terms

artworks

descriptive terms/styles and innovations

Purpose (Function), Meaning and Intended Audience

dates/events

Painting, Sculpture, and Photography

Post-war Expressionism in Europe

Background Information

existentialism::a philosophy asserting the absurdity of human existence and the impossibility of achieving certitude

promotion of atheism

“if God does not exist, then individuals must constantly struggle in isolation with the anguish of making decisions in a world without absolutes or traditional values

emergence of pessimism and despair, brutality or roughness

Alberto Giacometti

Nationality:: Swiss

Time → 1901 - 1966

Works:

Man Pointing No. 5

Francis Bacon

Nationality → British

Time → 1910 - 1992

Works:

Painting

Abstract Expressionism

Background Information

World War II’s devastation sent artists fleeing to the United States

The center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York

Representational art disappears

formalism::an emphasis on an artwork’s visual elements rather than it’s subject

gestural abstraction::reliance on the expressive of energetically applied pigment

chromatic abstraction::reliance on color’s emotional resonance

Arshile Gorky

Nationality → Armenian

Time → 1904 - 1948

History:

Four years old when his father escaped being drafted into the Turkish army by fleeing the country

His mother died of starvation when he was 15

Made his way to America in 1920, penniless and settled in New York four years later.

Works:

Garden in Sochi

Jackson Pollock

Nationality → American

Time → 1912 - 1956

History:

Nicknamed Jack the Dripper

painted on the floor

gestural abstraction

Works:

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

Lee Krasner

Nationality → American

Time → 1908 - 1984

History: Wife of Jackson Pollock

Major Painter

Works:

The Seasons

Willem de Koonig

Nationality → Dutch-born

Time → 1904-1997

History:

gestural abstraction

his wife Elaine was also a painter

Works:

Woman, I

Mark Rothko

Nationality → Russian-born

Time → 1903 - 1970

History:

chromatic abstraction

focused on the spiritual reality

Works:

No. 14

Post-Painterly Abstraction

Introduction

Post-Painterly Abstraction::a term coined by Clement Greenberg

another postwar American Art movement that developed out of Abstract expressionism but with a very different sensibility

characterized by detached rationality emphasising tighter pictorial control, versus Abstract Expressionism’s focus on intense passion

Frank Stella

Nationality → American

Time → b. 1936

History:

works characterized by thin, evenly spaced pinstripes on colored grounds

hard-edge painting

Works:

Mas o Menos (more or Less)

Helen Frankenthaler

Nationality → American

Time → 1928-2011

History:

color-field painting::emphasized painting’s basic properties

color-field painters poured diluted paint onto unprimed canvas and allowed the pigments to soak in.

Works:

The Bay

Op Art

Introduction

Op art was a major artistic movement of the 1960s

sought to produce optical illusions of motion and depth using only geometric forms on flat surface.

Bridget Riley

Nationality → Britain

Time → b. 1931

History:

was featured in the December 1964 issue of Life magazine.

Works:

Fission

Abstraction in Sculpture

Introduction

sculptors focused on three-dimensionality as the essential characteristic and inherent limitation of the sculptural medium.

David Smith

Nationality → American

Time → 1906-1965

History:

sculpture that has an affinity with the Abstract Expressionist movement in painting.

intended to be seen in the open air

Works:

Cubi

Donald Judd

Nationality → American

Time → 1928 - 1994

History:

a leader of the minimalist movement

minimalist artworks generally lack identifiable subjects, colors, surface textures, and narrative elements.

rejected illusionism and emphasized “objecthood” and concrete tangibility

Judd produced most of his major works in NYC

Works:

Untitled

Louise Nevelson

Nationality → Russian-born

Time → 1899 - 1988

History:

combined architectural fragments with the power of Dada and Surrealist found objects.

created works out of found objects, wood objects, and various forms with monochromatic color schemes, usually black, white, or gold.

Works:

Tropical Garden II

Louise Bourgeois

Nationality → French-American

Time → 1903 - 1970

History:

sculpture is connected with the body’s multiple relationships to landscape

Works:

Cumul I

Pop Art

Introduction

Some artists sought to harness the communicative power of art to reach a wide audience

Pop art is born

Pop art can be traced to the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London which was founded in 1952.

Richard Hamilton

Nationality → Britain

Time → 1922 - 2011

History:

trained as an engineering draftsman, exhibition designer, and painter

studied the way advertising shapes public attitudes

Works:

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Jasper Johns

Nationality → American

Time → b. 1930

History:

moved to NYC in 1952

pivotal to the early development of American Pop Art

attempted to draw attention to common objects in the world--what he called things “seen but not looked at”

Works:

Three Flags

Robert Rauschenberg

Nationality → American

Time → 1925 - 2008

History:

a close friend of Jasper Johns’s

created mass-media images

made multimedia works that he called combines, which intersperse painted passages with sculptural elements

Works:

Canyon

Roy Lichtenstein

Nationality → Britain

Time → 1923 - 1997

History:

born in Manhattan near Madison Avenue, the center of the American advertising industry

Works:

Hopeless

Andy Warhol

Nationality → American

Time → 1928 - 1987

History:

the quintessential American Pop artist

had an early successful career as a commercial artist and illustrator

often depicted icons of mass-produces consumer culture

Works:

Green Coca-Cola Bottles

Claes Oldenburg

Nationality → Swedish-born American

Time → b. 1929

History:

sculptural Pop art that incisively commented on American consumer culture

graduated from Yale in 1950

Works:

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks

Super-realism and Photography

Introduction

Super-realists expanded Pop’s iconography by making images that mimicked reality as faithfully as possible. Also known as photo-realism.

Audrey Flack

Nationality →American

Time → b. 1931

History:

intrigued by the formal and technical qualities of photography

used projectors and airbrushes

typically included multiple references to death

Works:

Marilyn

Chuck Close

Nationality → American

Time → b. 1940

History:

had facial blindness

Works:

Big Self-Portrait

Lucian Freud

Nationality → German-born Brit

Time → 1922 - 2011

History:

moved to London in 1933 when Hitler became the German chancellor.

grandson of Sigmund Freud

best known for his unflattering close-up view of faces

Works:

Naked Portrait

Duane Hanson

Nationality → American

Time → 1925 - 1996

History:

perfected a casting technique that enabled him to create life-size sculptures that many viewers mistake at first sight for real people

Works:

Supermarket Shopper

Minor White

Nationality → American

Time → 1908 - 1976

History:

in 1938 became a photographer for the Works Progress Administration

served in the US Army in World War II

settled in NYC where he met Alfred Stieglitz

sought to incorporate a mystical element in his own work

Works:

Moencopi Strata

Feminist Art

Judy Chicago

Nationality → American

Time → b. 1939

History:

born in Chicago

cofounder of the Feminist Art Program in California

originally conceived The Dinner Party as a feminist Last Supper

Works:

The Dinner Party

Cindy Sherman

Nationality → American

Time → b. 1954

History:

primarily worked with photography

addresses the “male gaze”

produce photographs showing herself designing, acting in, directing, and photographing the works.

Works:

Untitled Film Still #35

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Nationality → Poland

Time → b.1930

History:

A fiber artist.

leader in the exploration of the expressive powers of weaving techniques in large-scale artworks.

early life, she was a member of an aristocratic family disturbed by the dislocations of World War II and its aftermath

Works:

80 Backs

Architecture and Site-Specific Art

Introduction

The postwar period of architecture included Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. At the same time, younger architects began to rise to international prominence and post-modern architecture began to form

Modernism

Introduction

modernist architects stressed formalist simplicity in buildings adhering to a rigid geometry as well as buildings featuring organic sculptural qualities

Frank Lloyd Wright

created the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Fallingwater (see required works)

Le Corbusier

created Villa Savoye (see required works) and Notre-Dame-du-Haut

Mies van der Rohe

A minimalist architect. Created the Seagram Building (see required works) with Philip Johnson (1906-2005)

Postmodernism

Introduction

postmodernism began within a few years of the completion of the Seagram building

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs, 1961)

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Robert Venturi (b. 1925)

They argued that the uniformity and anonymity of modernist architecture were unsuited to human social interaction

Postmodern architects accepted and embraced the messy and chaotic nature of big-city life.

Michael Graves

1934-2015

designed The Portland Building

an early maker of postmodernist innovation that borrowed from the lively, garish language of pop culture

Rogers and Piano

British architect Richard Rogers (b. 1933)

Italian architect Renzo Piano (b. 1937)

Designed the Georges Pompidou National Center of Art and Culture in Paris.

color-coded pipes, duct, tubes, and corridors according to function.

Environmental and Site-Specific Art

Introduction

also known as earthworks.

emerged in the 1960s

most environmental artworks are site-specific and in open air.

Coincided with the ecology movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the creation of the EPA

Robert Smithson

(1938-1973)

best known for Spiral jetty (see required works)

Performance and Conceptual Art and New Media

Performance Art

Introduction

Performance art replaces traditional stationary artworks with movements, gestures, and sounds performed before an audience, whose members sometimes participate in the performance

Anticipated the rebellion and youthful exuberance of the 1960s

Carolee Schneemann

Nationality → America

Time → b. 1939

History:

“kinetic theater”

radically transformed the nature of Performance art by introducing a feminist dimension through the use of her body (often nude) to challenge gender stereotypes.

Works:

Meat Joy

Conceptual Art

Introduction

maintained that the “artfulness” of art lies in the artist’s idea, rather than in its final expression.

Joseph Kosuth

Nationality → America

Time → b. 1945

History:

operates at the intersection of language and vision

dealt with the relationship between the abstract and the concrete

pushed art’s boundaries to a point where no concrete definition of “art” was possible

Works:

Three Chairs

New Media

Introduction

Among the most popular new media were video recording and computer graphic

Video images combine the optical realism of photography with the sense that the subjects move in real time in a deep space “inside” the monitor

Nam June Paik

Nationality → Korean-born

Time → 1932-2006

History:

Studied music performance, art history, and Eastern philosophy in Korea and Japan

worked with electronic music in Germany in the late 1950s

relocated to NYC in 1965

Collaborated with the gifted Japanese engineer-inventor Shuya Abe (b. 1932) in developing a video synthesizer

he called his video works “physical music”

Works:

Global Groove

Required Works

135) Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier

139) Falling Water, Frank Lloyd Wright

145) Woman, I, Willem de Koonig

146) Seagram Building, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson

147) Marilyn Diptych, Andy Warhol

148) Narcissus Garden, Yayoi Kusama

149) The Bay, Helen Frankenthaler

150) Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, Claes Oldenburg

151) Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson

152) House in New Castle Country, Robert Venturi, John Rausch and Denise Scott Brown

Timeline of Movements

Abstract Expressionism (1940s-1950s)

Pop Art (1955-1960s)

Color Field Painting (1960s)

Conceptual Art (1960s)

Op Art (1960s)

Minimalism (1960s)

Site/Environmental Art (1970s-1990s)

Feminist Art (1970s-present)

Postmodernism (1975-present)

Video/Computer/Digital Art (contemporary)

Timeline of Historical Events

1947

the British left India, dividing the subcontinent into two hostile nations, India and Pakistan

1945

World War II ended, leaving devastated cities, ruptured economies, and governments in chaos throughout Europe.

1945 - 1980

Civil rights movement, university free speech, disengagement from Vietnam, the sexual revolution, rock music, drug abuse, feminism

1949

Communists came to power in China after a bloody civil war

1950

North Korea invaded South Korea

Independence and civil wars in African Nations

Civil war in Indonesia

1950s

the center of the Western Art world shifts from Paris to New York

1962

Algeria expelled France

America defeated in Vietnam.

1965-1967

the first inexpensive video recorder was made commercially available (the Sony Porta-Pak)

1969

The passage of the National Environmental Policy Act

1970

the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency

Purpose, Meaning, and Intended Audience

intended to be seen by everyone: in museums, private collections, specific places

often used as societal criticism or cultural awareness (i.e. feminism, global warming, war, consumerism, etc.)

Art was often times not for any specific reason other than to simply exist.

many times post-modernism experienced a mixed reception. It was often so strange and different that it was rejected at first, before becoming loved with the passage of time.

Materials

fiber

video cameras

photography

resin

burlap

oil paint

commercial paint

steel

titanium

various metals

prints

human bodies

the ready-made