American Art

B

6

Sculpture

Sculptor Gaston Lachaise was born in Paris and settled in America in 1906 when he was 24. He pursued relentlessly and finally married Isabel Dutaud Nagle, with whom he was obsessed. Over and over he sculpted parts of her body—especially her breasts and buttocks. In some works these looked like huge clods of earth; in other works, like voluptuous pieces of fruit. A complete figure of his wife, Standing Woman (1930-1933, Philadelphia Museum of Art), improbably combines the gargantuan proportions of a powerful female with a light gracefulness of stance.

Paul Manship, for whom Lachaise worked from 1913 to 1920, drew inspiration from early Greek Art but infused his figures with stylized patterns and carefully repeating curves. His bronze statue Day (1938, Smithsonian American Art Museum), an allegory of time, shows a fleet figure, nearly horizontal in his hurry, carrying a stylized sun. Elie Nadelman, born in Poland, came to America in 1917 when he was 32. His elegant and witty figures of dancers, men with bowler hats and bow ties, and fashionable bathers remind distantly of early American folk carvings. It is worth noting in terms of his art that he amassed a large collection of European and American toys and dolls. John Flannagan carved stone sculptures whose small size and roughness to the touch may not impress at first glance. But these sculptures have a wonderful compactness and sense of coiled tension. His figure of Jonah embedded in the whale suggests a fetus about to spring forth (Jonah and the Whale (1937, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond). Remarking on his preference for fieldstone, the sculptor observed that “its very rudeness seems to me more in a harmony with simple direct statement.”

C

The War and Postwar Period: 1940 to 1975

The United States emerged after World War II as the strongest nation in the world. New York City became the world’s major art center, and American artists no longer saw themselves as following in the shadow of European art. A number of painters who would become noted abstract expressionists had immigrated to the United States before the war. They included Arshile Gorky, who arrived from Armenia in 1920; Mark Rothko, from Russia in 1913; Willem de Kooning, from The Netherlands in 1926; and Hans Hofmann, an influential teacher as well as painter, from Germany in 1930. During the war Mondrian, Marc Chagall, and other important European artists sought refuge in the United States. Abstract expressionism was the first art movement to originate on American soil and gain an international following. Later 20th-century American art movements, such as pop art and minimal art, also had an international impact.

C

1

Abstract Expressionism and Its Followers

Abstract expressionism was the foremost modernist direction of the 1940s and 1950s, producing the most daring, adventurous, and forceful art. Stylistically, painters associated with the movement fell into one of two groupings. Artists in the first grouping applied paint in a rapid, gestural way—flinging, splattering, or dribbling it, or laying it on in slashing, dramatic brushstrokes. This branch of abstract expressionism is sometimes called action painting. Artists in the second grouping applied paint in broad areas, and their branch is sometimes referred to as color-field painting. Painters in both groups, and the critics sympathetic to them, insisted that these abstract paintings were not merely decorative, but had content and referred to universal concepts, feelings, or ideas. Writers saw a link between abstract expressionism and the then-current philosophy of existentialism, which emphasized individual freedom and choice and maintained that one cannot go back to the past for guidance to the present.

---

---

The best-known action painters are Jackson Pollock, Gorky, Franz Kline, and de Kooning. Pollock developed a method of dripping paint onto canvas in intricate webs from which an image or emotion might—or might not—eventually emerge. His Cathedral (1947, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts) suggests vertical extension, as in a cathedral, that defies the pull of gravity. The glowing colors and network of forms in Gorky’s Waterfall (1943, Tate Gallery, London) are meant to suggest the landscape near his Connecticut home. This painting is one of a series of waterfalls and landscapes that he painted in the 1940s. Kline's black-and-white Meryon (1960-1961, Tate Gallery), its black streaks pushing outward at the edges of the canvas, implies an essentially American idea of boundlessness. In de Kooning's Marilyn (1949, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), the broken forms and lines seem to assert the figure of a woman within a pervasive chaos. “Art,” de Kooning wrote in 1951, “never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.”

The best-known artists in the second group—color-field painting—are Rothko, Clyfford Still, William Baziotes, and Robert Motherwell. The floating rectangles of color in Rothko's paintings evoke a sense of calmness and surrender rather than the feeling of ceaseless activity conveyed by the action painters. The flamelike jagged forms in Still's paintings bring to mind both constructive and destructive processes in nature, such as burning forests that clear the way for new growth. In Baziotes’s paintings, such as Primeval Landscape (1953, Philadelphia Museum of Art), semitransparent floating shapes resemble primitive, single-celled organisms. Motherwell created a series of black-and-white paintings titled Elegies to the Spanish Republic, in which he placed egg-shaped forms between vertical bars, presumably with the intention of recalling the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

A second generation of abstract expressionists, including Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell, carried the movement into the 1960s and 1970s. But by the mid-1950s other directions in avant-garde art had emerged, for example in the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Larry Rivers. Johns’s paintings of common objects—including flags, targets, numbers, and maps—mystified the art world, coming as they did during the heyday of abstract expressionism. What Johns wished to do was to subvert the meanings of these objects. Is a painting of a flag still a flag? Or when an entire painting is the image of a flag, does the sense of a flag as a symbol of the country then slip away? Does the flag become simply a pattern? Where abstract expressionists had sought to express meaning through abstract form, gesture, and color, Johns aimed to remove the meaning from objects that are laden with connotations. Rauschenberg retained something of abstract expressionism in the streaks of paint applied to his work Estate (1963, Philadelphia Museum of Art), but he composed most of the surface of images from photographs and newspapers that he silk-screened onto the canvas. Some of the images he chose for this composition refer to freedom and control: traffic signs, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sistine Chapel during Second Vatican Council—a period of openness in the Roman Catholic Church. Rivers, too, stands at the edge of abstract expressionism, having retained its splatters of paint while deriving his images from cigar box lids and famous paintings of the past. His gift for facial characterization is evident in Parts of the Face (1961, Tate Gallery).

C

2

Postwar Sculpture and Assemblage

Austrian-born Chaim Gross emerged as a figural sculptor during the 1930s; for almost 60 years he carved blocky human figures of wood, such as Judith (1960, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Isamu Noguchi made smooth abstract sculptures of wood and marble with elegant curves respectful of the material, such as Grey Sun (1967, Smithsonian American Art Museum). But while these two artists worked, an entirely new concept took over American sculpture: assemblage. Assemblage involved putting together different elements to create sculpture—for example, by soldering metal parts—rather than working directly on the sculptural medium through hacking, carving, or molding.

The metal assemblagists of the 1940s and on included David Smith from Decatur, Indiana, and Richard Stankiewicz and Alexander Calder, both from Philadelphia. Smith learned his craft by working in automobile factories and on ships with dockworkers. For some pieces he used sharp, angular shards, and for others, gracefully flowing metal strips. In his Cubi XIX (1964, Tate Gallery) and other burnished metal sculptures in the Cubi series, he used simple geometrical shapes, including cubes. Stankiewicz made his sculptures of discarded remnants—pipes, parts of radios, boilers, and such—that he found by rummaging through junkyards, as in Untitled (1959, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Calder made a serious enterprise of the mobile—a sculpture whose parts are set in motion by air currents—although he was not the first to make sculptures with moveable parts. (Duchamp with his spinning Bicycle Wheel and other pieces had preceded Calder). Calder’s Horizontal Yellow (1972) is a standing version of the mobile.

Louise Nevelson created assemblages of wood, starting in the 1950s. She collected pieces of wood and door handles, architectural decorations, chair legs, and other discarded wooden objects, which she assembled in boxes and then painted in a single color—black, white, or gold. With their careful arrangements of shape and pattern, these works appear related to abstract art. Joseph Cornell made assemblages of glass boxes in which he placed tattered labels, bits of newspapers, shells, old movie posters, reproductions of European paintings, or other odds and ends that he carefully collected. His ingenious combination of things often alluded to Europe, whose culture he yearned to experience for himself, though he never managed to do so.

C

3

Post-Painterly Abstraction

In the 1960s and 1970s artists and critics began to classify abstract art as hard-edge or soft-edge, and influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg dubbed both varieties post-painterly abstraction. The term covers a broad group of artists who rejected the gestural effects and expressive brush strokes of the abstract expressionists. Much of their painting was done with acrylic paints rather than with oils, and forms in the paintings could have either clearly defined outlines (hard-edge) or blurred outlines (soft-edge). But both varieties shared a flat quality that gave no evidence of the artist’s manipulation of the paint, a manipulation evident in abstract expressionism. And while abstract expressionists alluded to ideas or emotional states beyond the painting, post-painterly abstractionists wished to produce paintings that had no meanings or allusions beyond what was on the canvas. As hard-edge painter Frank Stella succinctly put it, “What you see is what you see.”

Although the space (or depth) in an abstract expressionist painting is difficult to read, in general the paintings create the impression of a container with objects or images within it. In post-painterly abstraction, by contrast, artists scrupulously avoided giving any sense of depth to their paintings, thus further removing the canvases from any allusion to three-dimensional reality.

Some of the hard-edge artists exploited the repetition of certain shapes. Stella, for example, who had noted the equal spacing of the stripes in Johns’s flags, used brightly colored stripes in his work. He gave many of his canvases non-rectangular shapes and let the stripes follow the outline of the canvas, as in Rozdol II (1973, Seattle Art Museum). Kenneth Noland used circles or chevrons in works such as Split (1959, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Helen Frankenthaler and other soft-edge painters did not prime (use an undercoating on) their canvases; as a result the paint would seep directly into the cloth. Frankenthaler’s thin washes of color seem reminiscent of water or mists moving of their own volition, as in Mountains and Sea (1952, National Gallery of Art). Morris Louis used gravity to create soft-edge bands of color in various formats that he called florals, veils, or columns. He would tilt an upright canvas, allowing the paint to run down it at angles he could control, as in the floral painting Beta Upsilon (1960, Smithsonian American Art Museum).

The profusion of styles during the 1960s and 1970s included op art, whose practitioners aimed at producing pulsating optical aftereffects through the repetition of shapes in their paintings. The best-known American op artist is Richard Anuszkiewicz. Many critics consider op art a branch of post-painterly abstraction.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain