Painting

XIV

Painting Since World War II

Since World War II (1939-1945), American artists have played a vigorous role in originating new styles or developing those begun in other countries. These include abstract expressionism, op art and pop art, photorealism, and minimalism.

A

Abstract Expressionism

The catalyst in the creation of abstract expressionism, a movement centered in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, was undoubtedly the presence in the United States of many refugee European surrealists. Their exploration of the unconscious and of techniques employing accident intrigued Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and many others. These artists, who favored surrealist automatism (a technique similar to automatic writing) and expressionism, were known as gestural painters. In the hands of Pollock, for example, the painting technique involved dripping colors over large canvases to create energetic, random patterns. Other abstract expressionists, such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, developed color-field painting, applying great expanses of subtly modulated color to the canvas.

B

Op Art and Pop Art

In the 1960s, new styles and movements were initiated. Some painters continued in the path of abstraction, as exemplified by the op art works of Hungarian-born Victor Vasarély. Where op art relies on producing generally abstract optical illusions for its effect, pop art, as in the witty works of its originator, the English artist Richard Hamilton, is representational. Pop artists drew their imagery from advertising billboards, movies, comic strips, and ordinary, everyday objects. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol were major American pop artists.

C

New Realist Painting

The ironic images of pop art helped clear the way for a revival of realist painting. Realism is a continuous but highly individualistic tradition in American art, encompassing such diverse painters as Thomas Eakins, Sloan, Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and Fairfield Porter. The realists who received the most attention in the 1970s and 1980s were those who had assimilated some of the aesthetic concerns of abstract art. Photorealism relied on photography to achieve a precisely detailed, impersonal kind of realist painting, as in the meticulous cityscapes of Richard Estes. The rigorously structured nude figures of Philip Pearlstein and the flatly composed paintings of Alex Katz and Wayne Thiebaud also imparted a cool, abstract tone to realism.

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D

New Abstract Tendencies

After the intense subjectivism of abstract expressionism, abstract painting moved toward a more impersonal, rigorous formal purity. The culmination of this tendency was minimalism, in which painting was reduced to simple geometric forms, rhythmic patterns, or single colors. Leading minimalists included Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Robert Ryman, and Brice Marden. A related movement, hard-edge abstraction, evolved toward more complex and dynamic abstract compositions in the works of Frank Stella and Al Held. Conceptual art, influenced by Duchamp's dictum that painting should be “at the service of the mind,” often consisted of only a single word or a theoretical statement.

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