Odalisk Robert Rauschenberg 1955-1958

1. OdaliskRobert Rauschenberg1955-1958 sexual symbolism- collage elements drawn from popular culture, found in advertising phallic post presses into cushion and turns light on or off he wants his assemblages to be taken apart to be seen as individual elements very similar to the spontaneity of action painting

2. BedRobert Rauschenberg1955 Includes striped toothpaste, fingernail polish, pillow, quilt Stresses the act of self-actualization by exploiting the vividness of the associations attached to real things Is not any form of systematic iconography, but rather the individual should read the elements in any number of different ways

3. Canyon Robert Rauschenberg1959 Rauschenberg delved greatly to bring out new items such as, sheet metal and enamel on wood. This diverse work of multiple connotations, unifies just one creative philosophy, that of free & independent randomness. Rauschenberg urged to communicate to the audience through objects and items that played as representational aids, giving American contemporary art and sculpture a new meaning and aspect.

4. Booster Robert Rauschenberg1967 Largest hand-pulled lithograph that had ever been made, full length sequence of xrays of his own body Composition: x-ray, celestial movement of the year 1967, magazine images of drills migrating the stars movement It is not an attempt to bring work out of chaos, but simply waking up to the very life we live Self Portrait

5. Cornell ‘64 Happenings #4: Men cover car with strawberry jamAllan Kaprow1964 Kaprow was exploring a direction in art where idea and process were considered more important than the object. A Happening is an assemblage of events performed or perceived in more than one time and place. Its material environments may be constructed, taken over directly from what is available, or altered slightly; just as its active ties may be invented or commonplace. It is connected with Neo-Dada Movement Kaprow was as much a link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, or even the sculptor George Segal.

6. The Diner George Segal1964-1966 The artist called these types of artworks "situation sculptures.” His “decision to enter literal space was determined by strong urges for total experience” To make the figures, Segal wrapped bandages soaked in plaster around the bodies of his friends or models. When the bandages had dried and hardened, he carefully cut them off and reassembled the cast of the body.  The artist was also inspired by his memories of stopping at this type of restaurant during his late-night drives home to New Jersey after visiting art galleries in New York City.

7. Floor Cake Claes Oldenburg1962 Was inspired by the way cars sat inside a showroom and was determined to fill a gallery with sculptures of that proportion Soft sculpture of canvas and vinyl and stuffed with foam, cardboard, or kapok Comparison to surrealism b/c of radical shift in scale- gave it dreamlike aura Commercial success but critics hated it- it was figurative and funny rather than the march towards abstract purity

8. Geometric Mouse -- Scale A Claes Oldenburg1969/1971 Geometric Mouse X is an abstract, geometric representation of a mouse The mouse became part of Oldenburg's personal mythology. It was used as a letterhead symbol for his first retrospective exhibition Oldenburg regards the geometric mouse as a symbol of analysis and intellect, “autobiographical but not necessarily a portrait…In other words, the mouse is a state of mind” Paint on Cor-Ten Steel

9. ClothespinClaes Oldenburg1976 Began to design on an architectural scale and produced this work for an area in DT Philly Oldenberg directed a team of welders giving it a theatrical quality of testing and reworking ideas even in the final stage The sculpture's resemblance to a daily object should not obscure its artistic qualities. It is not, in fact, a reproduction of an ordinary clothespin, but a sweeping, stylized version.

10. Target with Plaster CastsJasper John1955 They ARE targets but at the same time they are painterly works of art, made with artistic materials Primary colors- analyzing the basic structural elements of the language of painting The newspaper fragments are not supposed to be decoded, but rather meant as a sense of information overload as if one were watching 2 films running over each other. Deals with the idea of randomness in Mass Media Performance aspect; one can open the casts to reveal its “private” contents for a general evocation of the senses

11. Three FlagsJasper Johns1958 Flat subject based on a ready-made formal scheme Prefabricated imagery tied art into mass production and popular consumerism Made the boundaries of the canvas identical to the image leaving nothing but surface treatment as a basis for formal interpretation 3 layers of canvas- seems rather cubist on its play with the illusion of the picture plane

12. False StartJasper Johns1959 Oil on top of newspaper- interweaves patches of primary colors overlapped with stenciled words (the names of colors but not appropriately placed nor were they the words of the color used) What one knows and what one actually sees There are no accidents in his work… he made no studies before completing work meaning his work was all improvisation *Like Polluck

13. Painted Bronze (Ballantine Ale) Jasper Johns 1960 Are these works of art or everyday objects? Handcrafted look- rendered each can and base separately and painted the labels too large and illegible Subject chosen b/c Johns drank Ballantine Ale and the color of the can is similar to the bronze casting Revealed a new emotional intimacy of the artists life

14. Blue Sponge Relief Yves Klein 1957 Klein was a pioneer in the development of Performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of Minimal art, as well as Pop art. Inspired by the sponges themselves The sponges were to represent humanity on intellectual and spiritual levels. The sponges absorb in and out as humans breathe in and out

15. Anthropometrics of the Blue Period Yves Klein 1960 Klein had three nude models cover themselves in blue paint and affix their body prints on the white papers, laid out on the gallery walls and floor. The idea was about the application of the specific blue, not the color itself Sometimes the creation of these paintings was turned into a kind of performance art—an event in 1960, for example, had an audience dressed in formal evening wear watching the models go about their task while an instrumental ensemble played Klein's 1949 The Monotone Symphony

16. Baluba III Jean Tinguely 1961 Junk-art aesthetic from an interest in motion, impermanence, accident *Unlike Rouchsenburg, Rouchsenburg specifically chose his materials in his sculptures whereas Tinguely stumbled upon his materials by accident “Meta-matics” were comically collaged iconoclasm that mechanically painted “abstract expressionist” pictures Often he invited the viewer to participate in his carnival-like contraptions

17. Fat Chair Joseph Beuys 1964 Rejection of materialism in favor of an essential spirituality- stems from the German romantic tradition The chair conforms to human anatomy and order, fat signifies chaos b/c it undergoes a metamorphosis with a slight change in temperature (suggesting a spiritual transcendence in man) His interest in transcendentalism comes from the writings of Rudolph Steiner

18. How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare Joseph Beuys 1965 Covered his head in honey (a life force, product of creativity) and gold pigment, tied a steal sole to right shoe (hard reason) and felt on his left (spiritual warmth), sat for 3 hrs mouthing explanations of his works to the dead hare he held in one hand Opened communication to the non-rational world of soul concerning the irrelevance of explanations in art The artist is not an object-maker but rather a medium of esoteric knowledge

19. The Pack Joseph Beuys 1969 Known for his highly political work The Pack exudes the chaotic and dynamic energy which Beuys considered essential in order to bring change in society. Twenty-four sledges, resembling a pack of dogs, tumble from the back of a VW van. Each sledge carries a survival kit made up of a roll of felt for warmth and protection, a lump of animal fat for energy and sustenance, and a torch for navigation and orientation.  Sense of urgency- part invasion, part escape to survival

20. Lecture at New School, New York with Freedom Democracy Socialism Joseph Beuys 1974 Intense sessions raising political consciousness, drawing diagrams and notations to punctuate his delivery His lecturing did not break his line of sculptural works but rather furthered the evolution towards encompassing “social sculpture” Beuys was motivated by a belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident in the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change. concept of social sculpture, in which society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art (the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk) to which each person can contribute creatively 

21. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, album cover for The Beatles Peter Blake 1967 t featured a colorful collage of life-sized cardboard models of famous people on the front of the album cover and lyrics printed on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a British pop LP According to Blake, the original concept was to create a scene that showed the Sgt. Pepper band performing in a park; this gradually evolved into its final form, which shows The Beatles, as the Sgt. Pepper band, surrounded by a large group of their heroes, rendered as lifesized cut-out figures Blake asked them to make lists of people they'd most like to have in the audience at this imaginary concert

22. Just What Is It That Makes Today's Houses So Different, So Appealing? Richard Hamilton 1956 The collage consists of images taken mainly from American magazines. The principal template was an image of a modern sitting-room in an advertisement in Ladies Home Journal Using commercial graphic-design techniques and imagery from popular media, he undertook sophisticated exploration of the language of visual signs Hamilton described this as “Instant Art” from the magazines

23. Picture Emphasizing Stillness David Hockney 1962 The armature of lines around the painterly figures suggests his debt to Francis Bacon The introduction of lettering into a gestural style of figurative painting, in a small print just in front of the leopard's forepaws, shows the influence of Larry Rivers. The caption, “They are perfectly safe. This is a still” implies that the linguistic context of the picture as a picture (rather than a reference to nature) defines the reality it describes

24. Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott David Hockney 1969 Painting contains stark classicism in the precision of its drawing, in the hard edge application of the paint, and in the orderliness of its composition and one point perspective Hockney felt that photographs distort the way we see by taking in too much at once, so in 1972 he joined multiple close-up and fragmentary photographs of his friend Peter Schlesinger Painting has a moving focus in which the eye follows a path from point to point rather than holding to a conventional one-point perspective

25. Campbell's Soup Cans Andy Warhol 1962 Warhol may have painted them in response to the Painted Bronze of 1960 by Jasper Johns, but surpassed the Johns sculpture in the inexpressive literalness with which they were presented The cans did not represent the soup itself, rather the image of soup, divorcing the signifier from the signified more radically than any painting up to that time had done Canvases have no trace of expressive gesture or individuality

26. Gold Marilyn Monroe Andy Warhol 1962 This creates an expressive dissonance between the machine like façade and the sense of the individual buried within it This overwhelming barrage of surface glitter deuces the observer to a helpless voyeur, passively experiencing life as an assembly line of images By duplicating a photograph known to millions, Warhol undermined the uniqueness and authenticity characteristic of traditional portraiture. Instead he presented Monroe as an infinitely reproducible image.

27. Saturday Disaster Andy Warhol 1964 Warhol embarked on a disaster series that amplified the morbid preoccupations of he “Marilyns.” He based the series on gruesome tabloid photos of mutilated accident victims, the a bomb, and the electric chair He multiplied the images in decorative patterns and brilliant colors These images not only disturb us because of their horrifying explicitness, but also because Warhol’s detachment suggests a depersonalization that is in itself terrifyingly death like

28. Self-Portrait Andy Warhol 1967 Warhol had tended either to print the screens in monochrome, so that the scale of values corresponded to nature, or to find more artificial looking versions of naturalistic colors Changing the values of the photograph and dissociating the colors from any reference in nature at all

29. Skulls Andy Warhol 1964 Series did not sell so well 'I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, and everything could just keep going the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'.'  -Andy Warhol The dichotomy between the subject and the execution, the image of a skull and glamorous colors in which it is painted, is representative of Warhol's schizophrenic personality, of his well documented desire for fame and celebrity, glitzy life in contrast to, as quoted above, his wish for a blank tombstone.

30. Blam! Roy Lichtenstein 1962 Mimics frames of comics and images out of advertisements, improving on them slightly in the composition and details Comparing to Kaprow’s “The Happenings” it has a similar mixture of expressionism, detached humor and objectivity, the objectivity of assimilating found objects from the urban environment without alteration Heavily influenced by the commercialism that surrounded him

31. Little Big Painting Roy Lichtenstein 1965 Lichtenstein denies any intentional social comment in his work. When he explains his motivation in choosing certain subjects and treating them in a certain way, he does so in terms of curiosity -- a desire to redo an old work in a new way The painting injects a note of humor that contradicts the heroic high-seriousness of the Abstract Expressionist Lichtenstein's surface is anonymous. His brush stroke paintings of the nineteen-sixties are related to Jean Tinguely's "meta-matic" machines of the late nineteen-fifties -- works of kinetic sculpture that mechanically produced Abstract Expressionist style paintings. 

32. Drowning Girl Roy Lichtenstein 1963 During this period, Lichtenstein often painted anonymous strips, most often with soap-opera romance or action themes With small holes and heavy pigment Lichtenstein’s screens frequently clogged up, so that he had to touch up sections of the painting by hand to enhance the mechanical look He often contrasted these dot-patterned areas with flatly painted patches to achieve the crass, visual punch of popular media imagery

33. F-111 James Rosenquist 1965 Political and especially anti-war imagery became prominent in Rosenquist’s painting after the assassination of JFK. Designed to cover all four walls of a room of the Castelli Gallery The fighter-bomber runs the entire length of the mural. It underlies everything, just as the public’s concerns over the war did in 1965, when the US began the bombing of North Vietnam

34. The Wait Edward Kienholz1964-65 Mostly made out of desiccated animal bones Her head is in a plastic-encased photo of a young woman’s face, as if the woman of her youth still lives in in her mind She sits patiently waiting in her heavy, dark, antique chair, dressed in brittle, yellowed garments The jars around her neck seem to contain tokens of her memories

35. Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights Edward Ruscha1962 Depicts convincing three-dimensionality of objects in a landscape in LA Ruscha’s trademark and word paintings make an equivalence between words, signs, and objects feel like a matter of course The reality in the picture hovers uneasily between abstraction and representation, undermining the conventional distinction between them As with New York Pop Art, Ruscha’s painting also attack aesthetic and semiotic hierarchies by setting advertising and commercial art devices in a fine art context

36. Cubi XVII David Smith 1963 Evokes figural associations Used liquor boxes to make the 3d cubes, and he also kept 40-50 prefabricated boxes on hand for spontaneous modifications Judd: “Smith seems to combine the anthropomorphism of his forms with the anthropomorphism of things he might observe… ‘it is in the work and it is beyond him.’  Later influences Noland

37. And Half Kenneth Noland 1959 Noland was heavily influenced by the teachings of Josef Albers, who famously taught and wrote that colors and people's perceptions of them are governed by intrinsic human instincts. Albers called this theory "the interaction of colors." Noland spent a lifetime experimenting with a variety of forms (circles, chevrons, plaids, etc.) and colors on the canvas in order to challenge people's perceptions without offering any apparent meaning or context in his art. Noland's art reduced abstract imagery to its most basic archetypes - in the form of geometric shapes and lines.

38. The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (second version) Frank Stella 1959 Influenced by Noland, his geometric paintings and shaped canvases underscore the idea of the painting as object. A major influence on Minimalism Stella was an early advocate of making non-representational paintings, rather than artwork that alluded to underlying meanings, emotions or narratives. He wanted his audiences to appreciate color, shape and structure alone. Stella challenged the very notion of a painting by declaring his flat canvases, structured reliefs, metal protrusions and freestanding sculptures all to be paintings.

39. Untitled (Stack) Donald Judd 1967 Judd rejected Abstract Expressionism through lack of imagery, composition, and by reducing painting and sculpture to its basic elements through using natural light, simple lines, industrial materials, and solid colors on flat surfaces. Therefore replacing the metaphor with literal truth.  Influenced by Frank Stella, Judd believed that art should no longer be representational nor presume to describe human emotion. It should purely just be. Judd's work is governed by a unique combination of reductive and highly distilled geometric forms.

40. Protractor Series: Takht-i-Sulayman Frank Stella 1967 Influenced by Jasper John’s Three Flags, because the objects themselves are the image Repetition of lines/stripes as a rhythm and interval The idea of eliminating foreground and background by painting a single motif, identical with the form of the canvas (as in the flags) led directly to Stella’s most important innovation – the shaped canvas

41. Die Tony Smith 1962 His greatest contribution involved the delicacy with which he calibrated the scale of his works in relation to their sites, undercutting the conventional motion of monumentality and making his sculptures remarkably responsive to their architectural or natural setting Influenced by Barnett Newman, who had been exploring the idea of the holistic image seen all at once as a single form, rather than as parts making up a whole He merely gave the specification to a fabricator over the telephone, thus separating himself completely from the physical object

42. Tomb of the Golden Engenderers Carl Andre 1976 Known for his geometrical arrangement of commercial and natural materials such as bricks, cement blocks, logs, and bales of hay. The clear geometry relates to Frank Stella’s early shaped canvases, while the overall structure implies infinite continuation as in Brancusi’s modular series of “Endless Columns”

43. Zinc-Zinc Plain Carl Andre 1969 The rigidly arranged scheme sets off the natural eccentricities of the materials As the title suggests, Steel Zinc Plainrepresents a territory or a space as much as an object. By placing it on the floor rather than on a plinth and allowing it to be walked across, Andre alters the viewer’s relationship to the work of art. Simple, geometric forms made from industrial materials are characteristic features of Andre’s sculptures.

44. Untitled (to Charles Cowles) Dan Flavin 1963 Flavin’s work emerged out of a mixture of influences, from Kaprow’s happenings and junk sculpture to his struggles with the spirituality of his Catholic upbringing that he rejected and yet somehow could not eliminate In 1963, he began working exclusively with new industrially prefabricated florescent tubes and fixtures Flavin’s works tease the viewer’s definition of art as dependent on an original object

45. Monument for Vladimir Tatlin Dan Flavin 1966 The boundlessness of the light implied the sublime for Flavin and it still carried an association of spirituality – the unlikely fusion of the industrial and the transcendental made these works what he called “a modern technological fetish” This romantic aspect is more pronounced in the work of Flavin and Andre then in that of Stella, Judd, and Morris, whereas they all shared an affinity for industrial materials, simplifies forms, systems, permutations, and a concern with focusing on real materials and space

46. Untitled (Three L-Beams)Robert Morris 1965-66 Famous for exploring the idea of sculpture without fixed form Composed of elements lying down Symbolic, shamanism, spiritual interpretations It is the same shape, but does not represent that (look different) Process art: devised certain strategies in ways he made sculpture

47. Untitled Robert Morris 1968 Explores space and gravitational mass, as well as the idea of mutable form Explores the idea of chance

48. UntitledRobert Morris1967-68 The process involves randomly scattering the pieces across the floor and on top of each other To move pieces, he sent for more pieces to be randomly dropped on the floor by movers themselves Represents use of chance

49. Modular Open Pieces, Floor/Corner Piece Sol LeWitt 1976 These visually complicated works embody simple structural systems that the viewer can extrapolate form their form. LeWitt referred to the underlying concept of these works as a “grammar” LeWitt’s allusion to language derived from structuralism, which posited meaning as a decipherable, universal structure underlying form LeWitt recognized that while the underlying logic in a work may be a simple scheme set on a predictable course, the object itself is experientially unpredictable

50. Four Color Frame Painting #1 Robert Mangold1983 Mangold juxtaposed the framing edges and seams of the canvases with drawn lines that allude to a continuous geometry He deliberately created perceptual contradictions to underscore the incompatible realities of the different systems