Postwar to Postmodern Art History: 1945–1980

The Global Shift and the Rise of New Visual Languages

• Scholars traditionally regard World War II ($1939-1945$) as the turning point for the art world, marking the shift in focus from Paris to New York with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. However, the $1950s$, rather than the $1940s$, served as the true watershed for the second half of the century.

• Marcel Duchamp’s interest in how art functions and his systemic questioning of the importance of craft became a dominant force as the decade of the $1950s$ progressed.

• Roots in Cubism: Many artists became obsessed with the concept, pioneered by Picasso and Braque, that art and image-making constitute a form of language. They focused on revealing visual structures used to present ideas, opinions, or to deceive and manipulate.

• Expansion of Mediums: Artists realized art was not limited to traditional mediums like oil on canvas, chiseled marble, or cast bronze. It did not have to remain on a wall or pedestal. By the late $1950s$ and $1960s$, artists utilized anything: televisions, film, earth, fluorescent lights, steel tiles, acrylics, environments, postcards, words, and junk.

• Emergence of Movements: New visual forms included Performance Art, earthworks, Conceptual Art, happenings, and video art, all springing up between the mid-$1950s$ and the $1970s$.

Socio-Political Context of Postwar America

• Consumerism and the Baby Boom: World War II ended $16$ years of financial depression. By the $1950s$, the U.S. became a nation of consumers. Returning soldiers married and had children in record numbers, creating the "baby-boom" generation. Families moved to "cookie-cutter" tract houses in suburbs.

• Technological Fascination: Americans shopped for cars, televisions, labor-saving appliances, boats, and movie cameras. Technology was symbolized by the Cold War space race.

• Social Inequality and Resistance: Postwar prosperity was not equal. Media depicted a hierarchy with white males at the head of a patriarchal society, viewing women and people of color as second-class citizens.

• Alternative Lifestyles: In response to this status quo, Beatniks, Zen Buddhists, underground jazz musicians, bikers, and urban gangs established alternative lifestyles in the late $1940s$ and $1950s$.

• Social Upheaval: The civil rights movement challenged norms in the late $1950s$, gaining momentum in the $1960s$. Together with antiwar protests regarding the Vietnam War ($1964-1973$), this period produced the feminist movement, Gay Pride, Black Power, Gray Power, and environmental groups like Greenpeace.

Abstract Expressionism: Existentialism and Action Painting

• Roots and Heritage: Abstract Expressionism evolved from Surrealism and Dada. It shared a quest for universal truths with Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. However, it was driven by a despondent view of humanity following WWII atrocities.

• Existentialist Influence: The war shattered faith in science, logic, and progress. Existentialism emerged, maintaining there were no absolute truths and that life consists of subjective experiences. Abstract Expressionists embraced this, facing alienation, the absurdity of life, and the fear of death through personal confrontation in art.

• Action Painting (Gestural Abstraction): Surrealism in New York evolved into Abstract Expressionism as myths and symbols dissolved into complete abstraction. Artists worked on an enormous scale to overwhelm the viewer.

• Jackson Pollock ($1912-1956$): A marginal figure in the $1930s$ who turned to Jungian psychoanalysis and Surrealism. In $1947$, he unveiled his "action paintings" at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery.     - Terminology: The term "Action Painting" was coined by critic Harold Rosenberg ($1906-1978$).     - Example: Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 ($1950$) is an $8 imes 17\,foot$ wall of house paint.     - Technique: Pollock applied paint by dripping, hurling, and splattering on unstretched canvas on the floor, working from all four sides. He claimed the source was his unconscious.     - Characteristics: "Allover paintings" with even stresses and no single focal point. The work serves as a record of the physical and psychological self.

• Willem de Kooning ($1904-1997$): A Dutch immigrant who influenced a generation of artists. His earlier works were Picasso-inspired Cubist-Surrealist paintings of women.     - Process: He used "bravura paint handling" but his pictures were laboriously crafted over time, using letters or pinned drawings to jumpstart the process.     - Movement: Unlike Pollock, he retained a Cubist structure of "push-pull space" and overlapping planes.     - Controversy: In $1953$, he shocked the art world with representational paintings of women. Woman I ($1950-1952$) was repainted hundreds of times. De Kooning cited sources as varied as Paleolithic Woman of Willendorf and contemporary Camel cigarette advertisements.

Abstract Expressionism: Color-Field Painting

• Methodology: Instead of energetic brushwork, Color-Field painters used large, meditative planes of color to express primal qualities and the sublime.

• Mark Rothko ($1903-1970$): His early work drew on Greek tragedy (Aeschylus) and the Passion cycle. By $1949$ he reached his mature style of flat, stacked color planes.

• Example: No. 61 (Rust and Blue) ($1953$). A $10\,foot$-high work with ragged-edged ethereal planes.     - Effect: Rothko sought to evoke "tragedy, ecstasy, doom." He wanted viewers to stand close to be immersed in a "mystical void," experiencing a spiritual aura and the "precipice of infinity."

Post-Abstract Expressionism: Re-Presenting Life and Dissecting Painting

• Robert Rauschenberg ($1925-2008$): Studied at Black Mountain College. He analyzed the concept of art rather than pure painting.     - White Paintings ($1951$): Large canvases with solid white paint that captured shadows, dust, and light as "real life" without firm meaning.     - Combines: Innovative works combining painting, sculpture, and found objects. Odalisk ($1955-1958$) is a four-sided "lamp" containing sexual puns, magazine collages, a phallic pole, and a stuffed cock.

• Jasper Johns ($b. 1930$): Primarily a painter whose works examine the nature of painting.     - Example: Three Flags ($1958$). He used encaustic (wax-based paint) to paint flat objects like flags, targets, and maps.     - Concept: He treated images as "signs" similar to language, focusing on the flatness of the canvas and the reality of paint rather than illusionistic depth.

Redefining Art: Environments and Performance Art

• Allan Kaprow ($1927-2006$): Influenced by Pollock's scale and Rauschenberg's objects, he created "environments" (constructed installations viewers could enter).     - Yard ($1961$): A gallery garden filled with used tires. Viewers walked through, smelled, and rearranged the tires.     - Happenings: Term for visual art forms involving human activity and chance. 18 Happenings in 6 Parts ($1959$) involved participants like Rauschenberg and Johns performing tasks like squeezing orange juice or playing records.

• George Segal ($1924-2000$): Created representational environments with ghost-white plaster figures cast from real people using medical bandages.     - Example: The Gas Station ($1963$). This work features a memento mori (reminder of death) in the form of a Bulova clock. It critiques the alienation and lack of spirituality in modern technology-driven life.

Pop Art: Consumer Culture as High Art

• Definition: Pop Art derives imagery from popular/vernacular culture (low art) and incorporates it into high art to reveal the manipulative nature of mass media.

• Roy Lichtenstein ($1923-1997$): Scavenged imagery from telephone book advertisements and comic books.     - Technique: Used "benday dots" to create an illusion of volume from flat patterns.     - Critique: Works like Drowning Girl ($1963$) highlight gender stereotyping (virile men vs. distraught women) embedded in mass media.

• Andy Warhol ($1928-1987$): Focused on product design and news photography.     - Example: 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans ($1961-1962$). Warhol hand-painted these for his Los Angeles debut but soon moved to mass-producing art in his studio, "the Factory."     - Philosophy: Used the silkscreen process to print photographic images. He treated art as a commodity where the "name product" (a Warhol) was what people purchased, emphasizing the idea over craft.

• German Pop (Capitalist Realism): Sigmar Polke ($1941-2011$) and others in Düsseldorf created "Capitalist Realism" (a pun on Socialist Realism).     - Example: Alice in Wonderland ($1971$). Painted on store-bought printed fabric instead of canvas. It uses "Raster dots" (media dots) and parodies mass media through ghostlike imagery and unrelated motifs.

Formalist Abstraction and the Influence of Clement Greenberg

• Clement Greenberg ($1909-1994$): The most influential critic of the mid-century. He promoted "formalism"—art that deals only with qualities inherent to the medium: color, texture, shape, and composition.

• Ellsworth Kelly ($b. 1923$): Known for "Hard-Edge Abstraction." He based shapes on negative spaces (shadows, bridge openings).     - Example: Red Blue Green ($1963$). An $11\,foot$-wide painting exploring figure-ground relationships and pure color intensity.

Minimal Art: The Specific Object

• Characteristics: Minimalism favored mathematical/conceptual premises and mass-production materials (Plexiglas, steel, fluorescent tubes). There is no sign of the artist’s hand.

• Donald Judd ($1928-1994$): Leading Minimalist who called his works "specific objects."     - Example: Untitled ($1969$). A series of copper boxes ($9 imes 40 imes 31\,inches$ each) spaced $9\,inches$ apart.     - Impact: The work sits on the floor without a pedestal, making the actual space around it an integral part of the experience.

The Pluralism of the 1970s: Post-Minimalism

• Shift: By the late $1960s$, artists viewed formalism as escapist. They returned to emotion, the human figure, and social/political issues.

• Eva Hesse ($1936-1970$): Used unusual materials like acrylic over balloons, fiberglass, and latex.     - Example: Untitled ($1968$). This work utilizes organic, skin-like fiberglass and latex appendages to evoke themes of frailty, decay, and sexuality.

• Robert Smithson ($1938-1973$): Created "earthworks"—manipulations of the natural environment.     - Example: Spiral Jetty ($1970$). Located at Rozel Point, Utah. A $1,500\,foot$-long, $15\,foot$-wide spiral made of $6,650\,tons$ of mud and black basalt.     - Message: The work speaks to "entropy" (the inevitable decline and exhaustion of all things) as it erodes into the Great Salt Lake.

Conceptual Art and the Dematerialization of the Object

• Definition: Art where the idea or concept is more important than the aesthetic object. Often manifest as words, maps, or charts.

• Joseph Kosuth ($b. 1945$): Focused on semiotics (the science of signs).     - One and Three Chairs ($1965$): Displays a real chair (the signified), its photograph (signifier), and a dictionary definition (the ideal chair).

• Joseph Beuys ($1921-1986$): A German artist based in Düsseldorf. He utilized myth (his WWII plane crash in the Crimea) and materials like felt and animal fat.     - How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare ($1965$): A performance where Beuys, acting as a shaman with honey and gold paint on his head, silently lectured a dead hare. It critiqued intellectualized art in favor of intuitive, spiritual communication.

Television and Video Art

• Nam June Paik ($1932-2006$): A Korean-born Fluxus artist who titled television the "electronic superhighway."     - Example: Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S. ($1995$). A massive neon map of the U.S. filled with monitors displaying rapidly changing images relevant to each state. It positions television as the primary way Americans experience reality.

Art with a Social Agenda

• African-American Art: In $1963$, the group "Spiral" formed to support civil rights.     - Romare Bearden ($1911-1988$): Created photo-collages from newspapers and magazines.     - Example: The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism ($1964$). This Cubist-inspired collage reflects black identity, African roots (masks), and the syncopation of jazz.

• Feminist Art: Launched in part by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique ($1963$).     - Judy Chicago ($b. 1939$): Established the first Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and CalArts.     - The Dinner Party ($1974-1979$): A collaborative monumental work featuring a triangular table with $39$ place settings for historical women (e.g., Emily Dickinson, Georgia O'Keeffe) and $919$ names on floor tiles. It used "female" media like ceramics and embroidery to create a spiritual communion of women.

Late Modernist Architecture

• International Style: Represented by the "glass box."     - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ($1886-1969$): Designed the Seagram Building ($1954-1958$) in New York. Its aesthetic of "Less is more" features a $38$-story tower of tinted glass and bronze on pillars (pilotis), using thin I-beams for mullions.

• Sculptural Architecture: A reaction against the nonreferential glass box.     - Practitioners: Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier used poured concrete to create massive, organic, and referential monumental buildings (e.g., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).