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_American Fine Arts 1945-1970 _
By: Anonymous
PREFACE: Art during the mid-twentieth century contained some of the most
important changes art history. These explosive times were counter-balanced
with explosive popular culture. More historical events, abrupt changes, and
turbulence occurred from the end of World War II until the height of the
Vietnam War than in any time period. Before this time, styles of art had
lasted generations. In the 1960s numerous important art movements were
happening at the same time. There were variations on variations, movements
inside of other movements. Therefore, because of the amount of independent and
integrated pieces of movements and styles, a lot can be missed in a short
paper. The amount that happened in these twenty-five years is enough to fill
volumes, and so, this is just a brief scraping off the top of what during
these timesthe most tumultuous times in American History. INTRODUCTION: The
1940s through the 1960s were not only some of the most socially and
politically volatile times in American History, but were the catalyst for the
numerous changes in which occurred in American Popular culture during these
and following years. Instead of experiencing the trauma which resulted after
World War Is end, post-World War II United States returned fairly easily back
to everyday life. Although there were some problems converting from a wartime
to a peacetime economy in the late 1940s, Americans took on the task and
entered the 1950s on a very auspicious high note. During the time period
after World War II, the United States experienced many changes. Technology was
abundant and the rate at which new inventions, industries and technologies
came about was at a rate never seen before. From a television in every home to
the first computers and ultimately space flight, these two decades after World
War II were crowded with advancements. Some of the most dramatic changes came
in the field of art. What was once a single, slow road of popular culture
advancement branched off into thousands of smaller, faster changing roads.
Some of these roads , which can be seen as changing styles, or movements, in
art, whipped Americans through a roller coaster of change in what they saw
around them. The End of World War II: The major art movement taking place in
the United States directly after World War II was abstract expressionism. The
abstract expressionist movement devoted itself to the principles that art is
most expressive when a relationship is established between the artist and the
spectator . For the most part, abstract expressionism attracted the American
public with its simple methods and spontaneous appearance and more so because
it was an entirely American art movement. With most of Europe at war and in
recovery during the 1940s, Americans were left with the principal
responsibility of developing art. Abstract expressionism was, therefore, the
first movement to originate in the United States. During the war in the times
of chaos that existed in the world, America met the challenge of being the
leader in art and developing their own movement which would span the 1940s
and the 1950s. One of the most important artists in abstract expressionism
was Jackson Pollack (see appendix A). Pollacks work runs throughout the span
of the movement. The famous method of action painting which Pollack
developed was much like the times he, and the other artists who practiced this
method, lived in. While there appears to be chaos in the erratic and loose
placement of paint and strokes, there is still a great sense of the pieces
being defined and controlled . The abstract expressionists thought of their
paintings as living things. In Jackson Pollacks My Painting , from 1947, he
says, The source of my painting is the unconscious . The world around
Pollack and all world citizens at this point was chaoticcommunism was running
rampant, war had ripped throughout Europe, the nuclear bomb had been dropped
on Hiroshima. Yet, in this seemingly chaotic and uncontrollable world, these
artists were seeking to reach away from life and towards the unconscious to
control and to define, not destroy and massacre like the Cold War had. The
abstract expressionists saw their representations of paintings as continuous
organisms, not merely an object left to hang on the wall, but as a living
entity that continues in motion . abstract expressionism dominated the art
community for almost two decades and remained based in America. In some ways,
abstract expressionism worked to reestablish art to its truest meaningthe
existence of art in relation to the artists, and its eventual impact on
society . On the other hand, the movements that began to coalesce on the tail
end of abstract expressionism were focused at an opposite goal. Instead of
using art to create popular culture, artists would, as early as the beginning
of the 1950s, use popular culture to create art. The 1950s: The 1950s were
a time of great discord in the United States. McCarthyism ran rampant
throughout the nation and seriously crippled the every day lives of Americans.
Civil rights began to appear as a major issue in all Americans lives as
schools began to integrate black and white students and Rosa Parks sat on the
bus where she was not permitted to in Montgomery, Alabama. While the other
major mediums of popular culture involved themselves deeply in American
politics, on the other hand, popular art stayed mostly as it was. Pollack,
along with other abstract expressionists such as William DeKooning and Mark
Rothko (see appendix B), continued to explore their field with action
painting, abstractions and color-field painting, respectively. Abstract
expressionism dominated the art world of the late 1940s and 50s. Yet as the
1950s peaked, a new style of art began to appear in the art communityFor
the first few years of its existence, and especially in New York, the new Pop
Art movement went relatively unnoticed. The eventual recognition of Pop Art
as a movement took the majority of the 1950s but early Pop art was very
interesting and unique to the art world. When Pop art was recognized as a
shared phenomenon, there was hesitation as to what to call it . Some
suggested New Realism based on an analogy between French and American
movements promoted by Pierre Restany. Others suggested Anti-Sensibility
Painting but people discredited this name because it jumped the gun ; The
majority of people thought that it was only thought of as Anti-Sensible
because it was new and unfamiliar. A third name was Common Object Art, the
closest suggestion to the later name of Pop art, and was used because this new
art contained mainly commonplace, everyday objects, people, and placesobjects
from Popular culture. Eventually the name Pop art came along and stuck, it
being perfect for this new wonder. The major pop artists of the 1950s, such
as Jasper Johns (see appendix C) and Robert Rauchenberg (see appendix D), took
their images from everyday life. Johns painted the American flag and map as
well as words, numbers and letters. Rauchenbergs pieces contained
reproductions of familiar people, places and objects, and created
combine-paintings from paint, silk-screens, prints, three dimensional
sculpture, and collaged paper. Their paintings were still somewhat abstract
expressionist and stayed away from politics. From about 1955 until 1960,
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauchenberg shared a studio and were the first and
best audience for each others art. While their art is different, upon looking
back at it, both Johns and Rauchenbergs art had a kind of proto-Pop art
eminence . Rauchenberg deals, then, with a profusion of objects and events
that he can accept with in a capacious aesthetic. Johns on the contrary, does
not take an optimistic pleasure in the connectivity that random events
generate&If Rauchenberg is the type of artist as radar operator, Johns is the
artist as textual scholar, appraising unreliable symbols . Both Johns and
Rauchenberg were harbingers of the new art movement to come. As early Pop
artists, they introduced the world to a new style of art, playing off abstract
expressionism and looking towards the future. The 1960s: During the
early1960s, art began to seep more and more into popular culture and expand
into itself become a medium of vast difference. The 1960s were the most
dynamic of the decades. Popular culture has its own art movement at this point
and there were more and more new artists joining its ranks everyday. Not only
was Pop art appearing more frequently as a new art movement, but other
movements were being seen more often such as Minimalism, Optical Art, Post-Pop
and Photo-Realism, as well as Conceptual Art. Pop Art Most noticed during the
early to mid 1960s was the Pop Art movement. These times can be summed up as
times during which the entire country was experiencing a new cultural
awakening mobilized by President John F. Kennedys proclamation of a New
Frontier . The American Pop Art movement was centered in New York City
during this time period. New York Pop included an enriching tale of humor
combined with culture much unlike American Pop Arts cousin British Pop Art
whose purpose was solely to undo the work of the abstract expressionists. The
New York Pop artists also represented the fulfillment of the American idea of
mass-production These new artists embarked on a style that did not limit
them, but rather allowed them to explore the freest forms of their creative
minds. Their styles, if one can be defined, all employed different elements,
devices and meanings. They offered new artwork that was closely associated
with the culture of the second half of the 20th century. They portrayed
artwork through a variety of methods that differed from the ordinary painting
or sculptureincluding commercial, comic strip, and food sculptures. They
aimed to depersonalize art, removing such elements as people, and sometimes
focusing on technology or mechanization. Generally, not one painter in the
field of Pop Art was doing the same things as one of his or her counterparts.
Yet, one of the major beliefs that ran through Pop Art was that all art is
similar. All aspects of modern culture had similarities whether it was a
television, assembly line, commercial or person. They used any objects,
magazines, food, newspaper illustrations, clothing, furniture, cars and even
cartoons as part of their theories on art. During this time, Jasper Johns and
Robert Rauchenberg continued to explore the field of Pop Art, as well as many
other newer artists such as Roy Lichtenstien and Andy Warhol One of the most
prominent painters of the Pop Art movement was Andy Warhol (see appendix E).
Andy Warhol began his career as a commercial graphic artist and worked
directly in the field of Pop culture. After the 1950s ended, Warhol moved
into Pop art and out of Pop culture, taking with him numerous unique
influences. Unlike Rauchenberg and Johns, Warhols subjects were not anonymous
or symbolic. Warhol dug straight into the heart of pop culture and focused on
copies of magazine ads, products found in the grocery store such as Campbells
Soup, and famous movie stars and icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth
Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy. Warhols art was free from aestheticism
whatsoever. Warhols paintings were mass produced on silk screens at his
studio aptly named The Factory . He showed that art is nothing more than what
one makes of it and that it can be found everywhere. Roy Lichtenstien (see
appendix F), another artist of this same period, felt the same way about art.
One major difference between Warhol and Lichtenstien is that Lichtenstien
focused on one major subject: comic strips. Lichtenstien, like the others,
took something found in every day culture and created something new with it
and something that works on many levels. In a 1963 interview with Gene R.
Swenson, when asked if he thought Pop art was despicable Lichtenstien summed
up Pop art overall: &It is an involvement with what I think to be the most
brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but
which are also powerful in their impingement on us. I think art since Cézanne
has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art&It has had less
and less to do with the world&Outside is the world; its there. Pop art looks
out into the world; it appears to except its environment& And that was exactly
what Lichtensteins, as well as all the others, art was doing. Taking the
world and making it art. Along with Rauchenberg, Johns, James Rosenquist,
Claes Oldenberg, and Warhol, Lichtenstien laid the foundation for the future
of art Pop art, unlike some other art movements, explored new art practices
that allowed them to inquire into how art can differ from the more mundane
abstract. At the time, people mainly enjoyed Pop art because of its
connectivity from humanity to culture. Yet, today, the implications and
hypotheses of Pop art have left an unprecedented impact on the art world.
Post-Pop and Photo-Realism The later period of Pop-Art remained similar to
what had been happening before. Painters like Ed Ruscha (see appendix G) still
based their art on common things and basic forms. Yet, slowly, as we came
closer to the end of the 1960s, a strange occurrence began to happen in the
art world. A new popular form of art was photo-realism. Photo-realisms roots
grew out of Pop art by taking the images seen from the everyday world. Artists
like Richard Estes (see appendix H) painted scenes of cities, diners, and
drive thrus while Chuck Close (appendix H) painted such realistic self
portraits that they were virtually impossible to tell from a photograph. These
paintings did not have any emotion and were cold but the accuracy was
impossible to get away from, it made them fascinating. The main goal of
photo-realism was to destroy completely what was once abstract or
expressionist art. By doing this, there was the possibility of turning art a
completely new directiontowards a non-abstractionist future. Op Art The Op
(Optical) Art movement was a very short movement taking place after Pop art,
from 1964 until 1967. Op Art began with the desire to involve a correlation
between seeing and understanding . The birth of Op Art came along when an
article in Time Magazine in 1964 called a new art movement, where artists
focus on eye manipulation, Op Art . The artists of the movement such as
Bridget Riley (see appendix I) thought that their movement was one based on
the eye and that the eye was the most important tool for observing and
understanding art. One of the major goals of Op Art was to trick the brain and
the eyeto make them interpret information differently. Like all other optical
illusions, the Op artists would create images that did not really exist by
using line and contrasting color. In Bridget Rileys Current , when one walks
towards or away from the picture, it appears to move. Op art went beyond Pop
Art to create a manufactured look by eliminating paint and brushes completely
and using machines instead. These artists wanted to show how a seemingly empty
and meaningless picture could still capture the emotions of the viewer. Op
art has represented an exploration to understanding how man uses his eyes to
interpret and absorb information . What makes Op Art stand out as an
important movement is that it made art into something that uses understanding
as much as seeing. With Op Art, art became an experience. Minimalism
Minimalism was another short movement taking place in the late 1960s,
primarily in sculpture. This movement received the most criticism from the
public because no one understood how rows of rectangles or interlocking cubes
were truly art. Yet, even though other artists thought their art should have
some aesthetics, the Minimalists only wanted to portray their sculpture in a
clear way. They used found objects like Styrofoam, wood, and fluorescent
lights. Artists like Don Judd, Dan Flavin, and Frank Stella were the select
few that were deemed the Minimalist artists in this time period. Whether they
were painting stripes like Stella or creating sculpture from light bulbs like
Flavin (see appendix J), they were directed towards the same idea: the idea of
order. Minimalism was an important movement because of how antithetical it was
compared to previous movements. Unlike the abstract expressionists, all ideas
of emotion and feeling were removed from the piece. Minimalists also went
beyond the Pop artists by removing the easily recognizable pictures of
everyday things and reducing them to basic forms. Another important role which
Minimalism played its influence on a following and even more abstract
movement: Conceptual Art. Conceptual Art Conceptual Art is one of the most
enigmatic movements in art. It is not based on actual art but rather on an
idea or concept. The forefather of Conceptual Art was Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp.
Duchamps philosophy was that every artworks idea was more important than
its product They eliminated every object from the art itself being left with
only an idea. If the idea was executed, it would only be executed with the
necessary objects or even less artistically, words. Rather than paint and
canvas, the Conceptual artist created books full of their ideas. The
Conceptual artists purpose was to intrigue, shock, amuse, evoke some sort of
emotion, and sometimes even anger the viewer. Conceptual art was a movement
created more for the creator than the viewer. It allowed the artist to be
completely free and able to express with out any limitations what so ever. And
with the height of freedom which existed during this time period, Conceptual
Art officially ends the definable era of Modern Art. Art As Adversary Politics
While much of the art of this time period stayed away from politics, there
were still many artists who dealt with political matters. Throughout time,
modernist artists have most often associated themselves with liberal,
radical, and sometimes revolutionary political positions when they are not
apolitical or neutral in their social and political views . Many politically
slanted works were shown in the sixties, but most of these were of little
lasting aesthetic value . Yet, one place where politics was abundant in art
in the 1960s was in African-American art. This was because of the militant
black struggle against racism and for Civil Rights during this time period.
But modernist art was not a place where African-American art was found. Black
art of the 1950s and 1960s is indeed its own style completely and belongs in
an account outside of modernism. It seems though that artists generally put
themselves rather than their art into politics. For example, in 1965, there
was a full page article in the New York Times under the headline, End Your
Silence signed by more than 500 artists and influential art-oriented persons
and calling for a protest against both the Vietnam War and the US intervention
in the Dominican Republic . Although many people saw Pop art as nothing more
than the flaccid capitulation to the commercial materialism that modernism
had always resisted , many of the artists including Andy Warhol, may have
hidden politics in their complex, nuanced, and ironic art. For example, were
Warhols repetitive silk-screen images of race-riots, automobile disasters and
electric chairs mere bids for publicity and bourgeois titillation, or were
they efforts to demonstrate the desensitizing effect of the endlessly repeated
scenes of horror in the press and on the tube? Was he just taking things from
popular culture and utilizing them in art, or was he commenting on them? This
forces a new analysis of Pop art. Is there a deeper meaning to these simple,
commonplace objects and of these seemingly repetitive ideas? Did they use
things from Pop culture because they were there or because they were showing
what they mean? Is it possible that the art of this time period was more than
meaningless abstractions and redundant images? Yes. As we look back on the art
of the 1960s, we can see deeper into what these pieces mean. How could any
artist living in some of the most volatile and explosive times this nation
ignore the fierce political and social problems surrounding them? The reason
politics wasnt emphasized in art during this time may have been to escape the
things happening in the world. It also may have been that they werent
emphasized so that the viewer could do it by him or herself rather than be
handed the meaning instantly. Conclusion: While it may not appear at first
sight, the art of these times truly did reflect the politics surrounding it.
More importantly though are the new ideas which emerged during these times.
Never before had the world seen so many movements occurring during one time.
Artists during the period from the end of WWII until the height of the Vietnam
War created and recreated art. Art had already been classified as modern and
this put restraints on these artists. They had to explore ways to modernize
themselves even more whether it was from leaving the eye and exploring the
brain in concepts or returning to the same photo-realism that the old masters
used. Critics were saying that art had become a challenge to create with out
being redundant, so artists pushed the limits and became redundant purposely.
That is what the art of this time period encompasses: pushing the limits until
it seems that they cannot be pushed anymore and then doing it again and again
until art is truly created. Art in the mid-19th century was the most dynamic
and influential art of the century and possibly some of the most influential
ever. By using what was already there, these artists produced completely new
ideas. Their brilliance may not be seen in their skill, but rather in their
concept. So as we start in a new millenium, we have to ask ourselves what will
be the next great movement in art? Could there be anything again as
influential as the times that existed here? Only time will tell. SOURCES:
Cagle, Van M., Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art Rock and Andy Warhol, New
York: Sage Publications, 1995 Yapp, Nick, Ed. The 1950s, Chicago: Konemann,
1998 Yapp, Nick, Ed. The 1960s, Chicago: Konemann, 1998 Reed, T.V., American
Popular Culture. (online) Available:
http://www.wsu.edu/~amerstu/pop/tvrguide.html, February 17, 2000 Seitz,
William C., Art in the Age of Aquarius, 1955-1970, Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992 Alloway, Lawrence. American Pop Art, New
York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1974 Dynamic Movements. (online)
Available: Http://library.thinkquest.org/ 17142/dynamic-movements/ Jansen,
H.W., The History of Art, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1997, p. 914-915
Warhols Reflection of the Social Times. (online) Available:
Http://vc.lemoyne.edu/ant305/students/7_abarnett/page3.htm Marcel Duchamp.
(online) Available: http://www.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/duchamp.html
_Bibliography _
SOURCES: Cagle, Van M., Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art Rock and Andy
Warhol, New York: Sage Publications, 1995 Yapp, Nick, Ed. The 1950s, Chicago:
Konemann, 1998 Yapp, Nick, Ed. The 1960s, Chicago: Konemann, 1998 Reed, T.V.,
American Popular Culture. (online) Available:
http://www.wsu.edu/~amerstu/pop/tvrguide.html, February 17, 2000 Seitz,
William C., Art in the Age of
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