ARTS 4820: ART OF THE LATER TWENTIETH CENTURY

The American Way of Life & The New York School

ARTIST NAMES:

REGIONALISTS and AMERICAN SCENE PAINTERS:

INDEPENDENT AMERICAN ARTISTS:

THE NEW YORK SCHOOL:

GESTURAL PAINTERS:

COLOR FIELD  or CHROMATIC ABSTRACTION PAINTERS:

AbEx Others:

POSTWAR AMERICAN SCULPTORS:(some were also working before the postwar period)

MEXICAN MURALISTS:[influenced size & medium of much of AbEx]

NAMES OF CRITICS/THEORISTS:

MAJOR EXHIBITIONS OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM:

POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION or SECOND GENERATION ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM or COLOR-FIELD PAINTING or NEW ABSTRACTION

MAJOR EXHIBITIONS OF POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION:

TERMS:

Regionalism: A movement in American 20th century art at its strongest during the Depression of the 1930s. The most important adherents, Benton, Curry & Wood, were all from the Midwest and their paintings tend to celebrate the life of small-town, rural America. They were part of the American Scene painters.

Social Realism: Another group of American Scene painters who were concerned with making specific types of social and political statements about the inadequacies and inequalities of American society during the 1930s and 40s. Thomas Craven was a  critic related to this movement in American painting.

Abstract Expressionism: [Also called the New York School and Action Painting (Rosenberg)] A movement which developed in New York City in the 1940s. The term does not denote one particular style, as the work of these artists varied considerably. It does denote an attitude that called for freedom from traditional aesthetic values, and placed emphasis on spontaneous personal expression. Surrealism, with its stress on the role of the unconscious in the act of creation, was a fundamental source of inspiration.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM POP ART
Definition: As the artists of postwar New York grappled with existential ideas, a new style of painting began to evolve which expressed these preoccupations. Characterized by abstract imagery, loose brushwork, and large, dramatic gestures, the new style was thought to represent some crucial psychic drama depicting subjective emotions rather than objective reality. The new style soon became known by several different names, including Painterly Abstraction and Action Painting, but today it is best known as Abstract Expressionism, or AbEx. Definition: the move away from the intensity of Abstract Expressionism and a return to crisp images and defining lines, using easily recognizable figures and objects of popular culture as subjects.

NEO-DADA   FLUXUS   SITUATIONISTS

NEO-DADA: a label applied  by unsympathetic critics in the late 1950s to the work of two American painters--Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.  Johns painted banal images: flags, targets, numbers and maps filling the whole surface of the canvas.  These pictures create a degree of uncertainty in the spectator's mind about the identity of the object confronted.

SITUATIONISTS:  an alliance of the European avant-garde artists, architects, & poets called the "Internationale Situationiste" [IS] which was formed at a conference in Italy in 1957 by amalgamating two existing groups--the "Lettriste Internationale" and the "International Union for a Pictorial Bauhaus."  Members of the IS included the architects Guy Debord & Constant & the Ex-CoBrA painter Asger Jorn.  The aim of IS was to cut across existing political & nationalistic divisions.  They refused to proclaim any sort of doctrine , a fact which makes them rather hard to define, but they did believe in a totality of the arts, an art of interaction, of participation, a spatial art or "unitary town planning" which would consider the needs of different localities and specific situations.  The ideal Situationist was envisioned as an amateur expert, an anti-specialist.  The volatile situationists soon split into competing groups however.  One such breakaway faction, called the "Bauhaus Situationiste Drakagygzet," was established in Sweden in 1961, and based itself on Soren Kierkegaard's philosophy of situations. Some of the artists included: Guy Debord (filmmaker in France & theorist), Asger Jorn (Danish artist), "Constant" A. Nieuwenhuys (artist form the Netherlands), Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio (artist from Italy) and Michael Bernstein (writer from France). As for their art, the Situationists mimic Dada in many ways; Jorn did many over-paintings on second-hand canvases by unknown painters which he bought in flea markets or the like, & transformed them by this double transcription.

FLUXUS: an international avant-garde movement born officially in 1962 and active throughout the 1960s.  The word Fluxus is Latin for flowing; in English Flux means a gushing forth, an abnormal discharge of fluid or blood from the body, a fusion, a state of continuous change; all these shades of meaning apply to the art of the Fluxus movement.  According to Joseph Beuys, its purpose was to "purge the world of bourgeois sickness...of dead art, to promote a revolutionary flood & tide in art, to promote living-art, anti-art, non-art reality...and to fuse the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into  a united front and united action."  The movement was centered initially in Germany; later Fluxus festivals were held in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London & New York.  Fluxus overlaps to some extent with the Happenings of the United States & staged similar events, plus decollage, situations, actions, concerts of electronic music, ant-theater, visual poetry, intermedia, & street performances.  Included many of the major avant-garde artist of the 1960s: Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Robert Filliou, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, La Monte Young, Ben Vautrier, Yoko Ono, Emmett Williams, Henry Flynt, Robert Watts, Naum June Paik, Allison Knowles, George Maciunas.  Fluxus attacked specialization, professionalization, isolation, personal artistic penmanship, and academicism. They also sought to effect social or political change through art.

Art Since 1960 by Michael Archer
(Outline by Shannon White)

Chapter One: The Real and Its Objects
(does NOT follow a chronology prescribed by the book)

I. Introduction to the 1960s

B. challenges to "traditional" categories

C. Other influences and challenges in the early 1960s

D. Schools/Movements resulting from "impulses" of the 1950s

1. Pop

2. Minimalism

3. (every little sub-school or mini-movement in between)

II. Pop Art

1. Roy Lichtenstein

2. Andy Warhol

3. Claes Oldenburg

4. Tom Wesselman

5. James Rosenquist

D. Other artists working in the Pop idiom

E. significant departure from the emotional AbEx-ists

F. Pop symposium, MOMA-NY, 1962

F. references to AbEx
1. acted as a dialogue for "tension between generations" - "a simultaneous continuation of and reaction to that which has gone before"

G. political Pop
1. domestic politics = a. Richard Hamilton
2. "seedier aspects of life" = a. Ed Keinholz
3. Oldenberg's "acerbic edge"
4. David Hockney's "identity politics" - issues of homosexuality
5. "Warhol's disinclination to speak about any message his work might have . . . provides social comment"

III. Op Art

A. kinetic art

IV. Tensions between US and European countries/power-play

A. New York was established as the pre-eminent center of modern art, replacing Paris
1. Nouveau Realisme, an umbrella category, reassured the world that the "balance of cultural power" had changed little

B. Leo Castelli put ads in Art International, 1964, showing the advancement of American artists through Europe as a military analogy

C. artists in France, particularly, were "challenging" the works by American artists in a "keeping up with the Jones'" fashion

D. move toward an emphasis on the process and the artists' actions a. "pushed the persona of the artist to the fore"

1. Yves Klein

2. Niki de Saint-Phalle  a. paint shot from a gun onto canvas

3. Piero Manzoni

4. John Latham a. "one second drawings" 1. "traces of a Minimal 'event'"

5. Oyvind Fahlstrom  a. "the variable paintings"

1. magnetized or hinged cartoon-like pieces that were movable to create many variations
2. incorporates chance

V. Socialist Realism

A. challenged the realism of Pop as being "Capitalist Realism" in comparison

B. Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg/Fischer's Demonstration for Capitalist Realism

C. Wolf Vostell

D. Fluxus and Situationism

VI. Hard-edge painting/Post-painterly Abstraction  =a. emphasis on flatness, rectilinear form

A. Morris Louis

B. Kenneth Noland

1. Targets

VII. Painting in the third dimension/visual incident

A. laid canvas over stretchers jutting out from the wall

B. construction within the rectilinear parameters

1. Lee Bontecou

C. free-standing paintings

1. Anne Truitt

D. Ellsworth Kelly

E. "New Generation" of sculptors

VIII. Minimalism

A. Donald Judd

B. Robert Morris

C. Dan Flavin

D. Carl Andre

E. Frank Stella

1. Minimalist painting

F. Lesser-contrated artists/ associated with Minimalist "tendency"

G. Minimalism in other artistic variations

1. John Cage - music

H. common roots with Pop

IX. Conclusion: new standards in judging new art

A. Greenberg took from Kantian theory that "art might demonstrate 'quality'" - defiance of rationalist tradition (Kantian theory) in the 60s,
Judd asserts the need for art "'only to be interesting'"

1. objections of Minimalism by Michael Fried (Greenbergian critic)

B. Criteria for "new judging"
1. artist's action, participation, the way in which works are produced
2. the resemblance of ordinary things and the way the spectator perceives those ordinary things
3. no longer can one ask "What is it about?" and expect an answer; instead, one can find a set of "cues by which one can orient the experience of being in the gallery with it"

C. blurred boundaries within art; blurred boundaries between art-forms/art as "'a complex and expanded field'"