A visit to

America Creative Rupture The 1960s

Introduction to American Art and Visual Culture – Lecture 6

Franz Kline (1950) Chief

Mark Rothko (1958) Black on Maroon Sketch for “Mural no. 6”

1960s   The nation was in accelerated cultural, social, and political transition.

Painting moved from the deeply personal (last week) to the impersonal

Issues of “High versus Low” were raised.

Multiple voices clamored for equalities and freedoms: women, blacks, etc.

Artists:

Ad ReinhardtEllsworth KellyMorris LouisCy TwomblyAgnes Martin

Robert RauschenbergClaes OldenbergAndy Warhol

Non Compositional Strategies

Ad Reinhardt     ”Art is Art. Everything else is everything else”

Ad Reinhardt (1961) Abstract Painting no 4

Ad Reinhardt (1966) Untitled Screen print

Ad Reinhardt (1954-58) Untitled

Ad Reinhardt hangs his paintings to dry 1966

Ad Reinhardt – works from the 1940s

Ellsworth Kelly   

Take a look at MoMA’s Mp3 description of the artist’s work:http://www.moma.org/audio_file/audio_file/794/ColorChart_601.mp3

   

Ellsworth Kelly

http://www.swiss-miss.com/2007/09/ellsworth-kelly.html

Elsworth Kelly (1963) Red Blue Green

Elsworth Kelly (no date) Orange Curve

Elsworth Kelly (1970)Black Square with Blue

Elsworth Kelly (1958)Broadway

Elsworth Kelly (1952) Méditerannée

Elsworth Kelly (1976-77)Nine Squares

Stains and Graffiti Legacy of Color and Gesture Forefathers

Helen Frankenthaler     “There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.”

Helen

Helen Frankenthaler (1952) Mountains and Sea HER FIRST DRIP PAINTING

Helen

Helen Frankenthaler (1967) Flood

Helen

Helen Frankenthaler (1973) Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Helen

Helen Frankenthaler (1964) Magic Carpet

Morris Louis     “He owes his reputation to the critic Clement Greenberg, who was also his coach. It is not really true, as has often been said, that Greenberg told Louis what to paint, though he probably had more influence over this lonely, gifted and insecure man than any American critic has had over any other artist.” - Critic Robert Hughes

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,962782,00.html#ixzz0YwAjOkQF

Morris Louis (1960) Where

Morris Louis (1961) Alpha Phi

Morris Louis (1958) 7 Bronze

Morris Louis (1959) Nun

Morris Louis (1959) Saf Dalet

Cy Twombly     On graffiti--”Graffiti is linear and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls. But [in my paintings] it's more lyrical. In those beautiful early paintings like Academy, it's graffiti but it's something else, too. I don't know how people react, but the feeling is more complicated, more elaborate. Graffiti is usually a protest - ink on walls - or has a reason for being naughty or aggressive.”Read a rare interview of this artist: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jun/03/art1

Cy Twombly at Houston Exhibition see Gagosian: http://www.gagosian.com

Cy Twombly (1970) Unitled

Cy Twombly (1972) Untitled

Read the entire interview: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jun/03/art1

• The Ferragosto paintingsThey were done in Rome, when I had to stay there in August. I was completely crazy, out of my mind with [the] heat.Paint is something that I use with my hands and do all those tactile things. I really don't like oil because you can't get back into it, or you make a mess. It's not my favourite thing - pencil is more my medium than wet paint. I did by mistake paint on a picture in Lexington and then quickly put an image on top. And I got into the wet. I had the background painted, worked into it and then merged the background and surfaces. Before, I always had a dry background and painted on. Now, I have someone paint the background that I have already figured out. I used to change things in my early paintings to get the nuance or feeling I wanted, but now I plan everything in my head before I do it. Also the scale of the things - they are big and I can't get on the ladder all the time, it hurts. So they are more thought out. I have drawn little sketches of things.

Cy Twombly (1961) Ferrogosto V

Read the entire interview: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jun/03/art1

• Coronation of Sesostris seriesWhen I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time. It can even be a year. These were started in Bassano and hung upstairs for years. I like the sun disc because I managed to do very childlike painting, very immediate. Then I took them to Virginia and finished them - wound up at the end with a detail of Degas's The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans. How it got in there, I don't know, but it's one of my favorite sets.

Cy Twombly (1980) Coronation of Sesostris

Read the entire interview: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jun/03/art1

• A Scattering of Blossoms seriesI work in waves, because I'm impatient. Because of a certain physicality, of lack of breath from standing. It has to be done and I do take liberties I wouldn't have taken before. I got all kinds of wonderful effects that I never achieved before. Sometimes it's simplistic. It's hot, so I do some cool paintings. Lots of times I like to enjoy myself. I think I'm in a good point of working.

Cy Twombly (2007) Untitled

'I'm not too sensitive to color, not really'

Cy Twombly (1988) Untitled Part VII

Cy Twombly (2008)The Rose II

Cy Twombly (2009)Leaving Pathos Ringed with Waves

Cy Twombly at Black Mountain College, North Carolina in the 50s. 'It was the first time I'd been in an atmosphere of artsy-ness'

Agnes Martin     “Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.”

Eight minute Interview of this artist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JfYjmo5OA

Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin (1960) Mountain

Agnes Martin (1962) Tremolo

Agnes Martin (1963) Friendship

Agnes Martin (1952) Untitled Watercolor

Creedence Clearwater Revival (1967) I Heard it Through the Grapevine

TAKE A BREAK, MAN.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJS8j9YYB9w

• 1959 - Barbie Doll and the Microchip invented• 1960 - Introduction of the Twist dance by Chubby Checker• 1962 - Death of Marilyn Monroe1962 - First TV broadcasts

in color• 1962 - Spacewar, the first computer video game, invented• 1962 - The Cuban Missile Crisis• 1963 - TouchTone telephones introduced• 1963 - President John F. Kennedy's assassination• 1963 - Women's Liberation, signaled by the publication of

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique• 1964 - Beatlemania, the Beatles 'invaded' US• 1964 - Boxer Cassius Clay joined the nation of Islam and

changed his name to Muhammad Ali

THE 1960S

• 1965 - Miniskirt made first appearance• 1965 - Watts (LA) race riots• 1965 - Protests of racial stereotyping against 'Amos and Andy' TV

show forced it off the air• 1966 - One Million Years BC made Raquel Welch a sex symbol in a

two-piece fur bikini• 1967 - "Hair" opened off-Broadway• 1967 - First Heart Transplant• 1967 - Anti-Vietnam War Protests Escalated as War Deaths Multiplied• 1968 - "60 Minutes" debuted on CBS-TV• 1968 - Martin Luther King, Jr's and Robert Kennedy's assassinations• 1969 - Woodstock and Summer of Love in San Francisco• 1969 - Introduction of the indoor-safe NERF ball• 1969 - "Sesame Street" debuted on TV• 1969 - Arpanet (first Internet) invented• 1969 - First Man on the Moon with Apollo 11 space flight

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kGYTQeUGB4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY 2.8 million viewers

• The sixties were the age of youth, as70 million children from the post-war baby boom became teenagers and young adults.  The movement away from the conservative fifties continued and eventually resulted in revolutionary ways of thinking and real change in the cultural fabric of American life. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7JVxE2SYxo

Pop Art

Andy Warhol

     “They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself”

Factory personalities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkwD261MHsc&feature=rec-LGOUT-exp_stronger_r2-2r-7-HM

This pair of photo-booth strips is one of Warhol's earliest experiments with photography, a medium that increasingly dominated his art during his peak years of innovation from 1962 to 1968. For Warhol, the photo booth represented a quintessentially modern intersection of mass entertainment and private self-contemplation. In these little curtained theaters, the sitter could adopt a succession of different roles, each captured in a single frame; the resulting strip of four poses resembled a snippet of film footage. The serial, mechanical nature of the strips provided Warhol with an ideal model for his aesthetic of passivity, detachment, and instant celebrity. Here, Warhol has adopted the surly, ultracool persona of movie stars such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, icons of the youth culture that he idolized.

Andy Warhol (1967) Untitled from Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn)

As art historian Marco Livingstone has stressed, Pop Art was never a circumscribed movement with membership and manifestos. Rather, it was a sensibility emergent in the 1950s and rampant in the 1960s. Andy Warhol (who began his career as a fashion illustrator) had been painting Campbell Soup cans since 1962. Such advertising icons, along with cartoons and billboards, yielded a synthesis of word and image, of art and the everyday. Fashion quickly embraced the spirit of Pop, playing an important role in its dissemination. The paper dresses of 1966–67 were throwaways, open to advertising and the commercial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cT10g9U9cU&feature=related

Rauschenberg:

At the same time that Abstract Expressionism began to wane…a disparate group of artists began to explore some of the overlooked implications of action painting—its gestural freedom, chance effects, and urban themes—giving birth to a wide array of strategies epitomized by Robert Rauschenberg's oft-quoted statement that he wanted to act in the gap between art and life. Rauschenberg himself had been making Combines—found objects covered with slashing strokes of paint that blurred the boundaries between high and low—since the mid-1950s, and in the early '60s began transferring photographic images from newspapers directly onto his canvases (via the process of silkscreening) in rebus-like arrangements. In this neo-avant-garde work, artists such as Rauschenberg adapted the shock tactics of World War I-era Dada collagists such as Kurt Schwitters to the new postwar context of American hegemonic power.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ

Robert Rauschenberg (1955) Bed

Robert Rauschenberg(1964) Prize

Robert Rauschenberg (1962) Brace

Robert Rauschenberg (1959) Canyon

Robert Rauschenberg (1963) Estate

Robert Rauschenberg (1964) Harbor

Robert Rauschenberg (1955-59) Monogram

Robert Rauschenberg (1964) Retroactive

Robert Rauschenberg (1963) Tracer

Robert Rauschenberg (1958) Caca-Cola Plan

Rachel Harrison

Claes Oldenburg:

Best known for his oversized soft sculptures of food and consumer objects of the Pop art period, Claes Oldenburg began his career staging avant-garde performances, constructing environments, publishing writings, and generally embracing the commerce of everyday life. Printed work has always played a central role in his art, beginning with commercially produced announcements and ephemera for his Happenings, and continuing with traditional printmaking.

Oldenburg (1961) Store Poster

• In 1961 and 1962, Claes Oldenburg was first to explore the idea of art as an everyday product when he presented a project entitled The Store in his New York studio. The project featured brightly-painted objects such as stockings, dresses, shirts, shoes, pies, chocolates, and ice cream sandwiches made of muslin, plaster, and chicken wire. Oldenburg's The Store not only put forth the idea of the 'art store," it also suggested the types of objects that, by 1965, would be created in abundance by other Pop Artists

Pop art's gaze on the universe of commercial products is often deadpan and cool. With Oldenburg, though, it becomes more comically disorienting: sculptures like Giant Soft Fan challenge our acceptance of the everyday world both by rendering hard objects in soft materials, so that they sag and droop, and by greatly inflating their size. (There are also Oldenburg works that make soft objects hard.) The smooth, impersonal vinyl surfaces of Giant Soft Fan are Oldenburg's knowing inversion of the hard-edge aesthetic of the 1960s.

Yoko Ono     “The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.”

Yoko Ono in the Venice Biennale, 2009. Work from the 1960s

Ono and Lennon used their March 1969 honeymoon in Amsterdam to promote peace (in response to the Vietnam War) by holding a one-week “Bed-In”. They met with the press from 9am to 9pm and sat “like angels.” The signs over the bed read “hair peace” and “bed peace.”

Next Week?

Roy LichtensteinJames RosenquistJim DineLarry RiversWayne TriebaudTom WesselmannLucas SamarasJames RosenquistGeorge SegalEd Ruscha

Carolee SchneemanKenneth NolandRobert MorrisAnd more….