From Modernism to Postmodernism

1. FROM MODERNISM
TO
POSTMODERNISM

2. CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS
CONTEXTS
DECOLONIZATION
From the beginning in the 19thcentury, imperialist nations owned
almost all the lands in Africa, southern Asia, the Middle East,
Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands as colonies.
After WWII the dismantlement of colonial empires began with the
physical removal of colonizers’ institutions, and the intellectual
decolonization.
The decolonization freed the colonized from the colonizer’s ideas,
and allowed a process of self-determination to begin.
The decolonization involved either nonviolent revolutions or
national liberation wars.
•The Western imperialists powers
• dominated the governments of their colonies,
• introduced western laws, schools, and religions
• tried to change the cultures of the colonized in order to
“civilize” them.

3. • In Latin America and China, the imperialists had spheres of
influence. Countries in the spheres of influence had their own
governments, but their economies were dominated by the
imperialists.
• The five imperialist powers were
• Great Britain
• France
• Germany
• Japan
• Russia
 The Western imperialist nations used their colonies and the
countries in their spheres of influence as sources of raw materials
for their economies, and as markets for their manufactured goods.
 This system made the Western imperialist nations extremely
wealthy.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

4. THE COLD WAR
European NATO allies’ colonial possessions provided them with
economic and military strength that would otherwise be lost to the
alliance. This was a major incentive to act very slowly.
The Cold War complicated the U.S. position of support for
decolonization due to concern over communist expansion and Soviet
strategic ambitions in Europe.
The Cold War competition with the Soviet Union came to dominate
U.S. foreign policy. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the West grew
increasingly concerned that as the European powers lost their
colonies or granted them independence, Soviet-supported regimes
might emerge.
The Cold War concerned everyone in the world because of the
threat of nuclear annihilation.
The Cold War ended in December 1991
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

5.  Arab nationalism became prominent in the Middle East in the late
1960s. The death of Egypt’s president Nasser in 1970 created an
opportunity for religious us leaders to return to politics.
 Social and economic stagnation contributed to the rise of
fundamentalist regimes.
EUROPEAN UNIFICATION
 The Maastricht Treaty established the European Union in 1993 and
introduced European citizenship.
 The main architects were Helmut Kohl(Germany) and François
Mitterrand (France).
 In 2002, euro banknotes and coins replaced national currencies in
12 of the member states. Currently the Eurozone membership
includes 19 countries.
 While no member state has left the EU, the United Kingdom is
negotiating its withdrawal after the membership referendum in
June 2016.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

6. CONCEPTS
THE ART WORLD’S FOCUS SHIFTS WEST MODERNISM,
FORMALISM, AND CLEMENT GREENBERG
CLEMENT GREENBERG (1909-1994) was the greatest art critic of
the second half of the 20th century and possibly the greatest art critic
of all time.
Clement Greenberg is by all accounts the most influential critic of
the mid and late 20th century.
Although his criticism focused mainly on the art of the past century
and a half, which he perceived to be the modernist era, Greenberg's
taste was informed by a wide appreciation of art from all previous
cultures.
Modernism, as he conceived it, began in France with Manet,
flourished under the School of Paris through Impressionism,
Postimpressionism, and Cubism, and spread throughout Europe and
across the Atlantic in the 20th
century.
In the 40s and 50s, his writing in Partisan Review, The Nation and
Commentary set a standard that resulted both admiration and heated
opposition.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

7.  In 1961, he published a revised selection of these essays under the
title of Art And Culture. The book became the most influential and
controversial book of critical writing on art.
 Although he continued to write and to lecture, Greenberg published
nothing after that in book form until The Collected Essays and
Criticism 1939 through 1969, edited by John O'Brian, was released in
four paired volumes in 1986 and 1993.
 By the mid-seventies, opposition to Greenberg had grown to the point
of demonization.
 He was accused of manipulating reputations, of telling artists what to
paint, and, specifically, of arrogantly presuming to edit David Smith's
sculptures after the latter's death.
 Greenberg never did post-graduate studies, never taught, never
worked in a museum; he wasn't an academic.
 Following his graduation from the University of Syracuse in 1930 he
embarked upon a decade-long period of solitary self-education, during
which time he crossed America selling neckties, married, and later
found employment in NYC with the US Customs department.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

8.  Following his graduation from the University of Syracuse in 1930 he
embarked upon a decade-long period of solitary self-education, during
which time he crossed America selling neckties, married, and later
found employment in NYC with the US Customs department.
 During this period his primary interest was in literature, one that that
led eventually to critical assessments of art. He came late to visual art,
led by his working criticism in the early 40s.
 The general opinion is that Greenberg's taste was "narrow", and that
after his discovery of Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists
in the 40s and 50s, his judgments were not progressive.
 As he aged he became increasingly critical of many developments in
contemporary art, which he dismissed as "novelty art." This was
widely interpreted as an inability to appreciate the new, or evidence of
a vested interest in art that satisfied his supposedly prescriptive theory
of modernism.
 Greenberg burst onto the intellectual scene in 1939 with his
publication in Partisan Review of "Avant Garde and Kitsch," which
provided an initial foray into the place of high art in industrial
civilization.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

9. POSTMODERNISM
THE EMERGENCE OF POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has
only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s.
Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that
appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including
art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications,
fashion, and technology. It's hard to locate it temporally or
historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism
begins.
Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is
by thinking about modernism, the movement from which
postmodernism seems to r emerge.
 Modernism has two facets, or two modes of definition, both of
which are relevant to understanding postmodernism.
The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic
movement broadly labeled "modernism."
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

10.  Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas,
rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid
genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parrody, irony, and
playfulness.
 Postmodern art and thought favor reflexivity and self-consciousness,
fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures),
ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the de-structured,
decentered, dehumanized subject.
 Postmodernism differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of
these trends.
 Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human
subjectivity and history but presents that fragmentation as something
tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss.
 Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can
provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most
of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

11.  Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation,
or incoherence, but rather celebrates that.
 The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make
meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.
 Another way of looking at the relation between modernism and
postmodernism helps to clarify some of these distinctions.
 According to Frederic Jameson, modernism and postmodernism are
cultural formations which accompany particular stages of capitalism.
 Jameson outlines three primary phases of capitalism which dictate
particular cultural practices including what kind of art and literature it
produced.
 The first is market capitalism, which occurred in the eighteenth
through the late nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, England, and
the United States.
 This first phase is associated with particular technological
developments, namely, the steam-driven motor, and with a particular
kind of aesthetics, namely, realism.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

12.  The second phase occurred from the late nineteenth century until the
mid-twentieth century (about WWII); this phase, monopoly capitalism, is
associated with electric and internal combustion motors, and with
modernism.
 The third, the phase we're in now, is multinational or consumer
capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and
consuming commodities, not on producing them), associated with
nuclear and electronic technologies, and correlated with postmodernism.
 Like Jameson's characterization of postmodernism in terms of modes of
production and technologies, the second facet, or definition, of
postmodernism comes more from history and sociology than from
literature or art history.
 This approach contrasts "postmodernity" with "modernity," rather than
"postmodernism" with "modernism."
 What's the difference? "Modernism" generally refers to the broad
aesthetic movements of the twentieth century; "modernity" refers to a set
of philosophical, political, and ethical ideas which provide the basis for
the aesthetic aspect of modernism.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

13.  "Modernity" is older than "modernism;" the label "modern," first
articulated in nineteenth-century sociology, was meant to
distinguish the present era from the previous one, which was
labeled "antiquity."
 Scholars are always debating when exactly the "modern" period
began, and how to distinguish between what is modern and what is
not modern;
 it seems like the modern period starts earlier and earlier every time
historians look at it.
 But generally, the "modern" era is associated with the European
Enlightenment, which begins roughly in the middle of the
eighteenth century.
 Other historians trace elements of enlightenment thought back to
the Renaissance or earlier, and one could argue that Enlightenment
thinking begins with the eighteenth century.
 Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and
rationalization, creating order out of chaos.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

14.  The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to
creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is, the
better it will function.
 Because modernity is about the pursuit of ever-increasing levels of
order, modern societies constantly are on guard against anything
and everything labeled as "disorder," which might disrupt order.
 Thus modern societies rely on continually establishing a binary
opposition between "order" and "disorder," so that they can assert
the superiority of "order."
 But to do this, they have to have things that represent "disorder"--
modern societies thus continually have to create/construct
"disorder.“
 In western culture, this disorder becomes "the other“ – defined in
relation to other binary oppositions.
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS

15. EXISTENTIALISM: THE ABSURDITY OF HUMAN
EXISTENCE
Existentialism is the title of the set of philosophical ideals that
emphasizes the existence of the human being, the lack of meaning
and purpose in life, and the solitude of human existence.
Existentialism maintains existence precedes essence: this implies
that the human being has no essence, no essential self, and is no
more that what he is. He is only the sum of life he has created and
achieved for himself.
Existentialism acquires its name from insisting that existence
precedes essence.
Thrown into the world, the human being is condemned to be free.
The human being must take this freedom of being and the
responsibility and guilt of his actions; so the human being must be
accountable without excuse.
The human being must take decisions and assume responsibilities.
There is no significance in this world, this universe.
The human being cannot find any purpose in life; his existence is
only a contingent fact.
THE ARTS FROM MODERNISM
TO POSTMODERNISM AND BEYOND

16.  His being does not emerge from necessity. If a human being
rejects the false pretensions, the illusions of his existence having
a meaning, he encounters the absurdity, the futility of life.
 The human being's role in the world is not predetermined or fixed;
every person is compelled to make a choice. Choice is one thing
the human being must make.
 The trouble is that most often the human being refuses to choose.
Hence, he cannot realize his freedom hence the futility of his
existence.

17. AN INDICTEMENT OF HUMANITY
•Throughout his career, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) focused on the
human figure as the subject of his paintings.
•Unlike other major artists of his time who reveled in abstraction,
such as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Bacon never
deviated from his commitment to making images of people.
•He invented profound and startling new ways of portraying people
as he distorted the inhabitants of his painterly world in order to
“unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to
life more violently.

18. Francis Bacon
Figure Study II, 1945-1946
Oil on canvas, 145 x 129 cm
National Galleries of Scotland

19.  Figure Study II, led to the Great butcher's shop image Painting,
1946, in its palette and in its use of an open umbrella as a
dominant image.
 The open mouth of the woman, conveys in subtler style the mood
of anguished tragedy set, incongruously, in an anonymous foyer
to a private hell.
 Bacon’s early years in London and Dublin during World War I left
Francis Bacon with a lifelong awareness of human suffering and
the violence of everyday life.
 Following World War II, as painters were increasingly drawn to an
art of abstraction, Bacon boldly conveyed a sense of postwar
existential despair though his distortion of the human figure.

20. Francis Bacon
Painting, 1946
Oil and tempera on canvas
123x105.5cm. Private collection

21.  The scene in Painting, 1946, is an old fashioned butcher's shop
with ceramic festoons on the walls and, looming up in the
background, a carcass which - like the Rembrandt carcass’
[Slaughtered Ox] in the Louvre - is also a headless Crucifixion.
In front of this, under an umbrella, is a figure which seems to be
that of a politician or even a Pope addressing an audience.
 The insistence on symmetry, the imitation of superior powers
and the atmosphere of enactment of a ritual combine to give the
work the look of an altarpiece with an overwhelming grandeur
of presence.

22.  "Study for Portrait V" is the fifth of eight variations painted in
1953.
 It began as a portrait study of art critic David Sylvester and
evolved into a satirical reinterpretation of Diego Velasquez's
"Portrait of Pope Innocent X" (1650) as a grotesque, godless
being.
 The menacing grimace and rubbed-out eyes convey a sardonic,
soulless creature more indicative of the "innocent" pope's
corrupt nature.
 Gold paint strokes suggest three-dimensional space and define
a throne that entraps the figure as he floats in a dark void.

23. Francis Bacon
Study after Velazquez's
Portrait of Pope Innocent X,
1953 Oil on canvas,
VELÁZQUEZ, Diego Rodriguez de Silva
Portrait of Innocent X. c. 1650.
Oil on canvas, 141 x 119 cm
Galleria Doria-Pamphili, Rome

24.  Conceived as a shifting sequence of images, Bacon's serial format
was influenced by Eadward Muybridge's nineteenth-century
photographic studies of figures in motion.
 Related canvases from 1951 present a similar papal figure emitting
an anguished scream that intensifies even more the sense of terror,
the absence of God, and the violence of human existence conveyed
in "Study for Portrait V.“
 Perhaps Bacon's most famous image - the so-called 'screaming
pope' in Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) -
became the touchstone for the longest series of paintings in his
career, the Papal Portraits of 1953.
 This series of eight papal portraits was painted during a period of
just a few weeks in the summer of 1953,

25. Francis Bacon
Studies for Portrait I & II, 1953

26. Francis Bacon
Studies for Portrait III & IV, 1953

27. Francis Bacon
Studies for Portrait V & VI, 1953

28. Francis Bacon
Studies for Portrait VII & VIII, 1953

29. SCRAPED AND SEARED CANVASES
 Dubuffet's return to painting was accompanied by a passion for
primitive and naive art forms, as well as for paintings made by the
psychologically disturbed.
 By 1945 he had started to collect so called 'ugly art' or Art Brut, and in
1948 he founded a society to promote this type of work.
 He also wrote some important statements, criticizing the cultural aims
of post-Renaissance Western art, in the place of which he advocated
the more spontaneous, non-verbal, and spiritually potent qualities of
primitive cultural expression.
 This resulted in a totemic approach to image making which soon
revealed itself in his first exhibition, where city life and images of men
and women were presented with an aggressively simple and childish
vigor. These paintings looked more like graffiti covered walls or tribal
emblems than conventional oil paint.

30. Jean DubufetThe Busy Life 1953 (La Vie
affairée). Oil on canvas support
1302 x 1956 mm
Presented by the artist 1966, Tate Gallery

31. LOST IN THE WORLD’S IMENSITY
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor and painter who gained
fame in the late 1930' and through the 1940's.
Known as a surrealist he explored the reality of the human figure.
Giacometti was primarily concerned with reporting the precise
visual perception of objects and their relationship to the enveloping
space.
He reduced form to its essence in a tortured fragmentation that
appears to comment on the nature of humankind in the contemporary
world.
The artist studied Egyptian and Renaissance art and used them to
determine the value and position of man in the 20th century.
Most of his works are made in bronze, and feature scarred or eroded
surfaces.
Within this medium he tried to show the downfall (dehumanization)
of mankind.

32. Alberto Giacometti
Man Pointing, 1947
Bronze.
5′ 10″ x 3′ 5″ x 1′ 4″

33. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
A painting movement in which artists typically applied paint rapidly,
and with force to their huge canvases in an effort to show feelings
and emotions, painting gesturally, non-geometrically, sometimes
applying paint with large brushes, sometimes dripping or even
throwing it onto canvas.
The work is characterized by a strong dependence on what appears
to be accident and chance, but which is actually highly planned.
Usually there was no effort to represent subject matter.
Not all work was abstract, nor was all work expressive, but it was
generally believed that the spontaneity of the artists' approach to their
work would draw from and release the creativity of their unconscious
minds.
The expressive method of painting was often considered as
important as the painting itself.

34. THE PRIMACY OF PROCESS
Action painting is a form of abstract expressionism. Jackson Pollock is
the most celebrated artist of this form.
What makes his style so unique is that he placed a large canvas on the
floor instead of using the traditional easel. He painted with forceful, rapid,
impulsive brush strokes or by splashing the paint directly onto the
canvas.
He also used sticks, trowels, paint cans with holes in the bottom, and
knives to apply the paint.
 His method of painting came from his interest in primitive cultures and
he was especially fascinated with Native American Navajo sand painters
and their method of working.
Their works were created on the ground with sand of various colors let
loose from the hand. He described his abstraction as an attempt to evoke
the rhythmic energy of nature

35. Jackson Pollock
1912-1956

36.  Pollack used the unorthodox techniques that have made him famous,
by flinging the paint and pouring it to gain spontaneous effects.
 Often, he would use numbers as titles for his paintings.
 On some of his work, his footprints are visible, where he literally
stepped into the painting.
 Rather than standing back from the canvas and contemplating it from
a distance, he immersed himself in the act of painting.
 By creating these action paintings, he felt he was actually a part of the
painting.
 He cared more about expressing his emotions and feelings rather
than making a picture look real.

37. Pollock, Jackson
Number 1, 1950
Enamel and aluminum paint on canvas, 63 in x 8 ft 6 in
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

38. Jackson Pollock
1912-1956

39. A FEROUCIOUS AND INTENSE WOMAN
In the late 1940s, de Kooning transformed Cubist abstraction into
an expressionist style of painting. His black and white abstractions,
featured in his first solo exhibition in 1948, established his reputation
as a leader of the New York avant-garde.
During the early 1950s, de Kooning explored the theme of Woman
in a series of violently expressive paintings.
Developing a bold style of gestural paintings, he produced figure
and abstract paintings, throughout the 1950s.
In the 1980s he embarked on a series of starkly simplified, lyrical
abstractions that critics termed his old-age style.

40. Willem de Kooning
Woman I, 1950–1952
Graphite, pastels,
crayon, oil paint

41. COLOR’S ENDURING RESONANCE
By the early 1960s, Newman's art became a resource and an
influence for both Color Field painters and Minimalists.
His work was understood as original in its direct presentation of
pure color, marked only by long lines that were rigorously parallel
to the vertical framing edges.
These lines from the bottom to the top of the canvas (zips the
artist called them zipps) did not define or structure space, but
emphasized only the flatness of the surface itself.

42. Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimus
Oil on canvas. 1950 – 1951. Museum of Modern Art

43.  Mark Rothko is known for his color field paintings, composed of
bright bands of horizontal colors painted on enormous canvases.
 He claimed that in order for a painting to be good it must have a
deeper meaning and that aesthetically it may be well painted,
however, that does not necessarily mean that the painting is good.
 Rothko attended Yale University in 1921 His time at Yale was cut
short after his scholarship was not granted to him during his
second year.
 He decided to drop out altogether and headed for New York.
 He began to experiment with automatic drawing and the
unconscious mind. His technique became looser and produced
lines which dominated the foreground of his paintings.

44.  By the early 1940 his canvases started to increase in size and his
style was still going through changes.
 He began to use color instead of symbols. By this time Rothko was
painting more on canvas and soon abandoned drawing altogether.
 His new compositions created a meditative mood and universality.
This is an example of a painting where Rothko began to paint large
horizontal bands of color. Rothko also abandoned titles for his
works and called them numbers to distinguish them from others.
 Rothko also resisted in explaining what his paintings meant
because he felt that it would limit the viewers mind and
imagination.

45.  Rothko stated, "silence is so accurate." By the late 1950's the
public started to recognize, enjoy, and appreciate Rothko's abstract
work, and as a result his reputation began to grow.
 Although he had established a reputation and respect from the
public, Rothko was still unhappy.
 He felt "trapped and restless." In 1967 he began to increasingly
become more depressed and a year later he suffered from an
aneurysm of the aorta.
 During the last few years of his life he began to paint more with
bright colors despite his mood. Still, everything did not get any
better and he felt as though his life was deteriorating. Consequently
he took his life on February, 25, 1970.

46. Mark Rothko
Untitled, 1961
Oil on canvas, 5’9” x 4’2”

47. POST PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION
ELEMENTAL HARD-EDGE PAINTING
 Ellsworth Kelly is one of the more important American practioners
of abstract art of the second half of the 20th Century.
While he has never identified himself completely with any one
school, he has had a significant influence on Minimal Art, color field
painting, hard-edge painting and what Clement Greenberg called
"post-painterly abstraction" (a loose group of artists who broke with
the painterly high drama of the Abstract Expressionists in favor of a
more austere and formal approach).

48. Ellsworth Kelly
Red, Green, Blue, 1963. 6’3” x 11’3”. Oil on Canvas

49. FRANK STELLA
The spontaneity of Nunca Pasa Nada belies its awesome power
and almost overwhelming scale: it is as vulnerable, clipped and
seemingly precarious as it is monumental, definite and finite.
Ever ambiguous, even at its most explicit, Stella’s art renders
spectacular the crisis of easel painting in the twentieth century.
Stella has consistently explored new expressions of formal
abstraction since he arrived on the New York art scene in 1959.
First his black paintings and shaped canvases, then monumental
geometric constructions known as the Protractor series, followed by
several decades of works that challenge the distinction between
painting and sculpture...

50. Frank Stella, Nunca Pasa Nada, 1964, Lannan Foundation,
Los Angeles, Metallic powder in polymer emulsion on shaped
canvas

51. MINIMAL ART
A twentieth century art movement and style stressing the idea of
reducing a work of art to the minimum number of colors, values,
shapes, lines and textures.
No attempt is made to represent or symbolize any other object or
experience.
It is sometimes called ABC art, minimal art, reductivism, and
rejective art.
Precursors to Minimalism include the Russian Suprematists,
such as Kasimir Malevich (Russian, 1878-1935).

52. UN UNAMBIGUOUS VISUAL VOCABULARY
Donald Judd, in the 1960s, began to create art that used "real
materials in real space."
He created objects that occupied three-dimensional space and
rejected illusionism. He considered himself a painter
Untitled is an example of the "progression" or "stack" work
considered to be Judd's trademark. This piece hangs cantilevered from
the wall.
His work is almost mathematically precise but he claims his geometric
series mean nothing to him in terms of mathematics.
He was impatient with critics who claim that his works and those of
other Minimal artists have no meaning.
He claims he does not attempt to deliver his own political or social
messages, but insists his goal is to focus on the space occupied and
created by his objects--their purity of form.
In the work Untitled Judd challenges the viewer to reconsider the
concepts of boredom, monotony, and repetition.

53. Donald Judd, Untitled (in six units),
Brushed aluminum, 1978 – 1979. 48 x 119 x 14 in.

54. Donald Judd, 1928-1994
Untitled, (ten elements),
1969, anodized aluminum,
27 x 24 x 6 in. each box

55. MULTIPLICITY OF MEANING
 Louise Nevelson was born on September 23, 1899 in Kiev,
Russia.
 Her father was a contractor and a lumber merchant. In 1902, he
immigrated to the United States leaving his family in Russia.
 In 1904, they sold their home and with the money that her father
sent, they left for the United States. They settled in Rockland,
Maine.
 Her father became a successful builder, lumberyard owner and
realtor.
 Louise had strong ties to the family, especially her father. He
advocated equal rights for women.
 Her mother was a beautiful woman and a freethinker.
 Louise knew at an early age that she wanted to be an artist.
 Louise Nevelson resented her husband’s expectations that she
would fit into the mold of upper-middle class matrons and in 931,
they separated.

56.  She took her son to her parents in Maine and she went to Munich,
Germany, to continue her art studies. She was in Munich six
months when the Nazis closed her art studies school.
 She returned to the United States in 1937 and taught at the
Educational Alliance Art School on the Lower East Side of New
York City as part of a WPA-funded program.
 Her first public showing of her sculpture was in 1933. Two years
later, some of her work was part of an exhibit in the Brooklyn
Museum.
 She managed to survive by selling some of her works. Her
reputation as a sculptor grew and, as she exhibited, she sold more
of her works.
 In 1967, she had a woman's show at the Whitney Museum which
became the turning point of her life.
 She continued to create and exhibit her works during the seventies
and the eighties. In 1964, Nevelson created "Homage to 6,000.000,"
a memorial to the Jews killed in the Holocaust.

57.  She was about to donate to the Centre Beaubourg in Paris, a work
worth about S125,000, when the French government released a
Palestinian terrorist.
 She compared this action to the "Hitler era." In protest, she
withdrew her donation of her work to the museum.
 Louise Nevelson was a woman with an independent mind who
threw off the shackles of restrictions and confinement of her life.

58. Louise Nevelson
White Vertical Water, 1972.
Painted wood, 26 sections,
216 x 108 inches overall.
Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum,

59. ORGANIC FORMS
 Louise Bourgeois was born in 1911 in Paris.
 She was the middle child, between her sister and her brother. This
position gave her a sense of instability.
 Unresolved conflicts and ambiguous memories from childhood
were retained as memories of a family in which the mother was the
protective figure. The father, the authoritarian figure cheated her
mother with Saddie, the family's tutor.
 The family home, the network of relationships among the members
of the family, and the child's anguish make up the "childhood
motivations" which are the basis of Louise Bourgeois’ art.
 She entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics in 1932 but turned
to art the following year, enrolling at several art schools, including
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in addition to apprenticing in
artists' studios.

60. Louis Bourgeois
Blind Man´s Buff 1984.
Marble

61.  She emigrated to New York, in 1938, and continued her studies at
the Art Students League.
 Her first one-person exhibition was held at the Bertha Schaefer
Gallery, New York, in 1945, and her sculpture was first shown in
1949 at the Peridot Gallery, New York.
 In 1982 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a
retrospective, which traveled to various American venues.
 Her work has since been shown internationally, including in
Documenta 9 (1992) and the São Paulo Bienal of 1996.

62. Louis Bourgeois
Spider 1996. Bronze # 26.

63.  Her father had a tapestry restoration business, a craft which
acquires a symbolic meaning in her work.
 Unlike her father's business of mending tapestries, a spider
weaves its web.
 The huge Spider signifies labor, giving, protection and foresight.
 The potency of the web is in either welcoming or entangling us as
if we were prey.

64. ERFORMANCE ART
Joseph Beuys viewed performance art as a medium with the
potential for self healing and social transformation. He believed that
by enacting self-invented rituals, he could assume the role of a
modern-day shaman and affect the world around him.
His performances, or "actions," utilized elements of the absurd and
contained layers of meanings and symbols. But even within a
seemingly chaotic environment, Beuys attempted to create an
atmosphere for his viewer that would unite the intuitive, passionate
soul with the intellectual mind, and thus prepare the individual for a
spiritual evolution.
Beuys was introduced to performance art in 1962 when he
encountered Fluxus, a nonconformist international group of artists
who sought to upset bourgeois perceptions of art and life.
Beuys' actions were often described as autobiographical, politically
charged, and intense.

65. Joseph Beuys
Coyote (I Like America
& America Likes Me),
1974. performance/
sculpture

66.  Actions would typically last 45 minutes to nine hours, and though his
actions were not rehearsed, Beuys often created a score or "partitur"
(as opposed to a script) in which he would plan the objects that would
be used and the sequence of the performance.
 Beuys viewed each action as a new version of a basic theme and an
attempt to make his philosophy more comprehensible. He also
believed that the less literal the performances were, the easier it would
be for the audience members to translate his message into their own
lives.
 Beuys traveled to the United States in 1974 and performed an action
entitled I like America and America Likes Me at the René Block Gallery
in New York. The action actually began at Kennedy Airport, where
friends wrapped him in felt and transported him to the gallery in an
ambulance. Beuys then spent several days in a room with only a felt
blanket, a flashlight, a cane that looked like a shepherd's staff, copies
of the Wall Street Journal (which were delivered daily), and a live
coyote. His choice of employing a coyote was perhaps an
acknowledgment of an animal that holds great spiritual significance
for Native Americans.

67. CONCEPTUAL ART
Conceptual art marks a major turning point in late twentieth-century
art.
An art of ideas which can be written, published, performed,
fabricated, or which can simply remain inside your head it is also an
art of questions.
Since its emergence in the mid 1960s, it has challenged our
precepts about not only art but society, politics and the media. An
international movement, Conceptual art encompasses not only North
America and Western Europe but also South America, Eastern
Europe, Russia, China and Japan.
Its legacy is global, ranging from small local participatory projects
to large-scale installations at major museums and biennales.

68. THE DEVELOPMENT OF POP ART
 Pop Art was a movement that departed from the cliches of
boldness so often portrayed in modern art. The Pop artists
disconnected themselves from the idea that art must contain
meaning in the abstract.
 The artists most recognized and closely associated with Pop art
include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and
Richard Hamilton. These artists found success both in Europe and
the United States.
 As it existed then, and as it exists now, Pop Art was a regeneration
and renewal from the nearly two decade reign of Abstract Art.
 The Pop Art movement first began in England (British Pop). Their
roots began with an interest in Cubism and Dadaism.
 They appreciated the work of Marcel Duchamp whose ready-
mades, as he called them, added a new sense of completion for the
Pop artists.

69.  For the most part, the reason Pop Art was so successful for its
artists in the early years was because the world had grown tired of
the repetitive forms of Abstract art.
 The artists began to associate more often with one another in the
1960's.
 Throughout the 1950's and 60's, artists created work that was
deeply rooted in culture, both in the United States and Europe.
 By 1965, when Pop artists showed their work at the Milwaukee art
center, Pop Art had become well defined and regarded.
BRITISH POP: THE INDEPENDENT GROUP
In fact Pop Art was founded in England by Richard Hamilton, who
created collages that parodied the commercial imagery pervasive
at the time (and to this day).

70. Richard Hamilton
Just What Is It That Makes
Today's Homes So
Different,
So Appealing?
Collage,
10.25 × 9.75 inches
Collection of the Kunsthalle
Tübingen, Tübingen,
Germany

71. Richard Hamilton
Just what is it that makes today's homes so
different? Year – 1993
Medium - Laser jet print. Size - 16.7 x 26.7 cm
(image); 21.0 x 29.7 cm (sheet)

72. AMERICAN POP AND
CONSUMER CULTURE:
BEVERAGES IN
BRONZE
Jasper Johns
Painted Bronze II: Ale Cans,
1964

73. A “COMIC” FOCUS IN ART
Roy Lichtenstein,
As I Opened Fire, oil and magna on canvas. 1964
68 in × 168 inches. Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam

74. THE ART OF COMODITIES
Andy Warhol
Green Coca Cola Bottles
Oil on Canvas, 1962

75. A MYTHICAL CELEBRITY
Andy Warhol,
Marilyn Monroe Diptych, 1962. mixed media.

76. SUPERSIZING SCULPTURE
 Claes Oldenburg was born January 28, 1929, in Stockholm,
Sweden, but spent most of his childhood in the United States.
 After studies at Yale University and the Art Institute of Chicago, he
moved to New York City in 1956, where he established himself in
the early 1960s with a series of installations and performances
influenced by his surroundings on the Lower East Side.
 Oldenburg's initial interest in constructing environments such as
The Street (1960), The Store (1961), and Bedroom Ensemble (1963)
soon evolved into a concentration on single sculptures.
 Using ordinary, everyday objects as his form of expression, he
went on to develop "soft" sculpture and fantastic proposals for
civic monuments.
 In 1969, Oldenburg took up fabrication on a large scale with
Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, which became a
controversial focus for student protest when it was installed on the
Yale campus, followed in 1976 by Clothespin for downtown
Philadelphia.

77. Claes Oldenburg
Knife Ship II, 1986. Steel, aluminum, wood; painted with polyurethane
enamel. Closed, without oars: 7 ft. 8 in. x 10 ft. 6 in. x 40 ft. 5 in. Extended,
with oars: 26 ft. 4 in. x 31 ft. 6 in. x 82 ft. 11 in. height with large blade
raised: 31 ft. 8 in. Width with blades extended: 82 ft. 10 in. Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles

78. Claes Oldenburg
Bat Column, 1977
Steel and aluminum painted with
polyurethane enamel
96 ft. 8 in. high x 9 ft. 9 in.
diameter,
on base 4 ft. high x 10 ft.
diameter
Harold Washington Social Security
Center, Chicago

79. SITE-SPECIFIC ART AND ENVIRONMENTAL ART
THE ART OF WRAPPING
 On May 7, 1983 the installation of Surrounded Islands was
completed.
 In Biscayne Bay, between the city of Miami, North Miami, the
Village of Miami Shores and Miami Beach, 11 of the islands
situated in the area of Bakers Haulover Cut, Broad Causeway, 79th
Street Causeway, Julia Tuttle Causeway, and Venetian Causeway
were surrounded with 603,850 square meters (6.5 million square
feet) of pink woven polypropylene fabric covering the surface of
the water, floating and extending out 61 meters (200 feet) from
each island into the Bay.
 he fabric was sewn into 79 patterns to follow the contours of the
11 islands.

80. Christo & Jeanne-Claude
Surrounded Islands, Biscayne
Bay, Miami, Florida, 1980-83

81.  The floating rafts of fabric and booms, varying from 3.7 to 6.7
meters (12 to 22 feet) in width and from 122 to 183 meters (400 to
600 feet) in length were towed through the Bay to each island.
 There were 11 islands, but on two occasions, two islands were
surrounded together as one configuration.

82. Christo & Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin 1971-95

83. Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970
Basalt rock, salt crystals, earth, water
15 ft × 1500 ft. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah
Owner: Dia Art Foundation

84. Duane Hanson
Tourists II, 1988
Autobody filler,
fibreglass and mixed
media, with
accessories life size

85. Duane Hanson
The Tourists, 1974
Autobody filler,
fibreglass and mixed
media, with
accessories life size

86. Duane Hanson. Woman with Suitcase.
Autobody filler, fibreglass and mixed media, with
accessories life size