Modern Art

C

Abstraction in Sculpture

American sculptor Alexander Calder began experimenting with abstract forms and motion in the 1920s and 1930s, influenced by the mechanical forms in Russian constructivism and the elemental quality of Mondrian’s compositions. But Calder’s most innovative contribution was the mobile, a work of abstract metal sculpture whose components were both balanced in equilibrium and arranged to permit natural movement. Thus the artist incorporated chance by allowing nature—in the form of wind or air currents–to move parts of the work in unpredictable ways. Calder produced mobiles from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Another sculptor to blur the established boundaries of artistic categories was American David Smith. In works from the 1930s to the early 1950s he combined found objects with abstract shapes, the fluidity of line with the solidity of sculptural form, and the opacity of metal with the transparency of his overall design. His works seem to have no visual center of attention, thus applying the principle of all-over composition found in abstract expressionist paintings. In later works, such as Cubi XIX (1964, Tate Gallery, London), Smith moved from organic to geometric abstraction, welding cubic forms together in precarious balance. He maintained a combination of sculptural and painterly elements by rubbing and polishing the metal surface of Cubi XIX, a process that left curving calligraphic marks and evoked a sense of the artist’s spontaneous execution.

The wooden sculptures of Louise Nevelson also reflect the all-over compositions of abstract expressionism. Nevelson took ordinary objects, contained them within tightly organized geometric frames, and painted them a single color, usually black. By recombining these ordinary objects into a work of art, she neutralized their original identities and functions. The single color united the various elements, even as it drew attention to the variety of their forms. Although many of her pieces rest on the floor, her later works became increasingly dynamic and many of them fastened to the wall. The forms in Mirror Shadow II (1985), for example, intersect at a variety of angles and project energetically toward the spectator.

D

Dada’s Return

Although abstract expressionism had become widely identified with art in the United States from the 1940s on, in the late 1950s American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns wanted to reopen the dialogue between art and ordinary objects, which the dada movement had begun. Rauschenberg invented the combine, an art form that, as its name indicates, combined painting with real objects. These works stood midway between painting and sculpture, high art and popular culture. They combined the gestural and highly personal application of paint typical of the abstract expressionists with the discarded refuse of Western culture, as well as with everyday objects such as newspaper clippings and photographs. Johns likewise played with oppositions. In Flag (1958, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), for instance, he painted a replica of a very familiar object, the American flag. His work parodied the abstract expressionist’s desire for free expression by using the predetermined form and pattern of the flag. But he undermined the format of the flag through the painting’s rough, irregular surface, created by mixing crumpled newspaper with the paint. To complete the circle, this textured surface reminds the viewer of the brush strokes of abstract expressionist works. In addition, Johns chose to represent an object that is as flat as the painting, leaving the spectator to wonder whether this is a painting of a flag, a flag itself, or both.

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E

Minimalism

The stripes of Johns’s flag had a remarkable influence on Frank Stella, an artist whose style helped initiate a completely different movement: minimal art. Stella eliminated any references to everyday objects, but maintained the concept of repetition he had seen in Johns’s flags. In The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (1959, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) Stella painted a symmetrical and precisely measured pattern of white pinstripes on black canvas, using repetition as his means of composing the picture. Once he had defined a modular unit (the stripe), he simply repeated this unit across the canvas. He abandoned the traditional method of composing a picture, in which the artist gradually adds elements to bring the picture into balance, in favor of a method by which the painting virtually paints itself. When asked about the content of his work, Stella replied “What you see is what you see,” implying that the visual experience of the work was most significant, and that attempts to infer meaning were essentially beside the point.

Another key figure in the minimalist movement was sculptor Donald Judd. Like Stella, Judd exploited in his sculptures the minimalist device of repetition. Many of these works consist of series of identical and interchangeable boxes made of such industrial materials as steel and Plexiglas. In addition, Judd eliminated any emotional content from his work by turning over the construction of his sculptures to engineers and craftsmen. Other important minimalist artists were Americans Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin.

F

Pop Art

The pop art movement of the 1960s took inspiration from the use of everyday objects by Johns and Rauschenberg. The pop artists—including Americans Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann—established a stronger connection than ever before between high art and popular culture. In Whaam! (1963, Tate Gallery, London) Lichtenstein created art from something that had never before been associated with high art: the comic book. Lichtenstein reproduced comic strips almost exactly, down to the mechanical dots created by the printing process. But what was most original about Lichtenstein's image was that once separated from the other panels of the comic strip, it no longer told a story. Taken out of context, the image had its own abstract power. Moreover, the machine-printed dots gained a distinctive new quality when Lichtenstein painted them by hand.

Andy Warhol preferred another strategy. Like Judd, he frequently relegated the execution of his pieces to assistants. In his Atomic Bomb (1965, Saatchi Collection, London), and in similar pieces showing car crashes and electric chairs, Warhol took a shocking image from a newspaper and repeated it again and again. These works demonstrated how repetition—made possible by mechanical reproduction techniques—can sometimes desensitize an audience to an image’s content.

G

New Art Forms

In the 1960s and 1970s several movements emerged that attempted to free art from the art market—a system in which works of art become commodities to be bought and sold or held as a financial investment. A group of artists sometimes referred to as postminimalists wanted to create art that would be too short-lived to be sold. Sculptor Richard Serra, for instance, threw molten lead into a corner of the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City for a series of works called Splashing (1968). His point was not only to make ephemeral, unmarketable art, but also to express the inherent properties of the liquid metal, properties that became visible only through the process of putting that material into action.

Artists Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Nancy Holt were also intrigued by how the forces of nature could be incorporated in a work of art. Ultimately, these artists chose to move their work outdoors and create what became known as earthworks (see Sculpture: Earthworks). Instead of brushes or pencils, they used bulldozers and other machinery to move earth into giant sculptural forms. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), for instance, was a giant coil of earth, rock, and salt crystals extending outward from the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Not only was this work too large to be bought or sold, but Smithson left it vulnerable to the natural forces of rain, wind, and erosion.