemporary Berlin and uses a variety of 1919 by Walter Gropius (1883–1969). The educational program • 1921 German astronomer Max Wolf (1863–1932) shows the true effects to capture the excitement, speed, and vibrancy of is based on the integration of the arts and crafts and aims at structure of the Milky Way for the first time. the German capital. nothing less than a revolution in German culture, from • 1922 Naum Gabo (1890–1977) brings Constructivism from his • 1927 The Weissenhofsiedlung model housing exhibit, directed by bourgeois parochialism to a socially transformative art. native Russia to Germany, where he lives until 1932. architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), opens in • 1918–34 "Red Vienna," the stronghold of the Social Democratic Party • 1923 Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) makes his first attempt to seize Stuttgart. In 1929, Mies exhibits his "Barcelona" chair in the in Austria, becomes an internationally acclaimed model of power, in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. During a brief German Pavilion (also of his design) at the Barcelona socialist municipal government. Embarking on a radical imprisonment for treason, he writes Mein Kampf. The value of International Exposition. The building is composed of program of democratization and redistribution, the the German mark drops dramatically and the ensuing abstract planes that intersect under its flat roof. Despite its administration focuses on the provision of housing equipped economic instability contributes to the popularity of the Nazi manifest modernism, the structure employs materials, such with modern amenities, green space, and community party, which Hitler reorganizes in 1925. as travertine marble, associated with traditional infrastructure such as libraries and kindergartens. The • 1924 German artist Otto Dix (1891–1969) records the horrors of monumental public buildings. In 1937, Mies leaves Germany program's aspirations are exemplified by the Heiligenstadt trench warfare in a book of etchings called The War. Like for Chicago, where he heads the Architecture Department at Houses (Karl Marx Hof, 1927–30), designed by Karl Ehn fellow veteran George Grosz, Dix devotes his art to stinging the Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois (1884–1957), a student of Otto Wagner. social commentary, focusing on the social negation of Institute of Technology) from 1938 to 1958. • 1919 German architect and urban planner Bruno Taut (1880–1938), disabled ex-soldiers in paintings such as War Cripples (1920). • 1927 Equating modernism with degeneracy, and degeneracy with a member of the Novembergruppe, publishes his utopian When The Trench (1923), a depiction of decomposed corpses, Jews and Bolsheviks, Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg drawings, Alpine Architecture, in which he reinvents is shown at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, public (1893–1946) founds the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur architecture in response to the devastation of World War I and outcry forces the museum's director to resign. (Militant League for German Culture) to purge the arts of demonstrates his Expressionist approach to design. Taut's • 1925 Austrian-born industrial and graphic designer Herbert Bayer "corrupt" elements. ability to use modern materials to achieve Expressionistic (1900–1985) becomes director of printing and advertising at • 1928 Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) writes The Threepenny Opera effects is also apparent in his Glass Pavilion at the 1914 the Bauhaus. In 1938, Bayer will emigrate to the United with composer Kurt Weill (1900–1950), in which he employs Werkbund Exhibition. States, where he will exercise a profound influence on "alienating effects" intended to destroy theatrical illusion • 1919 The German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is graphic and industrial art. and maintain the audience's critical detachment. The play is directed by Robert Wiene (1880–1938). The unnerving effect of the greatest theatrical "hit" of 1920s Berlin. With the rise to the film is a consequence of its multilayered plot and its sets, power of the Nazi party, Brecht will become a prominent which convey the feeling of a distorted medieval village. member of the antifascist movement.

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• 1928 The Kellogg-Briand Pact declaring an end to war is signed • 1934 In Austria, a clerical-fascist dictatorship is established in a In 1943, the German military surrender at Stalingrad and in by sixty-five countries, including Germany. Although the coup d'état orchestrated by Chancellor Engelberg Dollfuss. Tunisia; Italy declares war on Germany. In 1944, Paris and pact does not prevent World War II, it does establish the Parliament is dismissed and all political parties are banned Rome are liberated from German occupation and German legal concept of crimes committed against peace, for which except for the Fatherland Front. forces retreat from Russia. In 1945, World War II ends with a number of defendants in the Nuremberg Trials (1945–46) • 1934 The Volkswagen Beetle is introduced in Germany. Over the German surrender and the suicide of Adolf Hitler. Germany are convicted. next seven decades, 21 million of the economical "people's is divided into four zones of Allied military occupation: • 1928 CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) is car" will be produced. In the 1960s, the Beetle becomes the French, British, American, and Soviet. founded at the Château de La Sarraz in Switzerland by vehicle of choice for counterculture members. • 1941–46 Sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), earlier associated twenty-eight European architects organized by Le Corbusier • 1935 German director Leni Riefenstahl's (1902–2003) film Triumph with the Cubist and Surrealist movements in Paris, returns (1887–1965) and historian Siegfried Giedion (1888–1968) to of the Will premieres, a glorification of Hitler and his regime. to his native Switzerland for the duration of the war. formalize the principles of modern architecture and promote The next year, her film of the Olympics in Berlin, titled • 1942 Switzerland closes its borders to Jewish refugees. During functionalist design in urban planning. CIAM's ideas are Olympia, is a paean to "Aryan superiority." Riefenstahl's the war, Swiss neutrality ensures that its important financial widely adopted by city planners in the rebuilding of Europe willingness to propagandize for the Nazis makes her a institutions will continue to function and to be used by both following World War II. controversial figure after World War II. sides of the conflict. • 1929 The Deutscher Werkbund organizes the groundbreaking • 1936 German Marxist social and cultural critic Walter Benjamin • 1946 The Art Club is founded in Vienna by a group of modern Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, an international (1892–1940) writes the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of painters–some of whom had been in exile during the war— showcase for avant-garde photography and film. Its Technological Reproducibility" (also commonly translated as a space for recovering and rediscovering European • 1929 Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) publishes All Quiet on as "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"). avant-garde art. The club becomes the center of progressive the Western Front, a book later banned and burned by the In this influential essay, Benjamin theorizes the loss of the tendencies in Austrian culture for the next decade. Nazis. In the late 1930s, Remarque flees Germany for aura of the original artwork in the age of photography and • 1948–49 The Soviet Union stops road and rail traffic between Berlin Switzerland, then the U.S. film. In 1940, he commits suicide at the French-Spanish and the West. In a key event in the Cold War, Western • 1930 A period of worldwide economic depression and border while fleeing the Nazis. powers begin the Berlin Airlift of necessary supplies to the unemployment begins. In 1931, the Austrian bank • 1937 The National Socialist (Nazi) government organizes the city, which is surrounded by the Soviet zone of Germany. Creditanstalt crashes, causing a financial panic in Austria exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), which includes • 1949 Germany is partitioned. The Federal Republic of Germany and Germany. the work of many modernist artists. Opening in Munich, the (West Germany), comprised of the sectors occupied by • 1930 German artist John Heartfield (1891–1968) begins an eight- exhibition is attended by literally millions of visitors in its France, Britain, and the U.S., is proclaimed in May. The year association with the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung dozen German and Austrian venues. The show includes only remaining Soviet zone becomes the German Democratic (Workers' Illustrated Newspaper, or AIZ), for which he a fraction of the 16,000 artworks confiscated from German Republic (East Germany) in October. Berlin is similarly creates dozens of photomontages, often ruthless satires of museums by order of Minister of Propaganda Joseph divided between East and West, although it is a detached Hitler and the Nazis. Many of these photomontages—a Goebbels (1897–1945); thousands of these works are burned, enclave 110 miles from West Germany. technique in which Heartfield has become a master—will be the rest auctioned off. Among the artists deemed • 1949 The Fourth Geneva Convention revises and ratifies featured in his solo exhibition One Man's War Against "degenerate" are the Expressionists Kirchner, Marc, standards established by earlier Geneva Conventions (1864, Hitler, mounted in 1940 at the Arcade Gallery in London. Kokoschka, and Nolde, as well as Beckmann, Klee, Chagall, 1906, 1929) relative to the treatment of battlefield wounded, • 1930 The German production of The Blue Angel, directed by Dix, Grosz, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Kandinsky. Other cultural prisoners of war, civilians in wartime, and other related Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) and starring Marlene forms are subjected to the same rites of "purification." For matters. Dietrich (1901–1992), is released. The film, in which Dietrich instance, a Degenerate Music exhibit is mounted in 1938 to • 1949 After wartime exile in the United States, Bertolt Brecht plays Lola, a cabaret singer, and famously performs the educate the listening public on the dangers of atonalism and (1898–1956) settles in East Berlin, where he is given a song "Falling in Love Again" which will become her jazz. theater in which to perform his works. Many other artists trademark, makes the star's career. • 1937 Germans participate in the bombing of the Basque town of and intellectuals who had fled the Nazis return to East • 1933 The Nobel Prize for physics is awarded to the Swiss-English Guernica by fascist forces, an event memorialized the same Germany, attracted by its antifascist stance and the Paul Dirac (1902–1984) and the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger year in a large-scale painting (Guernica) by Spanish artist possibility of realizing their socialist ideals. Within a few (1887–1961) for the discovery of new forms of atomic Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). In 1999, the German government years, the migration will be reversed, from East to West. energy. officially apologizes to the citizens of Guernica for its part in • 1951 East Germany's governing Socialist Unity Party (SED) • 1933–45 Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) becomes chancellor of Germany the bombing. launches a campaign against formalism and "decadence" in and creates a one-party state under the National Socialist • 1938–45 Austria is annexed by Germany. In 1939, World War II starts art, literature, and architecture. The Ministry of Culture (Nazi) regime. The doctrine of an Aryan "master race," when German troops invade Poland, and France and Britain prescribes Socialist Realism as the only appropriate form of central to Nazi ideology, is translated into concrete policies declare war on Germany. Hitler (1889–1945) and Mussolini aesthetic expression. Artists enjoy a privileged status in the designed to exterminate German Jews. In March 1933, the (1883–1945) sign a ten-year "Pact of Steel." The same year, GDR, including freedom to travel from East to West, as long first concentration camp opens at Dachau. In 1935, the the Hitler-Stalin Pact of nonaggression between Germany and as they follow the government policy of glorifying socialism Nuremberg Laws deprive German Jews of citizenship. the Soviet Union is signed. In 1940, Germany invades and proletarian struggle; otherwise, they risk censorship, Before the end of World War II, some six million Jews in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. forced immigration, or imprisonment. Within these Nazi-occupied Europe will be deported and murdered in a Germany invades Russia in 1941 and Germany and Italy constraints, several painters of the Leipzig School create a systematic program of genocide. Gypsies, homosexuals, declare war on the U.S. In 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, distinctive body of work in the Socialist Realist mode, communists, the mentally ill, and other groups will also be established by the Germans after the invasion of Poland in including Werner Tübke (born 1929), Bernhard Heisig (born targeted. 1939, rise up against their Nazi captors. 1925), and Wolfgang Mattheuer (born 1927).

• 1953 Ludwig Wittgenstein's (1889–1951) Philosophical • 1961–62 The Fluxus Internationale Festspiele, held in Wiesbaden, • 1970 German painter Anselm Kiefer (born 1945) produces a Investigations is published posthumously. Wittgenstein is Germany, marks the official launch of the Fluxus movement, watercolor entitled Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome influential in using linguistics to resolve philosophical organized by American artist George Maciunas (1931–1978). of Heaven (1995.14.4), in which he depicts himself enacting issues. Fluxus continues into the 1970s, based primarily in Germany a parody of the "Heil Hitler" salute. An early work by Kiefer, • 1953 A workers' uprising against increased production quotas but having adherents throughout Europe and North America. it illustrates his ongoing concern to come to grips with the results in work stoppages throughout East Germany. The Closely related to the Dada movement, Fluxus artists aim for Nazi legacy, an objective shared with other painters workers demand the government's resignation. The a "total art" that transgresses traditional aesthetic associated with Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Abstraction in rebellion is suppressed by Soviet military forces and boundaries, combining visual art, music, poetry, and Germany in the 1970s and '80s, among them Georg Baselitz hundreds of workers are wounded or killed. electronic media into staged events or "happenings." (born 1938) and Markus Lüpertz (born 1941). • 1955 West Germany joins NATO and participates in the Participants in Germany include video artist Nam June Paik • 1971 In most Swiss cantons, women are granted the right to hold establishment of the European Union along with Italy and (born 1932) and Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). In the 1970s, federal office and vote in national elections, but are still France. This increasing coordination among the Western Beuys presents performance works concerning national barred from voting in many local elections. powers is balanced by the Soviet-aligned Warsaw Pact with history and personal biography. • 1973 Renowned East German writer Stefan Heym (1913–2001) East Germany as one of its original members. • 1963 Gerhard Richter (born 1932), Sigmar Polke (born 1941), and publishes The King David Report, a novelistic exploration of • 1955 The first documenta exhibition of contemporary art is held Konrad Lueg (1939–1996) respond to American Pop with the the intellectual's role in a socialist society. Heym's in Kassel, Germany. formation of the group Capitalist Realism in Düsseldorf. Lueg uncompromising pro-socialist but anti-Stalinist journalism • 1955 The State Treaty of Austria declares the country and Richter (who, like Polke, immigrated from East Germany) and literary works land him in constant trouble with "permanently neutral." organize their first event, Life with Pop: A Demonstration for authorities. • 1957 Germany is among the signers of the "Rome Treaty," which Capitalist Realism, in a department store, inviting friends to • 1974 The West German avant-garde group Kraftwerk, the first launches the European Economic Community (the EEC or view the artists sitting on furniture from the store's inventory electronic band, release the classic album Autobahn. Common Market; later renamed the European Community displayed as works of art. Kraftwerk (German for "power plant"), whose wholly [EC]). The other signers are France, Italy, Belgium, the • 1963 The Berlin Philharmonic Hall is completed by Hans Scharoun synthetic sound influences American New Wave, develop Netherlands, and Luxembourg. (1893–1972), who has long been affiliated with the techniques and equipment that become standard in • 1957 The Zero group is founded in Düsseldorf by Otto Piene Expressionist movement. This first major work by the contemporary music. (born 1928) and Heinz Mack (born 1931) to explore the architect leads to commissions in the last decade of his life. • 1975 West German photographers Bernd (born 1931) and Hilla possibilities of light-based art. • 1965–66 During a liberalization in cultural policy, the East German (born 1934) Becher publish Anonyme Skulpturen • 1958–59 The Wiener Gruppe (Viennese Group), a collective of film company DEFA produces a number of films critical of (Anonymous Sculptures). The Bechers' black-and-white experimental poets interested in transforming the written contemporary socialist life, including I Am a Rabbit by Kurt photodocumentation of—often derelict—industrial word into action and music, stage their Literary Cabarets in Maetzig (born 1911) and Traces of Stone by Frank Beyer (born architecture such as water towers, coal silos, blast Vienna. A precursor to the happenings of the 1960s, these 1932). Although both films are banned in a subsequent furnaces, grain elevators, and oil refineries, taken "total theater" events include performances of "sound crackdown, they are ultimately voted among the top 100 throughout Europe and North America, is allied to the poetry," sketches, and songs, and attract huge crowds. German films of all time by an international jury. practice of a number of American landscape photographers • 1959 The Bitterfeld Conference formulates appropriate artistic • 1968 Construction is completed on the Neue Nationalgalerie, who, eschewing traditional notions of untainted beauty, subject matter and the obligations of artists in East Berlin, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). record the impact of industrial culture on the land. This Germany. Artists/writers and workers should "exchange The minimalist sensibility of Mies' building stands in sharp practice is labeled the "New Topographics" in a seminal their tools," so that the former can better understand and contrast to the other structures in the Kulturforum complex, 1975 exhibition held at the International Museum of depict the life of the proletariat. all designed in an expressionist mode by Hans Scharoun Photography in Rochester, New York. • 1959 West German writer Günter Grass (born 1927) publishes the (1893–1972). • 1976 Popular singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann (born 1936) is novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), a picaresque • 1969 When Attitudes Become Form, a landmark exhibition of stripped of East German citizenship and expelled from the account of one man's journey through the nightmare of Nazi Conceptual Art, opens at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. country for his vocal advocacy of democratization. The Germany and the country's postwar "economic miracle.“ The show provokes a national scandal and curator Harald event, ending a period of relative optimism among cultural • 1960 Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) is among the Szeemann (born 1933) is forced to resign. workers in the GDR, sets off a flurry of protests, prompting signers of a "Constitutive Declaration of the New Realism." • late 1960s–'70s Various manifestations of Conceptual Art flourish in a government crackdown on more than a hundred dissident The movement supports work that embraces realism East Germany, particularly Mail Art, in which official writers. through assemblages of found objects. One outgrowth of exhibition venues (and censors) are bypassed in favor of • 1978 Austrian architect Hans Hollein (born 1934) completes the Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) is kinetic sculpture, by distributing work via the postal system in the form of Tourist Office in Vienna. This is followed by other projects artists such as Tinguely, and it is the subject of exhibitions illustrated letters, postcards, zines, and stamps. Among the in Austria and Germany, and Hollein's receipt of the Pritzker throughout Europe. practitioners are Robert Rehfeldt (1931–1993), who Architecture Prize in 1985. • 1961 The construction of the Berlin Wall divides the city into establishes an archive of Conceptual Art in East Berlin, and • 1978 The Marriage of Maria Braun, the first film in German Communist East Berlin and Democratic West Berlin. The Joseph W. Huber (1951–2001), whose project Nature Is Life— director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's (1945–1982) postwar wall stands for nearly thirty years. Save It (1977) consists of mailing sunflower seeds to artists trilogy, premieres. Fassbinder is associated with the New all over the world for planting. German Cinema.

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• late 1970s The German Green Party (Die Grühnen) is founded by • 1999 American architect Peter Eisenman (born 1932) wins the environmentalists and peace activists, including Petra Kelly competition for the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. The (1947–1992) and artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). In 1983, memorial consists primarily of thousands of concrete the Greens win twenty-eight seats in the federal parliament, columns. The project illustrates the ongoing German need the first European Green Party to gain a strong presence in to deal historically and psychologically with the Holocaust. national government. • 2000 The extreme right Austrian Freedom Party, led by Jörg • 1981 Swiss architect Mario Botta (born 1943) designs the Casa Haider (born 1950), enters government in a ruling coalition Rotonda in Stabio, Switzerland, in his trademark stark, with the conservative People's Party. Alarmed by the rise of geometric style: a concrete drum punctuated with openings fascist elements, the European Union imposes diplomatic to admit light into the interior. Among Botta's international sanctions on the country, but these are lifted seven months projects is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, later. completed in 1994. • 1983 The Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, by British architect James Stirling (1926–1992), is completed. It is an important monument of postmodern architecture. • 1987 Wim Wenders' (born 1945) film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) is released. The film captures life in West Berlin immediately prior to unification of the city and the two Germanys. • 1989 The Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapse. This event is followed in 1990 by the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany. Unified Germany then becomes a member of NATO. • 1990 London-based, Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid (born 1950) completes the Music Video Pavilion in Gröningen, Germany. Her Vitra Fire Station is built in Weil am Rhein, Germany, from 1991 to 1993, and her Exhibition Hall in the same city is completed in 1999. Hadid's reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of Deconstruction in architecture is based as much on her drawings as on her executed buildings. • 1992 The Maastricht Treaty, creating the European Union, is signed. Among the signatories is Germany. Austria enters the European Union in 1995. • 1995 Christo and Jeanne-Claude (both born 1935) wrap the Reichstag in Berlin. It is the culmination of a planning effort that began in 1971. The building is wrapped with 100,000 square meters of polypropylene fabric with an aluminum finish. • 1997 Hans Haacke (born 1936), known for socially critical installation art, exhibits at documenta X in Kassel his Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real- Time System, as of May 1, 1971, a work that prompted the cancellation of his 1971 solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. • 1999 Austria and Germany are among the European nations that adopt the Euro as a unit of currency for electronic transactions. • 1999 In Switzerland, the right-wing People's Party receives one- quarter of the total vote in national elections, becoming the second strongest political force in the country. • 1999 The Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind (born 1946), is completed. The metal-clad, zigzag- form building demonstrates Libeskind's association with Deconstructivist architecture.

This painting explores the relationship between women and machines, with imagery drawn from POPART advertising and pin-up magazines of the time. Hamilton said ‘This relationship of woman and appliances is a fundamental theme of our culture; as obsessive and archetypal as the Western movie gun duel’. The background of the painting is an open fridge. The woman, partly derived from an image in Esquire magazine, is a composite, suggested by one eye, breasts, shoulder and domestic apron. In the foreground is a hybrid toaster/vacuum-cleaner. As you move, the eye winks.

International movement in painting, sculpture and printmaking. The term originated in the mid-1950s at the ICA, London, in the discussions held by the Independent group concerning the artefacts of popular culture. This small group included the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi as well as architects and critics. Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990), the critic who first used the term in print in 1958, conceived of Pop art as the lower end of a popular-art to fine-art continuum, encompassing such forms as advertising, science-fiction illustration and automobile styling. Hamilton defined Pop in 1957 as: ‘Popular (designed for a mass audience); Transient (short term solution); Expendable (easily forgotten); Low Cost; Mass Produced; Young (aimed at Youth); Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; and Big Business’. Hamilton set out, in paintings such as £he (1958–61; London, Tate), to explore the hidden connotations of imagery taken directly from advertising and popular culture, making reference in the same work to pin-ups and domestic appliances as a means of commenting on the covert eroticism of much advertising presentation . $he 1958-61 Richard Hamiton Oil, cellulose paint and collage on wood support: 1219 x 813 mm frame: 1330 x 944 x 98 mm

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Postwar Context Pop Art: Inspired by the Everyday • In the years following World War II, America enjoyed an • It was in this climate of turbulence, experimentation, and increased consumerism that unprecedented period of economic and political growth. a new generation of artists emerged in Britain and America in the mid- to late-1950s. • Many middle class Americans These artists began to look for inspiration and materials in their immediate moved to the suburbs, environment. They made art that mirrored, critiqued, and, at times, incorporated spurred by the availability of inexpensive, mass- everyday items, consumer goods, and mass media messaging and imagery. In produced homes. reference to its intended popular appeal and its engagement with popular culture, it • A new kind of music, rock and was called Pop art. roll, burst into popular culture and became the soundtrack of teenage • Pop artists strove for straightforwardness in their work, using bold swaths of primary rebellion. colors, often straight from the can or tube of paint. They adopted commercial • Marilyn Monroe was a advertising methods like silk-screening, or produced multiples, downplaying the reigning film star, and television replaced radio as artist’s hand and subverting the idea of originality and preciousness—in marked the dominant media outlet. contrast to the highly expressive, large-scale abstract paintings of the Abstract • But by the late 1950s and Expressionists, whose work had dominated postwar American art. Pop artists early 1960s, a cultural revolution was favored realism, everyday (even mundane) imagery, and heavy doses of irony and underway, led by activists, wit. thinkers, and artists who sought to change, and even • But many Pop artists, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, were very aware overturn, what was, in their eyes, a stifling social order of the past. They sought to connect the traditions of fine art with the mass culture of ruled by conformity. television, advertising, film, and cartoons. At the same time, they challenged • The Vietnam War incited mass traditional boundaries between mediums and techniques, merging painting with protests, the Civil Rights Movement sought equality for photography and printmaking, combining handmade and readymade or mass- African Americans, and the produced elements, and bringing together objects, images, and sometimes text to women’s liberation movement make new meaning. gained momentum.

As an active member of London's progressive Independent Group in the early 1950s, he first studied the impact of popular culture on art and created collages incorporating advertisements from mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, a technique that served as the basis for Interior. Through a complex layering of painting and photographic techniques, he continues to examine issues of illusion and the processes of image- making. Always eager to embrace new technologies, Hamilton Interior, 1964 (published 1965). has experimented with Richard Hamilton (British, born 1922) computer-generated Screenprint, Composition: (49.1 x 63.8cm) Sheet: (56 x 69.7cm). imagery since the 1980s. Richard Hamilton became the seminal figure in the formation of England's Pop idiom through his analytical investigations of the media's influence on our perception of reality.

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My Marilyn, 1965 (published 1966). Richard Hamilton (British, born 1922) Screenprint, Composition: (51.5 x 63.3cm) Sheet: (68 x 84.2cm).

Hamilton was integral in revolutionizing the screenprint medium as a tool for artistic

invention in the 1960s. New York:The Museumof ModernArt,2004, p. 174 For My Marilyn he appropriated publicity stills of Marilyn Monroe published in a British magazine after her suicide. Respecting Monroe's own hand- drawn Xs, Hamilton vowed not to make any marks of his own, choosing instead to ArtistsandPrints: Masterworks fromTheMuseum Modernof Art, create painterly effects by

Hamilton typically scrutinizes a motif through a variety of mediums, reiterating enlarging, masking, DeborahWye, , in and reinterpreting from collage to painting to print, frequently combining screening, and

techniques. He was an experimental and prolific printmaker. overprinting. Wendy Weitman

Eduardo Paolozzi was a latter-day Surrealist. His metamorphosis into a true Pop artist came about only in 1962 in brightly painted, robot-like aluminium sculptures such as City of the Circle and the Square (1963; London, Tate) and in his portfolio of screen prints of 1965, As Is When.

As Is When , 1965.

This is Eduardo Paolozzi's As Is When (Wittgenstein Suite): Wittgenstein in New York (1965). Paolozzi's image of the American flag appears as part of a cacophonous cityscape in which image and object, inside and outside, public and private merge and interpenetrate. The flag itself is composed of proto-digital pixel-like forms. Tossed into play within a topsy turvy meaning game, the flag in Paolozzi's screen-print takes on an ethereal, virtual presence, waving stiffly over a bizarre, flattened world.

The City of the Circle and the Square 1963 and 1966

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In the mid-1950s in America, independently of the activities in England, the terms for certain aspects of Pop art were established by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The irony and anti-art gestures of their work initially attracted the term ‘neo-Dada’. Johns took as his imagery ‘things the mind already knows’, such as the American flag, maps, targets , arabic numerals and the alphabet. By changing the format, colour and medium, he demonstrated the formal and philosophical possibilities of an austere and direct presentation of blandly familiar images.

“One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag,” Johns has said of this work, “and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.” Those materials included three canvases that he mounted on plywood, strips of newspaper, and encaustic paint—a mixture of pigment and molten wax that has formed a surface of lumps and smears. The newspaper scraps visible beneath the stripes and forty-eight stars lend this icon historical specificity. The American flag is something “the mind already knows,” Johns has said, but its execution complicates the representation and invites close inspection. A critic of the time encapsulated this painting’s ambivalence, asking, “Is this a flag Jasper Johns (American, born 1930) or a painting?” Flag, 1954-55 (dated on reverse 1954) Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels 42 1/4 x 60 5/8" (107.3 x 153.8 cm)

In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, a number of painters developed strategies that both extended the life of painting while simultaneously pointing to its inevitable demise. Jasper Johns's flags and targets were epistemological cul-de-sacs—the image they portrayed could not be separated from their White Flag, 1955 material qualities, literally, as flag or Jasper Johns (American, born 1930) Encaustic, oil, newsprint, and charcoal on canvas target. Like his colleague Robert (198.9 x 306.7 cm) Rauschenberg, Johns revived concerns of the prewar avant-garde in a postwar White Flag is the largest of Johns's flag paintings and the first in which the flag context, but in a more conceptually is presented in monochrome. The lush reticence of the work perfectly exemplifies his early style. The fast-setting medium of encaustic enabled the provocative manner in his fusion of two artist to make each brushstroke distinct, while the forty-eight-star flag design— previously antithetical paradigms, that of contiguous with the perimeters of the canvas—provided a structure for the Duchamp's readymade with notions of richly varied surface, which ranges from translucent to opaque. White Flag is abstraction and the grid from Malevich painted on three separately stretched panels of cotton: the star area, the and Constructivism. seven upper stripes to the right of the stars, and the longer stripes below. Johns worked on each panel separately. After applying a ground of unbleached beeswax, he built up the stars, the negative areas around them, and the stripes with applications of collage: cut or torn pieces of newsprint, other papers, and bits of fabric. He dipped these into molten beeswax and adhered them to the surface. He then joined the three panels and overpainted them with more beeswax mixed with pigments, adding touches of white oil.

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Monogram, 1955-59 Freestanding combine Oil, printed paper, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber heel and tennis ball on canvas, with oil on angora goat and tyre on wooden base mounted on four casters, 106.6 x 160.6 x 163.8 cm

Rauschenberg’s self-styled ‘combines’ such as Monogram (1955–9; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.) were roughly made paintings and sculptures that incorporated photographs, newspapers and disparate objects collected in the street. Like Johns, Rauschenberg applied techniques from Abstract Expressionist painting to recognizable imagery and inspired many artists to dwell on subject-matter drawn from their immediate urban environment.

Monogram is one of the most famous Combines, which Rauschenberg reworked several times before achieving the final version. It is an incongruous association, on a sort of abstract painting placed horizontally, of an angora goat with a paint-daubed snout and a car tire around its middle, and various collages ranging from a tennis ball to printed papers. This work bears no resemblance to the unique assemblages of the surrealists, illustrating Lautréamont’s famous expression: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table” and evoking subconscious associations. The combination of objects, images and lines of paint does not seek perceptive unity – despite the odd visual interlacing of the goat and the tire – but division. The goat, despite the tire it wears around its middle, remains implacably a goat and the tire a tire. The meaning of the assemblage is attained in this. If the tire is a reference to the artist’s childhood living close to a tire factory, its association with the goat raises questions. The title Monogram renders this montage even more enigmatic: Monogram, or the interlacing of several letters to form a single character, composed here of the entanglement of the goat and the tire. Thus the letter O passes around the animal to make a knot as a rebellion against meaning and all ideas of beauty. The Ready-made (tire) and stuffed animal coexist in this work that, in keeping with the artist’s wishes, leaves as much place for the viewer as for the artist.

Appropriation is the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of existing images and objects. A strategy that has been used by artists for millennia, it took on new significance in the mid-20th century with the rise of consumerism and the proliferation of images through mass media outlets from magazines to television.

Pop artists reveled in reproducing, juxtaposing, and repeating everyday images from popular culture in their wide-ranging work. In doing so, they both mirrored and critiqued the ideas, desires, and cultural trends of their time. As Andy Warhol stated, “Pop artists did images that anyone walking down When Warhol first exhibited these thirty–two canvases in 1962, each one the street would recognize in a split second—comics, picnic simultaneously hung from the wall like a painting and rested on a shelf like tables, men’s pants, celebrities, groceries in a store. The number of canvases corresponds to the varieties of soup refrigerators, Coke bottles.” then sold by the Campbell Soup Company. Warhol assigned a different flavor to Today, appropriating, sampling, and remixing elements of popular each painting, referring to a product list supplied by Campbell's. There is no culture is common practice for evidence that Warhol envisioned the canvases in a particular sequence. Here, artists working in many they are arranged in rows that reflect the chronological order in which they were different mediums, but such strategies continue to challenge introduced, beginning with "Tomato" in the upper left, which debuted in 1897. notions of originality and authorship, and to push the boundaries of what it means to be an artist.

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"I don't think art should be only for the select few," Warhol believed, "I think it should be for the mass of the American people." Like other Pop artists, Warhol used images of already proven appeal to huge audiences: comic strips, ads, photographs of rock-music and movie stars, tabloid news shots. In Campbell's Soup Cans he reproduced an object of mass consumption in the most literal sense. When he first exhibited these canvases—there are thirty-two of them, the number of soup varieties Campbell's then sold—each one simultaneously hung from the wall, like a painting, and stood on a shelf, like groceries in a store. Repeating the same image at the same scale, the canvases stress the uniformity and ubiquity of the Campbell's can. At the same time, they subvert the idea of painting as a medium of invention and originality. Visual repetition of this kind had long been used by advertisers to drum product names into the public consciousness; here, though, it implies not energetic competition but a complacent abundance. Outside an art gallery, the Campbell's label, which had not changed in over fifty years, was not an attention-grabber but a banality. As Warhol said of Campbell's soup, "I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.“

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962. published 1999, p. 260 Synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, Each canvas (50.8 x 40.6 cm).

Marilyn Monroe was a legend when she committed suicide in August of 1962, but in retrospect her life seems a gradual martyrdom to the media and to her public. After her death, Warhol based many works on the same photograph of her, a publicity still for the 1953 movie Niagara. He would paint the canvas with a single color—turquoise, green, blue, lemon yellow—then silkscreen Monroe's face on top, sometimes alone, sometimes doubled, sometimes multiplied in a grid. As the surround for a face, the golden field in Gold Marilyn Monroe (the only one of Warhol's Marilyns to use this color) recalls the religious icons of Christian art history—a resonance, however, that the work suffuses with a morbid allure. In reduplicating this photograph of a heroine shared by millions, Warhol denied the sense of the uniqueness of the artist's personality that had been implicit in the gestural painting of the 1950s. He also used a commercial technique— silkscreening—that gives the picture a crisp, artificial look; even as Warhol canonizes Monroe, he reveals her public image as a carefully structured illusion. Redolent of 1950s glamour, the face in Gold Marilyn Monroe is much like the star herself—high gloss, yet transient; bold, yet vulnerable; compelling, yet elusive. Surrounded by a void, it Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962. is like the fadeout at the end of a movie. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, (211.4 x 144.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 241

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Printmaking, and in particular screenprint, was the basic medium for Andy Warhol's celebrated work on canvas and paper. While a prize-winning commercial artist in the 1950s, he devised a printing process of blotting outline drawings in ink from one surface to another. In a whimsical book of fashionable shoe styles, done at the time he was head of advertising at a shoe company, his blotted drawings were reproduced and then hand-colored by a team of friends. Although Warhol adopted a bland, detached persona, he was an extremely energetic artist and self-promoter who played a significant role in redirecting the course of art. Rather than deriving his work from subjective personal feelings or idealist visions for abstraction, Warhol embraced popular culture and commercial processes. He eventually set up his own print-publishing company called Factory Additions, issuing portfolios of his signature themes. For Marilyn, he created ten highly variable portraits, exploiting the possibilities in screenprinting for shifting Untitled from Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn) 1967. One from a portfolio of ten screenprints, colors and off-register effects. By celebrating the composition and sheet: seemingly impervious veneer of glamour and fame, (91.5 x 91.5 cm). but acknowledging its darker inner complexity, these prints reveal Warhol's subtle grasp of American culture.

Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 162

The growing popularity of television in American homes in the late 1950s and early 1960s fed a culture of celebrity-worship across the United States. Now able to view their favorite actors, musicians, athletes, and politicians from the comfort of their living rooms, the public became captivated by people who represented the American dream of money, glamour, and success.

Pop artists seized on the culture of celebrity worship, portraying cultural icons and political figures from a range of media. They embraced, and at times slyly critiqued, this media-saturated culture, employing the faces of Hollywood actors, musicians, notorious criminals, politicians—and the tabloid stories surrounding them—as sources of imagery and reflections of the changing culture.

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Untitled from Camouflage, 1987. Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) One from a portfolio of eight screenprints, Composition & sheet: (96.5 x 96.5 cm).

Warhol did not participate in the collaborative printshop system established in America in the 1960s, but his work contributed decisively to what has been characterized as a "print boom" at that time. Through the course of his career, he made nearly eight hundred printed images on paper, about half published in traditional editions. He was also a surprisingly experimental printmaker, issuing hundreds of trial proofs and unique variants. The compositions that make up Camouflage, his last portfolio, constitute a playful commentary on abstraction. Through manipulation of scale and color from sheet to sheet, Warhol alters the visual impact of the military fabric used for concealment.

In examples on canvas, he also superimposes his face, linking self- portraiture with disguise. For Andy Warhol, the most influential of the Pop artists, the direct application of pigment to canvas was outmoded and limiting. Early in his career, he began to utilize the silkscreen process to transfer photographed images to canvas. Warhol used this process throughout the 1960s to reproduce multiple portraits of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Jacqueline Kennedy. At the same time, he duplicated images of mass-produced commercial products, such as Campbell's soup cans and Brillo boxes, suggesting that the media marketed celebrities just like products.

Self-Portrait, 1966. Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on nine canvases, Each canvas (57.2 x 57.2 cm), overall (171.7 x 171.7 cm).

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Mao, 1973 Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 448.3 x 346.7 cm

Mao is one of a series of silkscreened portraits of the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (1893- 1976) that Warhol produced in 1973. Nearly 15 feet tall, this towering image mirrors representations that were displayed throughout China during and after the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Warhol was undoubtedly drawn to this subject because of the media’s attention to the opening of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in the early 1970s. His irreverent attitude toward China’s totalitarian propaganda is apparent on the surface of the painting. Flamboyant brushstrokes compete with the photographic image, forming color splashes on Mao’s clothing. Red rouge and blue eye shadow resemble graffiti. These details can be interpreted as commentary on the resemblance of Communist propaganda to capitalist advertising media. Originally a British movement of the late 1950s, Pop Art interpreted images from consumer culture with black humor, irony, and criticism. In its American form, Pop Art presented less harsh images, adapting sources such as comic strips, commercial products, and publicity photos. This deliberate departure from the gestural style of Abstract Expressionism shocked the art world in the early 1960s.

Hammer and Sickle, 1976. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, (304.8 x 406.4 cm). In the 1970's Andy Warhol, past the Pop phase of his career, painted this enormous painting of a hammer and sickle by going down to the hardware store and getting an actual hammer and an actual sickle, photographing them and making a silkscreen from it. But it's an interesting painting on several levels. Instead of painting an American flag, which would in principle be a symbol of unity or cohesiveness for his audience as Jasper Johns had done, Warhol paints in the middle of the Cold War the flag of the enemy or the symbol of the enemy, which would be about divisiveness and which would raise hackles. But it's particularly interesting that he paints it on this scale and in this way because this huge painting with its very bold graphic power and the vivid contrast of red and black and the tremendous energy with which it's painted almost makes one think of Abstract Expressionism—the great American painting of the 1950s. Not only was Pop Art supposed to have killed off Abstract Expressionism but also in the 1970s critics were just beginning to realize that Abstract Expressionism, with its rhetoric of individual freedom and gestural spontaneity, had been touted as the pure form of freedom by American propagandists fighting the Cold War battle for minds, in contrast to the socialist realism of the Soviet Union. So by taking a Soviet symbol and painting it in what seems at first to be a Pop fashion, but then turns out to have the power and reach of Abstract Expressionism, Warhol is turning on its head all of these conventional pieties of propaganda. Audio Program excerpt Kirk Varnedoe MoMA2000: Open Ends (1960–2000) September 8, 2000–March4, 2001

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Drowning Girl, 1963. Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, (171.6 x 169.5 cm).

Lichtenstein found sources for many of his early paintings in comic books. The source for this work is "Run for Love!" published by DC Comics in 1962. In the original illustration, the drowning girl's boyfriend appears in the background, clinging to a capsized boat. Lichtenstein cropped the image dramatically, showing the girl alone, encircled by a threatening wave. He shortened the caption from "I don't care if I have a cramp!" to the ambiguous "I don't care!" and changed the boyfriend's name she calls out from Mal to Brad. In addition to appropriating the melodramatic content of comics, Lichtenstein manually simulated the Benday dots used in the mechanical reproduction of images. Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997)

Techniques and strategies of commercial printing are fundamental to the visual language of Roy Lichtenstein's celebrated Pop style.

The Benday dots and regularized stripes he used for tone, the clarifying black outlines, the flat areas of bold primary color, and the simplification and schematization of his compositions are all elements embraced by consumer culture to create the inescapable printed imagery aimed at mass audiences.

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. The subject matter that first brought Lichtenstein's work to public attention was appropriated from comic strips, but his later themes owed their visual syntax to themes from "high" culture, particularly the history of modern art...like Germany Expressionism and Art Deco, as well as the time-honored motif of landscape in art. In every case, his sense of irony is coupled with a strikingly positive spirit. Printmaking was integral to Lichtenstein's practice from the time he was a student, and in the early 1950s he regularly entered regional print exhibitions. But it was his Pop style that attracted the professional workshops established in the 1960s, and his work was instrumental in the renaissance of American printmaking at that time. His mechanized aesthetic was particularly in keeping with the technical expertise offered at Gemini G.E.L., and his early collaborations there were undertaken with Kenneth Tyler, a printer he continued to work with at Tyler Graphics. Donald Saff, then of Graphicstudio, was another technical wizard who urged Lichtenstein to make prints. In all he created some three hundred fifty printed images, primarily with a series format that echoed his work in painting. In addition to traditional Reverie from 11 Pop Artists, volume II, 1965 (published 1966). prints, he created ephemeral projects in the spirit of Pop art, One from a portfolio of eleven screen prints by various artists, Composition: (68.9 x 58.3 cm); sheet: (76.5 x 60.9cm). like wallpaper, gift wrap, and paper plates, and also made many benefit prints and posters for social and political causes.

Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 168

Nine Polaroid Portraits of a Mirror, 1967 William Anastasi (American, born 1933) Black-and-white instant prints and mirror 14 1/2 x 11 1/4 in. (36.8 x 28.6 cm)

Anastasi's conceptual exercise—the gradual covering and replacement of a mirror by pictures of itself—allegorizes the transformation in the status of the photographic image in the 1960s. Only possible with the invention of the instant print camera, the artist's process involves photographing the mirror, attaching the print to the surface, and photographing the mirror again until the surface is covered. Anastasi's gesture problematizes what was once a direct, unmediated perception of the real with an endless labyrinth of recycled images. Like Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and Jasper Johns' flags and targets, the perceptual gap in these works between the thing itself and what is literally depicted has been all but erased. The exponentially multiplying self-referentiality of Nine Polaroid Portraits of a Mirror constitutes one of the ways in which artists of the 1960s parodied the interiority and introspection of their immediate predecessors, the Abstract Expressionists.

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Repository was presented in The Art of Assemblage, a landmark exhibition organized by William C. Seitz at The Museum of Modern Art in 1961. In a letter to Seitz, Brecht observed that "arrangement" was a more appropriate term for his cabinet piece because of the word's association with music and the organization of elements in a particular order. The objects in Repository are associated with ordinary actions—brushing teeth, opening doors, bouncing balls—and were chosen for their ability to engage viewers in what the artist called "events": everyday tasks that could be performed publicly or privately as art. Brecht, who aimed to blur the boundaries between art and life, was a central figure in Fluxus, an international movement of the 1960s and 1970s that brought together artists working with music, poetry, theater, film, and the visual arts.

By 1962, the idea for a linguistic work of art had been proposed by artists, associated with the Fluxus collective, particularly in the event-structures of George Brecht, where a simple phrase or directive (one piece was entitled and consisted of the word EXIT) could be enacted by the viewer in an infinite variety of ways.

The founder of Fluxus, Maciunas said: “The best Fluxus ‘Composition’ is a most non-personal, ‘readymade’ one like Brecht’s ‘Exit’—it does not require any of us to perform it since it happens daily without any ‘special’ performance of it. Thus our festivals will eliminate themselves (and our need to participate) when they become total readymades (like Brecht’s exit)”

In that same year, the California painter Ed Ruscha used this principle to create the book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, in which he first came up with the title, then proceeded to photograph the subject on one of his road trips from Oklahoma City (his hometown) to Los Angeles, his adopted city. The work of art was to be the book itself, simply but carefully designed, whereas the photographs inside showed no traces of aesthetic decision making at all, as if the artist had merely pointed the camera out the car window in order to fulfillthe requirements of the textual phrase.

Ruscha, Edward. Twentysix Gasoline Stations 1962.

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In another book from 1966 entitled Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha joined together separate photographs of each structure to create a fold-out version of the street itself. With characteristic humor and elegance, Ruscha had extended Jasper Johns's notion of the completely self- referential object into the realm of mass- produced commodities.

Royal Road Test, 1967 Ed Ruscha (American, 1937-) Book During the 1960s, Ruscha created a series of mass-produced, cheaply printed photographic books cataloguing the various kinds of banal roadside sites one might encounter on a typical drive through the American West, such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962), Some Los Angeles Apartments (1966), and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968). Ruscha's books paid tribute to and slyly parodied the romantic vision of the road epitomized by writers and artists such as Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank, while also subverting the rapidly expanding market for what the artist described as "limited edition, individual, hand processed photos." In Royal Road Test, Ruscha painstakingly documented himself dropping a vintage typewriter from a speeding Buick.

Ruscha's books of photographs introduced the medium as a central aspect of Conceptual Art:

1. Bruce Nauman's Photograph Suite (popularly known as "Eleven Color Photographs") of 1966 were comic enactments of puns and wordplay such as "Waxing Hot" (showing hands moving over a bright red sculpture of the word) or "Bound to Fail" (showing the roped torso of the artist from behind) that combined sculptural form, linguistic content, and photographic staging.

2. Dan Graham's Homes for America, published in the December 1967 issue of Arts magazine, looked at first sight like a bland sociological tract on postwar cookie-cutter housing, but was actually a sly comment on the industrial coloring and geometric structures of then-current Minimalism; like Ruscha's books, the work was inextricably tied to its status as an article in a mass- produced and circulated publication.

Bruce NAUMAN USA born 1941 Dan Graham Waxing hot 1967 Homes For America colour photograph printed 1966-1974, 1989 image 50.0 h x 50.8 w cm 50 x 56 cm

In his “Homes for America,” a parody of popular sociological texts illustrated with photographs taken by the artist (first published in 1966 in Art in America) Graham inserted a kind of pseudo- documentary voice into the otherwise hieratic and contested ground of art criticism. Functioning as a writer, performer, or architect, and locating all these modes of address within his practice as an artist, Graham began a career making hybridized works that fundamentally subvert both the context for which they are made and their self-reflexive status as works of conceptual art.

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Eleven Color Photographs, 1966-67/70. Chromogenic development prints, dimensions variable. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Gerald S. Elliot Collection. © 2008 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Bruce Nauman Self-Portrait as a Fountain from Eleven Color Photographs, 1966-67/70 © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2006

Eating My Words (from the portfolio Eleven Color Photographs), 1966–67 chromogenic development print 49,2 x 58,9 cm Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Gerald S. Elliott Collection / Photo Michael Tropea

This idea of attaching the work of art directly to the channels of distribution and publicity that constituted its inevitable fate as a commodity reached its most pointed use by Martha Rosler for her series Bringing the War Back Home: House Beautiful, in which she hijacked lifestyle magazine photography to devastating effect.

Red Stripe Kitchen, 1967–72, printed early 1990s Martha Rosler (American) Chromogenic print

This work is from Rosler's seminal series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful—a group of images originally published in the underground newspapers that sprung up in the late 1960s in opposition to the Vietnam War. Reviving the modernist tradition of political photomontage epitomized by John Heartfield's anti-Hitler covers for the German magazine AIZ, Rosler combined preexisting mass media images from documentary (Life) and lifestyle (House Beautiful) magazines to devastating effect. In this example, Rosler shows two GIs rooting through an up-to-the-minute designer kitchen color-coordinated in blood red. More than a trenchant comment on America's first "TV war," Red Stripe Kitchen is also a harbinger of our own present moment, in which media images of domestic comfort and security no longer seem to keep the violence and chaos of the outside world at bay.

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Another example of Conceptual Art's uniquely self-critical tendencies can be seen in the predilection for bureaucratic forms by artists such as Robert Morris and Douglas Huebler. In works like Cardfile (1962) and Document: Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal (1963), Morris avoided all traditional signifiers of the work of art; this turning away from the viewer served as a darkly effective counterbalance to the more affirmative gestures of Happening and Fluxus artists, who envisioned the total liberation of the viewer from the restrictive codes of society. Douglas Huebler grouped his works into preestablished categories—Duration (involving the passage of time), Location (involving specific sites), and Variable (such as verifying the existence of every living person on the planet via photography), pieces consisting of typed statements combined with deadpan photographs that documented the results of the linguistic directive. Each work was a unique instance of dipping into the vast ocean of measurable data—people, places, and their transformation over time—that only highlighted the absurdity of the attempt.

Duration Piece #11, Bradford, Massachusetts, 1969 Huebler began his career as Douglas Huebler (American, 1924–1997) a Minimalist sculptor whose Gelatin silver prints Each 7 3/8 x 8 3/8 in. (18.8 x 21.3 cm) works contained elements that could be moved or repositioned by the viewer. He would very quickly abandon the making of traditional art objects altogether, saying at the time: "The world is more or less full of objects, more or less interesting. I do not wish to add anymore. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and place." The results— typewritten documents written in legalese accompanied by black-and- white snapshots—resembled forensic reports prepared by a Buddhist monk in collaboration with the Marx Brothers; in one famous piece set in Central Park (Duration Piece #5, New York), the artist shot a single photograph in the direction of a birdcall, then walked toward the source of the sound until he heard another, at which point he turned and made a picture facing the new birdcall, until twelve photographs had been created. With disarming simplicity, Huebler slyly redrew the parameters of the work of art, effacing both the subjective experience of the artist and the reified status of the art object in favor of an elegantly conceived and simply communicated idea which exists fully only in the viewer's mind—a participatory aesthetic that is quintessentially of the late 1960s.

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This early work by Huebler is the eleventh in his Duration series, and was made in Bradford, Massachusetts, where the artist taught at a local liberal arts college for women. It forgoes the madcap (epitomized by his Variable series, in which he attempted to photograph everyone on the planet) in favor of a placid, Zen-like austerity. Focusing hypnotically on a snow-laden bush of spiky branches, Huebler's humdrum subject—photographed twelve times from a fixed position at fifteen minute intervals—is transformed into a readymade sculpture undergoing organic, material transformation, the various stages of a densely worked drawing, and a mirror in nature of the tonal reversal (from snow white to brush black) that underlies the negative-positive process of the medium in which he is working.

On Kawara's work has represented perhaps the purest strain of Conceptualism, in that he has most fully and consistently erased the boundary separating art production and everyday life. His most famous project is his ongoing Today series (begun 1966), paintings that consist solely of the date on which they were made, in the language of the city in which they were painted, against a monochrome background; each painting must be completed by midnight of the day it commemorates or it is destroyed. In these seminal works, process, form, and content become one, reconciling existentialist notions of present-ness with a Zen-like erasure of self through meditative, repetitive acts.

“DATE” PAINTINGS in “TODAY” SERIES, 1978 The Today series consist entirely of the date on which On Kawara (Japanese, born 1933) the painting was executed in simple white lettering set against a solid background. If Kawara is unable to complete the painting on the day it was started he immediately destroys it.

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TITLE, 1965 On Kawara (Japanese, born 1933) In 1965, Kawara painted a tripartite work that suggested what was to come. With Title we are confronted with three laterally organized canvasses, done up in hot, hot pink. The year 1965 occupies the central position in the triad as if organizing the information that surrounds it. That was the year the first American combat troops were sent to Vietnam, it was also the year Kawara took up partial residence in New York. The phrase “one thing” places further stress on the date. In her work on On Kawara, Anne Rorimer argues that the date of this painting (and the today series that follows) might be read as a comment about the formalist criticism on paintings autonomy in the late fifties and early sixties. The starkness of the date against a monochrome field becomes a parody of modernist paintings self-reflexivity. If modernist painting registers some measure of its process or its indexical quality, Title speaks literally to its presentness by furnishing it with a birth day. Dates of paintings, Rorimer writes, usually stand as supplement to the content, or form of each work. Typically they occupy a modest place within its composition, tucked away in the corner, say, or on the back of a stretcher. But in Title, the date is front and center and acts as form, content and “evidence” of a sort: evidence of a painting’s timeliness.

That impulse to timeliness is the foundation of Kawara’s practice. The intelligence of his work rests in its endless questioning of the presentness of art (as well as its pasts) with respect to the future. Kawara’s art is commonly, by no means erronouesly, thought in terms of the “passage of time” or the presence of the “art object, but one might argue that it is the implied futurity of the work that embeds its specifically in the larger cultural horizon of the 1960s.

He also has created a series of "autobiographical" works that chart the daily events and rituals so carefully excised from the Today paintings, including I GOT UP, I READ, I WENT, I MET, and telegrams responding to professional inquiries that read simply I AM STILL ALIVE. Tracing his passage through the ubiquitous, yet usually invisible, systems of measurement (map, calendar, clock) and communication (postcard, telegram) that structure everyday life, the artist accumulates abstracted signs of his own presence—an archive of the self—to test the limits of self- expression within the structures of modern society.

I GOT UP, 1970 On Kawara (Japanese, born 1933) 47 photomechanical reproductions (postcards)

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Considered the most personal and intimate of his works, I GOT UP is part of a continuous piece produced by On Kawara between 1968 and 1979 in which each day the artist sent two different friends or colleagues a picture postcard, each stamped with the exact time he arose that day and the addresses of both sender and recipient. The length of each correspondence ranged from a single card to hundreds sent consecutively over a period of months; the gesture's repetitive nature is counterbalanced by the artist's peripatetic global wanderings and exceedingly irregular hours (in 1973 alone he sent postcards from twenty-eight cities). Moreover, Kawara's postcards do not record his waking up but his "getting up," with its ambiguous conflation of carnal and existential (as opposed to not getting up) implications.

Contrasted with the random temporal shifts conveyed in the text messages are the diverse images of Manhattan featured on the postcard fronts, which accumulate over the piece's forty-seven day duration into an unexpectedly quasi-cinematic aerial tour of the city—circling around the United Nations (and inside the General Assembly), down the East River along the waterfront to New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, and finally roaming around Federal Plaza at street level before coming to rest at City Hall. Like the newspaper pages that line the special cases housing each date painting, these found images juxtapose the infinite variety and quotidian reality of the public world with the elliptical, self-reflexive messages on the back. The sequence also extracts a drifting urban poetry from the mass- produced and anonymous, layering it conceptually over the banal, functional postal route of the objects themselves, as well as reintroducing a formal design to a work that is at first glance anticompositional. With tremendous economy of means and a surprising visual elegance, Kawara creates a complex meditation on time, existence, and the relationship between art and life.

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Peter BLAKE - "Museum of the Colour White I" - (1995) Assemblage - 83.2 x 62.9 cm

Peter BLAKE - "No.7: 7 x 7 (June 1947)" - (2005) Assemblage - 53.3 x 26.5 x 5.5 cm

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