Lucio Fontana (Argentine-Italian, 1899-1968) creating a “spatial painting.” Fontana founded a movement called Movimento Spaziale: art for "a new age" that would show the "real space of the world.“ Began slash paintings in 1958

Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept, Expectations, 1959water-based paint on canvas slashed by the artist, c. 50 x 99 in

Fontana’s White Manifesto of 1947 (written in Argentina) states that "Matter, color and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art.”

Cy Twombly (US, b.1928) Leda and the Swan, Rome (artist’s home since 1957) 1962, oil, pencil, and crayon on canvas, 6' 3" x 6' 6 3/4“ MoMA NYC

Cy Twombly, detail

Cy Twombly at Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston in front of the gallery's largest painting, Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor. Calligraphic, graffiti-inspired, elegant, literary, scatological style. “The word as disembodied sign becomes the word as embodied mark, imbued with the spirit of a gesture and located in a particular place and time.” (Richard Shiff)

Helen Frankenthaler (American b. 1928), Mountains and Sea, 1952, charcoal and oil on canvas, 7’2” x 9’9”

“Post-Painterly abstraction,” “Color Field Painting” (late “Modernist” painting)

Helen Frankenthaler in 1950 on seeing Pollock's paintings, Autumn Rhythm and Lavender Mist: “It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign country and didn't know the language, but had read enough, and had a passionate interest, and was eager to live there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language."

Photograph: Jackson Pollock (far left) with Lee Krasner (far right), Clement Greenberg, unidentified child, and Helen Frankenthaler at the beach near Springs, Long Island. Unidentified photographer, ca. 1952.

Frankenthaler, Magic Carpet, 1964, 96 X 68 inches, acrylic on

canvas

Morris Louis (American, 1912-1962), Tet, 1958, synthetic polymer on canvas, 8 x 13ft. Influence of Frankenthaler (1953 visit) and Clement Greenberg.

Jules Olitski (Ukrainian-born American, 1922-2007) (right), Draky 1966, and (left) Comprehensive Dream, both are 120 x 92 inches, acrylic on canvas. Greenbergian Formalism – Color Field – Post-Painterly Abstraction

Morris Louis, Dalet Kaf, 1959, acrylic resin (Magna) on canvas, 100 x 143 in

Kenneth Noland (American, b.1924) Turnsole, 1961, Synthetic polymer paint on unprimed canvas, 7' 10 1/8" x 7' 10 1/8“ “Noland made his first completely individual statement when, as he said, he discovered the center of the canvas.” (Arnason p.533)

Ellsworth Kelly (US b. 1924), Red Blue Green, 1963, c. 84 x 136 inches, oil on canvas, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923), installation at the Broad museum of contemporary art, Los Angeles, February, 2008.

Josef Albers (Germany,1888 - US,1976) from series, Homage to the Square: (top right) Ascending 1953; and (lower right) Atuned, 1958, both are oil on masonite.

Émigré Bauhaus master, influential teacher at Black Mountain College and Yale University

http://www.laurentianum.de/ldalbe03.gif

Albers’ 1963 Interaction of Color, apedagogical book still in print and much used

Page from Albers’ Interaction of Color, Yale university pedagogical book.

Anthony Caro (British, born 1924) Midday, 1960, painted steel, 7' 8" x 37" x 12' 2"

Grace Hartigan (American, b. 1922)(right) Chinatown, 1956, o/c, 42 x 52” Second Generation Abstract Expressionism (left) Giftwares, 1955, oil on canvas, 63" x 81“

(left, at table) Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan (and David Smith standing at far left) at the Five Spot, NYC 1957(center) Larry Rivers (US 1923-2002),Portrait of Frank O’Hara,1954, o/c, 97"/ 53” (right) Larry Rivers, Jack Kerouac, David Amram, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso “New York School”poets and Beat poets

Lucian Freud, (British, b. Berlin 1922), Interior in Paddington, 1951, o/c, 60” x 45”

Freud, Girl With a White Dog, 1951-52; o/c, 30 x 40”; Tate Gallery, London

“I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.”

Freud, Naked Girl Asleep, 1968, o/c, 22 x 22in (right) Man Posing, ink on paper, 1984

Freud, Reflection (Self-Portrait),1985, Oil on canvas, 22 x 21 in(right) Sigmund Freud (grandfather)

Lucian Freud, Naked Man; Back View, 1992-1992

Clyfford Still (US, 1904-1980), 1951(right) Mark Rothko,1952

Taught at the California School of Fine Art (now San Francisco Art Institute) Abstract Expressionist influence on Bay Area painters:

David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn

David Park (US, 1911-1960), (left) Seated Man in a T-Shirt, 1958, SFMoMA(right) Art, Nature & Civilization, 1934, WPA Mural, San Francisco, Hayes Valley

(below right) Three Violinists and Dancers, 1935-37

WPA Social Realism

Bay Area Figurative Expressionism

David Park, Torso (detail, right) 1959, SFMoMa

"David was keen about Abstract Expressionism as long as it had the immediacy and tangibility and goopy sensuous arrangement of forms, but when it got into the very

serious 'views of the cosmos' he didn't go along with that." (Elmer Bischoff)

Richard Diebenkorn, (US, 1922-1993) ,Coffee, 1958, o/c(right) Woman in Profile, 1958, o/c

Bay Area Figuration

Richard Diebenkorn, (left) Berkeley #23, 1955; (right) Ocean Park No. 54, 1972; Both oil on canvas, Collection SFMOMA.

Elmer Bischoff (US, 1916 -1991), Two Figures on the Seashore, 1957, o/c(right) Orange Sweater, 1955. Bay Area Figuration

Fur Rat, 1962, wood, chicken wire, plaster, string, raccoon fur, and nails; 20 x 54 x 14 in. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Bay Area Funk (Beat) and Figuration overlapped. Joan Brown was a student of Elmer Bischoff part of both movements.

Exhibition of works from the early 70’s including cardboard sculptures (begun in her kitchen from household materials while her studio was under renovation)

Joan Brown c.1960

Joan Brown (US, 1938-1990), Bay Area Figuration, student of Elmer Bishoff(left) Wolf in Studio, enamel on masonite, 90 x 48”, 1972 (Crocker collection)(right) Self With Fish, 1970 Brown is “second generation Bay Area Figuration”

Bruce Conner (US 1933-2008) Suitcase, 1961-1963, 22x24x9" / crayon on paper, fabric, beads on lace, glitter, soot, wax, graphite and a plastic yo-yo.

A still from “A Movie,” a 1958 short by Conner selected for preservation by the National Film Registry. Conner’s films were assemblages of found footage.

Bruce Conner, Inkblot Drawing 5/28/1995, a Rorschach-like ink-and-pencil work. Conner worked with a wide variety of visual media.

Jay De Feo, The Rose, 1958-66, 129 x 92 x 11 in., oil on canvas with wood and mica, weighs over a ton. Whitney MAA

Cover of the influential anthology of writings by Dada artists and writers edited by Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell, 1951

In 1951 “painter” was a synonym for “artist.”

(left) Italian Futurist Music event, 1913, The music of chance and “noise,” including the sounds of urban life; (right) Hugo Ball performing Dada poem at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, 1916

New York DadaIn Advance of aBroken Arm by MarcelDuchamp, 1915

Jean Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916. Dada

Sources for Neo-Dada of the 1950s

John Cage (US, 1912-1992) early 1950s, prepared piano, aleatory (chance) music, Zen Buddhism and the I Ching (Book of Changes)

"In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.“

Don’t try to change the world, you’llonly make it worse.

-Cage

Allan Kaprow (US, 1927-2006), 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Reuben Gallery, NYC, 1959

Art News, October 1958, published Allan Kaprow’s article, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” which was an analysis of Pollock's work and a meditation on the meaning of Pollock’s death (1956) for the painting avant-garde.

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and lead artist Steve Roden reinvented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959/2008) over five nights from April 22 through April 26, 2008.

Allan Kaprow, Yard, Martha Jackson Gallery, NYC 1961; compare (right) Pollock painting, 1950 From “Action Painting” to performance art.

Young artists of today need no longer say, "I am a painter" or "a poet" or "a dancer." They are simply "artists." All of life will be open to them.

- Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” 1958

Allan Kaprow, photograph from Household, a Happening commissioned by Cornell University, 1964. Open link below for a 2008 re-enactment of it for the MoCA Los Angeles Allan Kaprow retrospective

http://www.moca.org/kaprow/index.php/category/household/

Marcel Duchamp (center) with Carolyn Brown and Merce Cunningham after a performance of Walk Around Time. Sound by John Cage, set (after Duchamp’s Large Glass) by Jasper Johns. Mid-1960s Neo-Dada

Rrose Sélavy by Man Ray, 1920

Marcel Duchamp,The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23

(below) photo of Duchamp by British Pop artist, Richard Hamilton, c.1968

Jasper Johns (US, b.1930), Flag. 1954–55, encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood (three panels) 42 1/4 x 60 5/8" MoMA NYC. Literal, conceptual painting. Parodic gestures of Abstract Expressionism are congealed in wax, thus contradicting and reifying the aesthetic of individualism.

Johns’ flags and targets, numbers and letters were “things the mind already knows . . . things that were seen and not looked at, not examined.”

Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955, encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, newsprint visible beneath the wax, 51 x 44 x 3.5” A target is already flat (reference to Greenberg and Kenneth Noland) A “sign,” a “thing the mind already knows.”

Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze, hand painted cast bronze (one of two casts), 5.5 x 8 x 4.75”, 1960, Proto-Pop (Neo-Dada) In 1960, Johns heard that de Kooning had complained of Leo Castelli, Johns famous dealer: "That son-of-a-bitch, you could give him two beer cans and he could sell them." Johns then made this and Castelli sold it.

Jasper Johns, False Start, 1959, oil on canvas, 67 1/4 x 54"

“It was as though the painter standing in front of the canvas, brush in hand, found that what was on the end of that brush was no longer a medium of wordless expression: it was art history, art criticism, art theory, concepts … words.”

Charles Harrison “Conceptual Art, the aesthetic and the end(s) of art” (Themes)

“It’s a different art world from the one I grew up in. Artists today know more. They are aware of the market more than they once were. There seems to be something in the air that art is

commerce itself.” Jasper Johns, 2008

Robert Rauschenberg (US, 1925 - 2008), seated on Untitled (Elemental Sculpture) with White Painting (seven panel) behind him in the basement of Stable Gallery, New York (1953). Paintings were used for the famous Black Mountain “Event” of 1952 by John Cage, who acknowledged that the White Paintings enabled him to compose in August 1952 his iconic 4'33‘‘, during which the pianist sits at the piano but does not play. Neo-Dada

John Cage’s statement for the 1953 Stable show: White Paintings: "... No subject/ No Image/No taste/No object/No beauty/No message/ No talent/No technique.../No idea...“

Fred McDarrah (US, b. 1926), Dillon's Bar, University Place: Frank O'Hara, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Anna Moreska, Nov. 10 at Dillon's Bar, NYC,1959(right) Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage on tour with the Merce Cunningham dance company

Robert Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, and Alex Hay, Pelican, (MoMA archival footage, 41 seconds): http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/37 Pelican was presented first at America on Wheels, a roller skating rink in Washington, D.C. on May 9, 1963 in conjunction with "The Popular Image" at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art.

Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. Combine painting: oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 6' 3 1/4" x 31 1/2" x 8" Gift of Leo Castelli. Neo-Dada, horizontal production and vertical display, like Pollock

Detail: iconoclastic, scatological treatment of paint, an anti-aesthetic, post-Abstract Expressionist parody of gesture painting. “Paint” includes toothpaste and nail polish.

"I could never make the language of Abstract Expressionism work for me -- words like 'tortured,' 'struggle' and 'pain,' I could never see those qualities in paint. How can red be 'passion’? Red is red. Jasper and I used to start each day by having to move out from Abstract Expressionism.“

Robert Rauschenberg

(left) Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing,1955, SFMoMA, Neo-Dada; (right) Willem de Kooning, Woman 1, oil on canvas, 1952, MoMA NYC, Abstract Expressionism. Art after Abstract Expressionism has been called “The Academy of the Erased De Kooning.”

As his contribution to an exhibition of portraits, Robert Rauschenberg sent a telegram to the Paris Galerie Iris Clert in 1961, which said: 'This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.‘ Neo-Dada proto-conceptualism

Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955 - 59, Combine: oil and collage on canvas with objects.Emblem of the artist who “destroys” painting? What could the dingy tennis ball behind the goat signify? The tire?

2005 exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines from the 1950sMetropolitan MA, NYC

Robert Rauschenberg, Factum I and Factum II, 1957, oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and painted paper on canvas, 61 x 35“. Nearly identical mixed media paintings that parody the “originality” myth of the avant-garde, especially Action Painting’s “signature” gesture.

Robert Rauschenberg on stage in Paris for performance painting with New Realist artists, 1961. Target of real flowers by Jasper Johns. Niki de Saint Phalle “shoot painting,” Tir, against back wall. Kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely looks through stage curtain.

Rauschenberg, (left) Tracer, oil & silkscreen ink on canvas, 84 x 60”,1963(right) Retroactive I, 1964. “I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is. And I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.”

A photograph is an actual trace of the real world.

Jiro Yoshihara (Japan 1905-1972), Painting, 1960 founded Gutai (Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai - Concrete Art Association) in Osaka in 1954

When Jiro Yoshihara died in 1972 the Gutai Art Association was dissolved.

Shozo Shimamoto (Japan 1928), (left) Ana (Holes), 1954, oil on layers of pasted newspapers, pierced, 46 x 36”, Tate London. Gutai movement(right) Painting, 1955, oil on paper, slashed and punctured (before Lucio Fontana)

Atsuko Tanaka (Japan,1932-2005), Electric Dress [as performance (left) and display as object (right)] 1956, Gutai http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdXcZq16yFc

Blinking incandescent lights covered with red, blue, yellow, and green enamel paint. Flashing on a circuit, the shapes and colors of the figure wearing the costume changed constantly, giving the impression of a body in constant motion even when standing still.

“I was seated on a bench at the Osaka station, and I saw a billboard featuring a pharmaceutical advertisement, brightly illuminated by neon lights. This was it! I would make a neon dress!” - Tanaka

The “dress” also references the traditional kimono and the nervous system of the body

Atsuko Tanaka Electric Dress performance photos, 1956, Gutai

Presages the extreme and sometimes dangerous performances of the 1970s feminist movement.

Saburo Murakami, Gutai perfomance: Smashing Through (21 panels of 42 papers) second Gutai exhibition, Tokyo, 1956

Internationally, performance art of the post-WW II era came out of painting.

Kazuo Shiraga (Japan b. 1925), Challenge to the Mud, Gutai performance, 1955

Art as a marriage of concept and raw material: the Gutai notion of allowing the “cry of the material”

Shiraga, Second Gutai exhibition,1956, “action” painting (verb) with feet; (center below) Painting (object)

(right) Gutai exhibition of Siraga’s paintings (objects) made with feet