Beyond AbEx: The 1960’s

1. Beyond AbEx: The 1960’s By the 1960s , Abstract Expressionism had lost most of its impact, and was no longer so influential. Movements which were direct responses to, and rebellions against, abstract expressionism had begun, such as pop art and minimalism. Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Tomato Soup, 1962 Ellsworth Kelly, Curved Red on Blue, 1963

2. Pop Art It is a moot point as to whether the most extraordinary innovation of 20th-century art was Cubism or Pop Art. Both arose from a rebellion against an accepted style: the Cubists thought Post-Impressionist artists were too tame and limited, while Pop Artists thought the Abstract Expressionists pretentious and over-intense. Pop Art brought art back to the material realities of everyday life, to popular culture (hence ``pop''), in which ordinary people derived most of their visual pleasure from television, magazines, or comics.Pop artists have focused attention upon familiar images of the popular culture such as billboards, comic strips, magazine advertisements, and supermarket products. Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!, 1963

3. Andy Warhol (1928 -1987) • Andy Warhol began as a commercial illustrator, and a very successful one. • first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962 (32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62.) • -he had a keen eye for art in general and furthered the Duchamp-esque notion that if you simply point at something and call it "art," it is.His aim was to demystify art by making it look as if anyone could have done it. • most of Warhol's best work was done over a span of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was shot. • it all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated by being repeated again and again, there is a role for affectless art... • You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be super-cool, like a slightly frosted mirror. Not that Warhol worked this out; he didn't have to. He felt it and embodied it. He was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity - the famous image of a person, the famous brand name - had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity.

4. Marilyn Monroe was a legend when she committed suicide in August of 1962, but in retrospect her life seems a gradual martyrdom to the media and to her public. After her death, Warhol based many works on the same photograph of her. In reduplicating this photograph of a heroine shared by millions, Warhol denied the sense of the uniqueness of the artist's personality that had been implicit in the gestural painting of the 1950s. He also used a commercial technique - silkscreening - that gives the picture a crisp, artificial look; even as Warhol canonizes Monroe, he reveals her public image as a carefully structured illusion. Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962

5. Do-It-Yourself Seascape, 1963 By the 1960s the popularity of paint-by-numbers had thoroughly dismayed art critics -- just the thing to tempt Andy Warhol to embrace it as Pop Art subject matter. To produce this picture, Warhol projected the line art from a paint-by-numbers kit onto a large canvas before painting.

6. "Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything." Andy Warhol Mao, 1973 Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962 Jackies, 1964

7. Pop Art: Roy Lichtenstein (1923 - 1997) - until 1957 he worked as a commercial artist and designer and did display work for shop windows. - his work borrowed heavily from popular advertising and comic book styles, which he himself described as being "as artificial as possible." Using oil and Magna paint his best known works, such as Drowning Girl(1963 ), feature thick outlines, bold colors and Benday Dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduction.

8. A stimulus for Lichtenstein’s art was provided by a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said; 'I bet you can't paint as good as that.' In 1961 Lichtenstein produced about six paintings showing characters from comic-strip frames, with only minor changes of colour and form from the original source material. It was at this time that he first made use of devices which were to become signatures in his work - Ben-Day dots, lettering and speech balloons. Look Mickey, 1965

9. The Melody Haunts My Reverie, 1965 Blam!, 1962

10. Figures in a Landscape, 1977 Painting Near Window, 1963

11. Pop Art: Claes Oldenburg (1929- ) - sculptor , best known for his public art installations typically featuring large versions of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft versions of normally hard objects. Floor Burger, 1962 "I am for an art that takes its forms from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself." Claes Oldenburg Soft Light Switches, 1969

12. Match, 1987 Binoculars, 1991 Drum Set, 1967 Spoon Bridge & Cherry, 1988

13. Pop Art: David Hockney (British, 1937 - ) David Hockney has always denied being a Pop artist but is included under this heading because this is how the public perceives him. Early paintings show the clear influence of the Neo-dada painters. Since figure-painting seemed 'anti-modern' Hockney began by including words in his paintings as a way of humanizing them, but these were soon joined by figures painted in a deliberately rough and rudimentary style. Second Tea Painting, 1961

14. In 1963 he moved to Los Angeles, entranced by the freedom and wealth of the American lifestyle. A Bigger Splash, 1967 Beverly Hills Housewife, 1966 Lawns Being Sprinkled, 1967

15. Minimalism, Hard-Edge & Op Art Minimalism stressed the idea of reducing a work of art to the minimum number of colours, values, shapes, lines and textures. No attempt is made to represent or symbolize any other object or experience. Hard-Edge and Op Art both emphasize crisp line, bright colour and pure abstraction, with the latter putting more emphasis on the work’s optical effects on the viewer. Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp, 1962 The title comes from a track by the American jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton. Stella was thinking about syncopation while working on the painting. Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled, 1964

16. Spectrum II, 1966-7 Ellsworth Kelly is a master of hard-edge painting, which seeks total unity in images without distinction between foreground and background. During the 1950s and early 1960s, he explored the shadows and reflections created by a single shape against a dark ground. By the late 1960s his shapes had become more symmetrical, and he began to work increasingly with color. In Spectrum II, Kelly arranged thirteen rectangular panels into a "spectrum" chart. The color expands the presence of the painting, giving off its own colored light and affecting all that is near it. To reduce the figure-ground relationship, Kelly is careful not to show any brushstrokes. Along with the monumental scale of this work, its pristine surface is characteristic of Kelly's work.

17. "What you see is what you see."Frank Stella (1936-), American painter, 1966. Critics have described this statement as the unofficial slogan of the Minimalist movement. "The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation."Hilton Kramer (1928-), The New York Times art critic, in the late 1960s. Takht-I-Sulayman Variation II, 1969

18. Frank Stella (1936 - ) Upon moving to New York City around the late 1950s, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by the Abstract Expressionists. He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist's emotional world. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more". Die Fahne Hoch, 1959 The content of the work makes no reference to anything outside of the painting itself. The pattern was deduced from the shape of the canvas—the width of the black bands is determined by the width of the stretcher bars. The white lines that separate the broad bands of black are created by the narrow areas of unpainted canvas. Stella's black paintings greatly influenced the development of Minimalism in the 1960s.

19. Stella also began using “shaped” canvases (canvases in a shape other than the traditional rectangle or square). As well as their influence on other painters, these paintings were an important influence on the development of minimalist sculpture. Stella was a friend of two of the most significant figures in that field, Carl AndreandDonald Judd. Damascus Gate Variation I, 1969

20. Op Art - a term used to describe certain paintings made primarily in the 1960s which exploit the fallibility of the eye through the use of optical illusions. Op art works are usually abstract, with many of the better-known pieces made in only black and white. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of movement, flashing and vibration, or alternatively of swelling or warping. Bridget Riley: Movement in Squares, 1961 Arrest I, 1965

21. Vonal-Fegn, 1971 Victor Vasarely: Vega Nor, 1969