Europe and America 1945-70 Still from Mad Men opening credits, AMC television series

Europe and America 1945-60

• People & Events :

• Response to upheaval and devastation of WW II

• Rise of consumerism in 50s

• Influence of European avant-garde in exile in U.S.

• New York & the New York School

• Clement Greenberg & Greenbergian formalism

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI, Man Pointing , 1947. Fig. 15-2.

• Themes :

• Formal exploration (purity)

• Self-expression

• Isolation and despair

• The sublime

• Consumer and popular culture

• Forms :

• Abstraction, realism, found objects, new media

Europe and America 1945-60 Francis Bacon, Painting , 1946, fig.15-3

Painting and Sculpture, 1945 to 1960 JACKSON POLLOCK, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950. Fig. 15-4.

Painting and Sculpture, 1945 to 1960

• Abstract Expressionism, gestural abstraction

• Rise of American modernist painting

• Act of creation most important

• All-over composition (no central focus)

• Greenbergian formalism?

• Jungian psychoanalysis?

JACKSON POLLOCK, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950, oil, enamel, aluminum paint, fig. 15-4. At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to actrather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or express an object real or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. -Harold Rosenberg, 1952

Painting and Sculpture, 1945 to 1960 WILLEM DE KOONING, Woman I, 19501952. Fig. 15-5.

Painting and Sculpture, 1945 to 1960

• Abstract Expressionism, gestural abstraction

• Expressive, energetic application of paint

• Retains figure

• Inspired by Cubist formal

• analysis

• Critique of women in advertisements

• Act of painting (2 yrs to complete painting, 200 attempts)

WILLEM DE KOONING, Woman I, 19501952. Fig. 15-5.

Woman II, III, & IV Venus of Willendorf Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon, 1907 1950s Camel Cig. ad

Painting and Sculpture, 1945 to 1960 Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon , 1959, mixed media, fig. 15-15 Rembrandt, Rape of Ganymede 1635, oil

Painting and Sculpture, 1945 to 1960 Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon , 1959, mixed media, fig. 15-15

• Proto-Pop

• Combine (found object

• assemblage)

• Includes stuffed bald eagle, pillow hanging from string, photo of young son

• Open and indeterminate

• meaning

• Resists over-manipulation of

• objects

• Resembles Dada collage and anti-aesthetic (Duchamp)

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made (I try to act in the gap between the two). -Rauschenberg

Painting and Sculpture, 1960 to 1970

• People & Events :

• Youth culture rejects

• traditional values

• Protest against war

• pacifist movements in 1960s

• Civil and womens rights

• (African American, Gay &

• lesbian)

• Assassinations of JFK (1963), MLK (1968)

• Vietnam War (until 1975)

President Elect by James Rosenquist 1960-61/1964, oil on masonite General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon by Eddie Adams, 1968, Associated Press

Painting and Sculpture, 1960 to 1970

• Themes:

• Formal exploration

• Consumer and popular

• culture

• Accessibility & inclusion

• Objectivity (vs. subjectivity)

• Forms:

• Pop Art

• Minimalism

• Mass production (the serial

• image/object)

• Found images/objects

• Performance & body art

Louise Nevelson, Tropical Garden II , 1957-59, painted wood, fig.15-11

Painting and Sculpture, 1960 to 1970 ANDY WARHOL, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Fig. 15-17.

Painting and Sculpture, 1960 to 1970

• Pop Art

• Established commercial

• illustrator

• Commentary on

• celebrity (public persona)

• Mass production (serial)

• Combines printing

• & painting

• References film

• Produces painting

• at factory, breaks

• rules of high art

ANDY WARHOL, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Fig. 15-17. Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait in Drag , 1981 Celebration or critique?

Painting and Sculpture, 1960 to 1970

• Pop Art

• Popular comic books, romantic melodrama

• Resulted out of a challenge from his young son (I bet you cant paint as good as that)

• Benday dots, look of comic book

• Slight alteration of image, retained most of original

• Blurs lines between high art medium and low -brow entertainment

• Plagiarism?

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, Hopeless, 1963. Fig. 15-16.

Painting and Sculpture, 1960 to 1970 La Fillette, Robert Mapplethorpe, 1982 Louise Bourgeois, Cumul I , 1969, marble Fig. 15-12

• Like biomorphic surrealism

• Body as landscape

• Sexual suggestiveness

• (castration fantasies?)

Painting and Sculpture, 1960 to 1970

• Minimalism

• Tangible qualities of the object

• Purity of form without embellishment

• Embraces qualities of the materials

• Removes deception & illusion

• Pure abstraction (objecthood)

DONALD JUDD, Untitled, 1969. Fig. 15-10.

• Superrealism

• Translation of photograph to painting by grid

• Systematic, objective

• process

• One of many portraits of self and friends

• All using standard size

• (9 x 7)

Painting and Sculpture, 1960 to 1970 Chuck Close, Big Self-Portrait, 1967-68 Acrylic, fig. 15-18

• Superrealism

• Painted with an airbrush

• Average Americans

• Emptiness and

• loneliness of

• daily American life

• Gritty realism

• vs. idealism

Painting and Sculpture, 1960 to 1970 Duane Hanson, Supermarket Shopper , 1970 Polyester resin and fiberglass, fig. 15-19

Contemporary Superrealism Ron Mueck, A Girl (2006, 15 long) and Spooning Couple (2005, 1/2 scale)