Art since 1940 : Strategies of Being

by Fineberg, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780130454690
• ISBN10: 0130454699
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-11-01
• Publisher: Prentice Hall

Summary

In Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, Jonathan Fineberg presents the art of the last six decades of our century as a series of responses, made by exceptional men and women, to the conditions of life in baffling and chaotic times. This Second Edition includes a whole new chapter on the 1990s and augmented sections earlier in the book. The year 1940 marks a defining moment in 20th-century art, when many artists of the European avant-garde moved en masse to New York. The city was instantly transformed into the art capital of the world, triggering radical changes of direction as artists, both immigrant and American-born, struggled with the reshuffled facts of their existence. For these artists, says Fineberg, making art was -- as it continues to be for artists today -- a strategy of coming to terms with their moment in history. This book helps us understand these "strategies of being" of the greatest postwar artists, and by extension other artists both well-known and little celebrated. Professor Fineberg focuses on artists' lives and how they intersected with broader cultural issues. Individual artists looked at indepth include Calder, Hofmann, Gorky, Motherwell, de Kooning, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, David Smith, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Bacon, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Johns, Beuys, Klein, Warhol, Rosenquist, Westermann, Arneson, Hesse, Nauman, Christo, Polke, Richter, Guston, Bearden, Aycock, Kiefer, Clemente, Borofsky, Basquiat, and Wojnarowicz.

Author Biography

Jonathan Fineberg has taught at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities and is now Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois.

Table of Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition	p. 10
Acknowledgments	p. 11
Preface	p. 13
Introduction	p. 14
Approaching Art as a Mode of Thought	p. 14
The Concept of the Avant-Garde	p. 16
The Critical Point of View of this Book	p. 18
New York in the Forties	p. 20
New York Becomes the Center	p. 20
Surrealism	p. 20
American Pragmatism and Social Relevance	p. 24
The Depression and the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.)	p. 26
The Availability of European Modernism	p. 28
The Europeans in New York	p. 30
The Sense of a New Movement in New York	p. 31
Commonalities and Differences Among the Artists of the New York School	p. 32
Automatism and Action in the Art of the New York School	p. 34
Action and Existentialism	p. 35
Clyfford Still	p. 38
Adolph Gottlieb	p. 38
Franz Kline	p. 39
Friends in and around the New York School	p. 39
A Dialog with Europe	p. 42
Alexander Calder	p. 42
Calder's Early Life and Themes	p. 42
Calder in Paris	p. 45
Cosmic Imagery and the Mobiles	p. 46
Hans Hofmann	p. 52
Stylistic Lessons from Europe	p. 52
Hofmann's Art Theory	p. 54
Hofmann's Painting	p. 55
Arshile Gorky	p. 59
Gorky's Life (Real and Imagined)	p. 59
The Development of Gorky's Style	p. 61
Gorky's Late Works	p. 65
Robert Motherwell	p. 67
Intellectual Affinities with the European Moderns	p. 68
Recurring Themes in Motherwell's Work	p. 69
Teaching, Writing, and Editing in Motherwell's Early Career	p. 69
Motherwell's Painting	p. 70
Willem de Kooning	p. 74
De Kooning's Training and Early Career	p. 76
The Dissolution of Anatomy into Abstraction	p. 77
The Anatomical Forms Dissolve into Brushstrokes	p. 80
De Kooning's Abstractions of the Fifties	p. 84
The "Women" of the Sixties and the Late Works	p. 84
Existentialism Comes to the Fore	p. 86
Jackson Pollock	p. 86
Pollock's Early Life and Influences	p. 86
Pollock's Breakthrough of the Early Forties	p. 89
Pollock's Transition to a Pure Gestural Style	p. 90
The Dripped and Poured Canvases	p. 92
Pollock in the Fifties	p. 97
Barnett Newman	p. 98
The Revelation of Newman's Onement 1	p. 100
The Paintings of the Late Forties	p. 102
Vir Heroicus Sublimis and Other Works of the Fifties	p. 103
The "Stations of the Cross"	p. 106
Mark Rothko	p. 106
Rothko's Formative Years	p. 107
Turning to Classical Myth	p. 108
Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, and "the Spirit of Myth"	p. 109
"Heroifying" the Ineffable	p. 111
The Murals and Other Late Work	p. 113
David Smith and the Sculpture of the New York School	p. 115
Smith's Initiation into the Art World	p. 116
The Aesthetic of Machines and the Unconcious	p. 118
The Pictograms and Hudson River Landscape	p. 121
An Existential Encounter with the Materials at Hand	p. 121
Career Success and Personal Sacrifices	p. 122
The Figural Presence and the Work of the Last Decade	p. 123
The New European Masters of the Late Forties	p. 128
Jean Dubuffet and Postwar Paris	p. 128
Dubuffet's Painting of the Forties	p. 131
Dubuffet's Philosophical Premises	p. 132
A Focus on Matter in the Fifties	p. 135
A Grand Style of Entropy	p. 137
The Existentialist Figuration of alberto Giacometti	p. 138
Francis Bacon	p. 142
Some International Tendencies of the Fifties	p. 148
Purified Abstraction	p. 148
An Encounter with the Physicality of the Materials in Europe	p. 148
A Material Reading of Action Painting in New York	p. 153
Greenberg's Definition of Modernism	p. 154
The Greenberg School	p. 154
Formalist Painting	p. 156
"New Images of Man" in Europe and America	p. 160
The Cobra	p. 160
The Figurative Revival of the Fifties	p. 162
Figurative Painting in the Bay Area	p. 169
Existential Imagist Art in Chicago	p. 170
The Beat Generation: The Fifties in America	p. 172
"A Coney Island of the Mind"	p. 172
John Cage	p. 174
Merce Cunningham	p. 175
The Cage "Event" of 1952	p. 176
Gutai	p. 176
Robert Rauschenberg	p. 177
The Self as a Mirror of Life	p. 177
Rauschenberg's Early Career	p. 178
The Combine Paintings	p. 181
The Drawings for Dante's Inferno	p. 183
The End of the Combines	p. 183
The Silkscreen Paintings	p. 184
Performance and the Prints of the Later Sixties	p. 187
Appropriating the Real: Junk Sculpture and Happenings	p. 188
Junk	p. 188
The Genesis of the Happenings	p. 188
The Judson Dance Theater	p. 193
Fluxus	p. 193
Walk-in Paintings	p. 193
Claes Oldenburg	p. 197
The "Cold Existentialism" of the "Ray Gun" and The Street	p. 197
The Store Days	p. 198
Soft Sculpture	p. 199
Proposals for Monuments	p. 202
Realizing Monuments and Architectural Scale	p. 203
Jasper Johns	p. 206
"Nature" Is How We Describe It	p. 206
Painting as a Discourse on Language	p. 206
An Aesthetic of "Found" Expression	p. 208
Emotion and Distance	p. 209
Incorporating Objects: What One Sees and What One Knows	p. 209
The Paintings of 1959	p. 210
The New Emotional Tone of the Early Sixties	p. 213
Explorations of Linguistic Philosophy	p. 213
Diver of 1962	p. 215
Periscope (Hart Crane)	p. 216
The Perceptual Complexity of Looking	p. 217
The Hatch Mark Paintings	p. 217
Dropping the Reserve	p. 220
The European Vanguard of the Later Fifties	p. 222
Nouveau Realisme	p. 222
Yves Klein's Romanticism	p. 222
Le Vide	p. 224
The "Living Brush"	p. 224
Seeking Immateriality	p. 226
Klein's Demise	p. 228
The Nouveaux Realistes	p. 230
Joseph Beuys	p. 231
Revealing the Animism in Nature	p. 232
The Artist as Shaman	p. 233
Art as the Creative Life of the Mind	p. 234
British Pop: From the Independent Group to David Hockney	p. 237
Key Figures of the Independent Group	p. 237
The Exhibitions	p. 237
Paolozzi and Hamilton as Artists	p. 239
Reintegrating Popular Imagery into High Art	p. 240
David Hockney	p. 241
The Landscape of Signs: American Pop Art 1960 to 1965	p. 244
The Electronic Consciousness and New York Pop	p. 244
A Turning Point in Theory	p. 244
Events that Shaped the Popular Consciousness	p. 246
Collaging Reality on Pop Art's Neutral Screen of Images	p. 246
Andy Warhol	p. 250
Warhol's Background	p. 251
Selecting Non-Selectivity	p. 251
Eliminating the Artist's Touch	p. 253
A Terrifying Emptiness	p. 253
The Factory Scene	p. 256
Business Art and the "Shadows" that Linger Behind It	p. 257
Roy Lichtenstein	p. 259
James Rosenquist	p. 261
H.C. Westermann, Peter Saul, and the Hairy Who	p. 267
H.C. Westermann	p. 267
Peter Saul	p. 270
The Hairy Who	p. 272
West Coast Pop	p. 277
Funk Art	p. 277
Peter Voulkos	p. 280
The Politicized Cultural Climate of the Sixties	p. 281
William Wiley	p. 281
Ed Kienholz	p. 283
L.A. Pop	p. 283
Robert Arneson	p. 286
Arneson's Break with Conventional Ceramics	p. 286
The Toilets	p. 287
A Technical Breakthrough	p. 287
Objects of the Mid Sixties	p. 289
The Self-Portraits	p. 289
Discovering a Political Voice	p. 291
Introspection via Pollock	p. 291
In the Nature of Materials: The Later Sixties	p. 294
Back to First Principles--Minimal Art	p. 294
Frank Stella	p. 297
Donald Judd	p. 299
Tony Smith	p. 300
Carl Andre	p. 301
Dan Flavin	p. 303
Robert Morris	p. 304
Sol LeWitt	p. 306
The Los Angeles Light and Space Movement	p. 307
Object/Concept/Illusion in Painting	p. 309
A Focus on Surface Handling in Painting	p. 310
Eva Hesse and Investigations of Materials and Process	p. 311
Eva Hesse	p. 312
The Direct Sensuality of Fiberglass and Latex	p. 313
Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra	p. 316
Bruce Nauman	p. 316
Richard Tuttle and Richard Serra	p. 318
Artists Working in the Landscape	p. 323
Michael Heizer	p. 323
Walter De Maria	p. 326
Robert Smithson	p. 327
An Accidental Rubric	p. 331
Arte Povera, and a Persevering Rapport with Nature in Europe	p. 332
Politics and Postmodernism: The Transition to the Seventies	p. 338
Re-Radicalizing the Avant-Garde	p. 338
The Critical Atmosphere of the Late Sixties	p. 338
Language and Measure	p. 340
Art from Nature	p. 342
Vito Acconci: Defining a Conceptual Oeuvre	p. 346
Body Art	p. 347
Ana Mendieta	p. 349
Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica	p. 349
Performance Art	p. 351
Nam June Paik's Electronic Nature	p. 352
Direct Political Comment	p. 354
Marcel Broodthaers	p. 354
Situationism	p. 356
The Potential for Broader Political Action	p. 356
Christo and Jeanne-Claude	p. 356
Art in the Theater of Real Events	p. 356
The Shift to an Architectural Scale	p. 360
The Logistics of the Projects	p. 363
The Surrounded Islands	p. 363
Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the Nineties	p. 364
Postmodernism	p. 365
Sigmar Polke	p. 365
Gerhard Richter	p. 371
John Baldessari	p. 374
Surviving the Corporate Culture of the Seventies	p. 376
A New Pluralism	p. 376
Art and Feminism	p. 381
Photography in the Mainstream	p. 384
A Dazzling Photorealism	p. 384
Entering the Real Space	p. 387
Public Sites	p. 389
Appropriated Sites: Charles Simonds	p. 392
Gordon Matta-Clark's Site Critiques	p. 392
The Complexity That Is Culture	p. 393
Romare Bearden	p. 394
Bearden's Collages of the Sixties	p. 395
Alice Aycock	p. 398
Metaphor Replaces Physicality in Aycock's Work of the Eighties	p. 401
Philip Guston's Late Style	p. 405
Guston's Early Career	p. 405
Guston's Action Paintings of the Fifties	p. 408
The Reemergence of the Figure	p. 408
Painting at the End of the Seventies	p. 414
New Expressionist Painting in Europe	p. 414
Jorg Immendorff's Political Analysis of Painting	p. 416
Grappling with Identity	p. 417
Georg Baselitz and A.R. Penck	p. 418
Anselm Kiefer	p. 420
Italian Neo-Expressionism	p. 424
Francesco Clemente	p. 425
The Internationalization of Neo-Expressionism	p. 426
The Peculiar Case of the Russians	p. 428
Ilya Kabakov	p. 430
New Imagist Painting and Sculpture	p. 433
Elizabeth Murray	p. 439
The Origins of Murray's Style	p. 440
Pursuing the Logic of the Shaped Canvas	p. 440
The Eighties	p. 444
A Fresh Look at Abstraction	p. 444
American Neo-Expressionism	p. 448
Jonathan Borofsky	p. 452
Graffiti Art	p. 454
Keith Haring	p. 455
The East Village Scene of the Eighties	p. 457
Jean-Michel Basquiat	p. 457
David Wojnarowicz	p. 459
Post-Modern Installation	p. 463
Ann Hamilton	p. 464
Appropriation	p. 466
Cindy Sherman	p. 470
The Aesthetic of Consumerism	p. 471
Political Appropriation	p. 474
New Tendencies of the Nineties	p. 478
Return to the Body	p. 478
Transgressing Body Boundaries	p. 482
The Academy of the Avant Garde	p. 484
Cultural Identity	p. 484
New Uses of the Camera	p. 488
Art as Controversy	p. 490
Fashion	p. 493
Slippage: Pop Culture and Romantic Nature	p. 496
Postmodern Conceptualism	p. 499
Constructing the Postmodern Self	p. 500
To Say the Things That Are One's Own	p. 504
Bibliography	p. 506
Notes	p. 512
Index	p. 523
Table of Contents provided by Rittenhouse. All Rights Reserved.