American Art

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Representational Art

Representational art (art that portrays recognizable objects) continued alongside abstract expressionism, primarily outside New York City. On the West Coast, the Bay Area Figurative School emerged in the 1950s and became known for its landscapes and paintings of the human figure. One of its leading members, San Francisco Bay artist Richard Diebenkorn, created softly colored grids whose compositions suggest boulevards or, in View of Oakland (1962, Smithsonian American Art Museum), the rooftops of a city. Wayne Thiebaud, who came to California from Mesa, Arizona, painted pastries and other foodstuffs, taking care to emphasize their gooey and shiny qualities.

Andrew Wyeth, the son of a renowned illustrator, came from farming country near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and painted country scenes, some marked by a sense of disquieting solitude. One of his most poignant works, Christina's World (1948, Museum of Modern Art), is set in Maine and shows a physically disabled young woman as she struggles to reach a distant house at the top of a hill. Morris Graves, from Fox Valley, Oregon, was a follower of Zen who painted birds and other aspects of nature. He regarded his birds, which he often showed as blind, to have moved beyond their physical presence to become symbols of the inner life, as in Raven in Moonlight (1943, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh).

Romare Bearden and Betye Saar dealt with their identities as African Americans, but unlike social realist Jacob Lawrence, they did not focus on the sufferings of their race. Bearden focused on the solidity of the family and the community (Family, 1988, Smithsonian American Art Museum), and Saar, on the mystical aspects of her people's collective past (Black Girl's Window, 1969, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York). Painter Robert Colescott recast the figures in famous paintings of the past with blackface stereotypes of African Americans, thereby satirizing the paintings and pointing to the absence of African Americans in white histories.

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Pop Art

The representational art movement that emerged in New York City in the 1960s was pop art, which followed Johns and Rauschenberg in its use of images drawn from popular culture. But unlike Johns and Rauschenberg, who incorporated mass-produced objects and images in their art, the pop artists re-created commonplace objects and images—soup cans, comic strips, advertising—as works of art in their own right. The pop art movement began in part as a reaction against abstract expressionism, which pop artists believed was too intellectual and divorced from real life. Rather than glorifying the creative process and the artist’s personal touch as abstract expressionism had done, pop art embraced mechanical creation and the impersonality and repetitiveness of the mass media. As with post-painterly abstraction, there seemed to be a lack of involvement on the part of the artist, an absence of allusions or possible interpretations. The writer Susan Sontag characterized the avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s as “a flight from interpretation.”

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The leading pop painters include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist. Warhol, who had enjoyed a successful career as a commercial illustrator, showed as single images or rows of images objects so frequently seen and so immediately recognizable that people never stopped to examine them closely. These objects included dollar bills, the face of Marilyn Monroe as displayed on billboards or in magazines, and Campbell's soup cans. Warhol's attitude toward these objects, positive or negative, cannot be discerned. Surfaces were everything, he claimed. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.” Critics found more behind images of an electric chair or a car crash Warhol re-created from news photos. By repeating the static images, reproducing them in altered colors such as silver and black, and displaying them as art, Warhol restored shock value to the images and what they depicted.

Lichtenstein made paintings from greatly enlarged frames of comic strips dealing with dramatic situations, such as war and romantic entanglements. His large, colorful paintings, such as Whaam! (1963, Tate Gallery), purposefully pointed to their inherent vicariousness. If actual fighting in war constituted the experience in Whaam!, and a photograph that captured that experience was a step away from the reality, then a comic strip based on the photograph would be still another step removed. Finally, a painting based on the comic strip would be at the furthest remove from the actual experience of war.

Rosenquist began as a billboard painter, and his pop paintings reveal this background with their oversized images and enormous size. Advertising also influenced his art, and his fragmented images in unrelated juxtaposition capture the visual overload of a consumer culture. Jim Dine, another pop artist, used as his subjects items found in catalogs, such as ties, bathrobes, and heart-shaped objects (Putney Winter Heart, 1971-1972, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris).

Of the pop sculptors, none is more intriguing than Claes Oldenburg. While dealing with the mass-produced objects of pop art, he avoided the movement’s hard and mechanical qualities. Oldenburg used vinyl and other flexible materials to create his so-called soft sculptures such as Soft Drum Set (1972, Musée National d’Art Moderne). The soft sculptures sag as though they are going to sleep or deflating and 'dying,' thereby evoking the human condition more poignantly than a representational but hard and unyielding figure of a person in a traditional sculpture material. Oldenburg also constructed giant replicas of tools, such as Trowel I (1971-1976, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands), and other common objects, including clothespins, a baseball bat, and a lipstick. Placed out of context, on a city sidewalk or college campus, or in a sculpture park, the pieces elicit from the pedestrian a sense of shock and disassociation. Sculptor George Segal, who is sometimes grouped with the pop artists, made plaster casts of neighbors and friends from New Jersey standing about or engaged in everyday activities. The white figures placed in settings with actual objects seem ghostlike and estranged from their surroundings. In The Curtain (1974, Smithsonian American Art Museum), for example, a plaster nude woman stands behind a wooden window frame, pulling back a cloth curtain.

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Conceptual Art and Minimal Art

The conceptual approach to art gained wide application in the last decades of the 20th century. In this approach, introduced by Duchamp in the second decade of the century, the concept or novel idea becomes more important than the art object. The conceptual art movement took off in the 1960s, spearheaded in America by artists Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth, and others. Lewitt’s concepts were so straightforward that he could telephone the instructions for others to execute. Among his works are three-dimensional grids of open cubes and geometric drawings based on straight lines. Kosuth explored language and meaning, exhibiting, for example, an object (such as a chair), its photograph, and a printed dictionary definition of the object, leaving the observer to ponder the reality of each.

Some conceptual artists worked with industrial materials. Carl Andre employed bricks, squares of metal, and other materials that spread over the floor or ground, usually in flat, rectangular patterns as in 144 Magnesium Squares (1969, Tate Gallery, London). Explaining what he had done, Andre wrote that his work “is atheistic because it is without transcendent form, without spiritual or intellectual qualities; materialistic because it is made out of its own materials without pretension to other materials; and communistic because the form is equally accessible to all men.” Dan Flavin used fluorescent light tubes in different colors, displayed vertically or in various configurations, to transform visually the space they illuminated. These works, as a result, extend beyond the physical object into the onlooker’s space, as in Monument for V. Tatlin (1969, Tate Gallery), which pays homage in its composition to the Russian constructivist sculptor Vladimir Tatlin. In some of Flavin’s works, the lights flash rhythmically on and off. The work of Andre and Flavin also falls into the category of minimal art, sculpture and painting based on geometric modules or other simple units. Sculptor Donald Judd, who created elegant and austere metal boxes of polished metal and Plexiglas, was a leader of the minimal movement.

Conceptual art even encompassed nature and natural forces, and some artists brought art out of the gallery through what became known as earthworks or earth art. Earth art was constructed within and in harmony with the landscape and ordinarily lasted only a limited time before natural processes wore it away. One of the best-known earthworks is Spiral Jetty, created in Utah in 1970 by Robert Smithson. After having 6,000 tons of earth deposited in the Great Salt Lake, Smithson built upon this layer a graceful, narrow coil out of black rock and salt crystals. This coil or spiral jetty, which extended into the lake, was 4.6 m (15 ft) wide and 457 m (1,500 ft) long. The presence of the jetty altered the viewer’s experience of the lake. Although rising water submerged the jetty soon after its completion, photographs and drawings of it remain as documentation.

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The Late 20th Century: 1975-2000

Many of the art movements of the 1970s continued into the latter part of the 20th century. Some artists altered the outdoor environment in ways related to earth art. Others moved their environment-altering art indoors and created room-size artworks. Artists worked in an ever-greater variety of media, including electronic media, especially videos. Some took their art online. A number of artists sought to raise public consciousness by confronting issues such as racism and feminism. Some critics predicted a return to more decorative and less argumentative art as the 21st century began.

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Sculpture

Perhaps the most exciting development in late-20th-century sculpture came from the use of new media. Minimal and conceptual artists had begun this trend by using industrial rather than traditional artistic materials. Earth artists had advanced this notion by incorporating nature into their sculptures.

Bulgarian-born artist Christo altered the landscape and our experience of it, in many cases by wrapping buildings, trees, or other large objects. In 1995 he covered all surfaces of the Reichstag in Berlin, Germany, with 100,000 sq m (120,000 sq yd) of reflective silver fabric. The home of the German parliament, a building that had stood dark and empty from 1945 until the early 1990s, became bright and shiny through Christo’s intervention, changing the pedestrian’s perception of the building and its surroundings. Christo’s art, like Smithson’s, is of short duration but is documented in models, photographs, and drawings. Other Christo projects include Surrounded Islands (1980-1983), in which he floated pink polypropylene fabric around 11 islands in Biscayne Bay near Miami, Florida, and The Umbrellas, which placed umbrellas along the coasts of California and Japan in 1991. Christo’s intrusions into the landscape relate to earth art.

Some late-century sculptors transformed interior spaces rather than the out-of-doors. Known as installation artists, they used a variety of materials to create works that the viewer could walk by or through. Judy Chicago created one of the earliest installations, The Dinner Party (1979, collection of the artist). Each of the 39 place settings in the work represented a different woman in history. Installations by British-born American artist Judy Pfaff referred to specific urban environments and to the natural world. She installed enormous constructed reliefs of fruits and vegetables along a brick wall in Supermercado (1985, Whitney Museum of American Art). She also created imaginative gardens of glass, colored tubing, wire, and other materials in works such as Moxibustion (1994, Exit Art, New York City). Ann Hamilton sought to overwhelm the spectator’s senses in her sculptural installations of the 1980s and 1990s, many of which involved sound, smell, or taste.

Korean-born artist Nam June Paik created sculptural installations from multiple television sets. In these works, an array of rapidly changing images flashes across the TV screens, conveying the fleeting nature of information and the quick cut of television pictures and subjects. The sculpture of Bruce Nauman incorporated flashing neon lights and videotaped images that assault the onlooker with disturbing and disagreeable words, thoughts, images, and sounds.

Duane Hanson created extraordinarily lifelike sculptures of working-class people that he cast life-size in synthetic resins and painted. Caught in mid-stride and decked out in actual (usually mismatched) clothing, these figures stare vacantly ahead. In an exhibition, viewers find it easy to confuse Hanson’s super-realistic figures with other gallery-goers.

Perhaps the most acclaimed U.S. public monument of the last decades of the 20th century is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982, Washington, D.C.), designed by Maya Lin. It consists of two highly polished black granite walls 150 m (493 ft) in total length on which are inscribed the names of more than 58,000 American men and women killed or missing as a result of the Vietnam War (1959-1975). The monument was created to harmonize with its setting on the National Mall. As earth art transforms the environment, the memorial focuses attention not only upon itself, but also changes one's perception of the Mall in its length. Yet the memorial also demands a close-up view: relatives, friends, and other visitors can see their own faces reflected as they search for names. Lin also designed a Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, to honor those who died in the struggle for civil rights.

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