Kinetic Art

Kinetic art - art that depends on movement for its effects - has its origins in the Dadaist and Constructivist movements that emerged in the 1910s. It flourished into a lively avant-garde following the landmark exhibition Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris in 1955, after which it attracted a wide international following.

At its heart were artists who were fascinated by the possibilities of movement in art - its potential to create new and more interactive relationships with the viewer and new visual experiences. It inspired new kinds of art that went beyond the boundaries of the traditional, handcrafted, static object, encouraging the idea that the beauty of an object could be the product of optical illusions or mechanical movement.

But the group was split between those such Jean Tinguely, who were interested in employing actual movement, and those such as Victor Vasarely, who were interested in optical effects and the illusion of movement and went on to be more closely associated with the Op art movement. Kinetic art thrived for a decade and achieved considerable prominence. But Op art proved almost too successful in capturing the public's imagination, while Kinetic art eventually began to be seen as a stale and accepted genre. By the mid 1960s, these developments together led to a decline in artists' interest in movement.

Naum Gabo

Linear Construction in Space no. 3, with Red

Gabo’s first constructed works were figurative (e.g. Constructed Head No. 2, 1916; London, artist’s family priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat., p. 92), but following his return to Russia in 1917 he started to make non-figurative reliefs and towers from transparent plastic and glass. Column (144 mm; London, Tate), his most important architectonic sculpture of this period, was conceived in the winter of 1920–21 as a celluloid model. As he intended with most of his works, Gabo enlarged this construction several times. (There is a 1.05 m version in New York, Guggenheim, and a 1.93 m version in Humlebæk, Louisiana Mus.; both measurements include an integral base.) In 1920, in conjunction with an open-air exhibition on Tverskoy Boulevard, Gabo, together with his brother, published his Realistic Manifesto, summarizing his views on art. As with all Gabo’s writings this manifesto is poetically forceful and was highly influential. Rejecting Cubism and Futurism Gabo called for an art for a new epoch, a public art recognizing space and time as its basic elements and espousing construction and kineticism. These ideas are embodied in Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave, 1919–20; London, Tate).

References:

http://www.theartstory.org/movement-kinetic-art.htm

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=2043

Minimal Art

 Also been referred to as ABC art, refers to painting or sculpture made with an extreme economy of means and reduced to the essentials of geometric abstraction.

It applies to sculptural works by such artists as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, John McCracken, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, and Anne Truitt; to the shaped and striped canvases of Frank Stella; and to paintings by Jo Baer, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, and Robert Ryman.

Minimalist art is generally characterized by precise, hard-edged, unitary geometric forms; rigid planes of color—usually cool hues or commercially mixed colors, or sometimes just a single color; nonhierarchical, mathematically regular compositions, often based on a grid; the reduction to pure self-referential form, emptied of all external references; and an anonymous surface appearance, without any gestural inflection. As a result of these formal attributes, this art has also been referred to as ABC art, Cool art, Imageless Pop, Literalist art, Object art, and Primary Structure art.

Minimalist art shares Pop art’s rejection of the artistic subjectivity and heroic gesture of Abstract Expressionism. In Minimal art what is important is the phenomenological basis of the viewer’s experience, how he or she perceives the internal relationships among the parts of the work and of the parts to the whole, as in the gestalt aspect of Morris’s sculpture. The repetition of forms in Minimalist sculpture serves to emphasize the subtle differences in the perception of those forms in space and time as the spectator’s viewpoint shifts in time and space.

Frank Stella

Double Gray Scramble

Throughout his career, Frank Stella has been an innovator in both painting and printmaking. As a young artist, he became known for his reductive Minimalist paintings, executed in series that emphasized a single theme to which each painting presented a different solution or response.

In 1967 he accepted master printer Kenneth Tyler's invitation to make prints at the Gemini G.E.L. workshop. There he continued the serial spare geometry of his paintings, often basing his prints on those paintings, while confronting a new set of challenges in terms of scale, ink, and paper choice.

Stella's prints also afforded him the opportunity to rework certain concepts, as in the 1973 Double Gray Scramble, part of a brief but fruitful foray into screenprint, which combined earlier images of concentric squares in either gray tones or color values. In this work he alternates between color and gray, "scrambling" the squares of the earlier projects.

References:

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/movement/?search=Minimalism

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A5640&page_number=53&template_id=1&sort_order=1

Hard-Edge

The term Hard-edge painting was coined in 1959 by art historian Jules Langsner to characterize the nonfigurative work of four artists from California in an exhibition called Four Abstract Classicists. The term then gained broader currency after British critic Lawrence Alloway used it to describe contemporary American geometric abstract painting featuring an “economy of form,” “fullness of color,” “neatness of surface,” and the nonrelational, allover arrangement of forms on the canvas. This style of geometric abstraction refers back to the work of Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian. Artists associated with Hard-edge painting include Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Liberman, Brice Marden, Kenneth Noland, Ad Reinhardt, and Jack Youngerman.

 Ellsworth Kelly

Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance

With his keen eye for contour, Ellsworth Kelly extracts visual “fragments” from the surrounding world—the sweeping curve of a Romanesque nave, a crescent moon, a barred window—and then condenses them into elemental colors and shapes. Although relentlessly abstract, his forms are anchored to the legible, to details of architecture or landscape, filtered through the artist’s vision. Early in his career, Kelly adopted a philosophy of anti-illusionism that would change the parameters of painting and revise its relationship to sculpture. He began painting monochrome panels in the early 1950s and has been experimenting with this composition (or anticomposition) ever since in single and multipanel formats. With their anonymous, uninflected technique and absence of surface drawing, these pristine “painting-objects” established a new relationship between painting and its architectural context. By defining the structure and shape of each canvas through color—matte, uniform, and without gestural nuance—Kelly eliminated any figure-ground illusion and brought painting into the sculptural realm of objects; the painting itself became the figure, with the wall as its ground.

Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red exemplifies Kelly’s lucid, forthright style. Five monochrome panels are arranged in the order of the chromatic spectrum, the primary colors balanced by their intermediary values of green and orange. The concentrated colors are charged by their interaction with each other, and the work’s size—monumental, yet at a human scale by virtue of its breakdown into vertical panels—further strengthens its presence. Dark Blue Curve signals Kelly’s longtime interest in shaped canvases. It is this focus on peripheral shape identified by color that makes his paintings sculptural, engaging directly with their own forms and the walls around them. The shaped monochromes reinforce the anti-illusionistic project begun with Kelly’s rectangular panels; unframed and unmarked save for their color, they are a more emphatic denial of the window-onto-the-world view of the traditional four-sided easel painting. Wright Curve, a steel sculpture designed for permanent installation in the Guggenheim’s Peter B. Lewis Theater, is named after the museum’s architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Its affinity with the palette and geometry of the auditorium shows the artist’s interest in encouraging site-specific experiences of his painting and sculpture. For Kelly, the transition between the two mediums is fluid: “sculpture for me is something I’ve brought off the wall.”

References:

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/movement/?search=Hard-edge%20painting

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Hard-edge%20painting&page=1&f=Movement&cr=1

Pop Art

International movement in painting, sculpture and printmaking. The term originated in the mid-1950s at the ICA, London, in the discussions held by the Independent group concerning the artefacts of popular culture. This small group included the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi as well as architects and critics. Lawrence Alloway, the critic who first used the term in print in 1958, conceived of Pop art as the lower end of a popular-art to fine-art continuum, encompassing such forms as advertising, science-fiction illustration and automobile styling. Hamilton defined Pop in 1957 as: ‘Popular (designed for a mass audience); Transient (short term solution); Expendable (easily forgotten); Low Cost; Mass Produced; Young (aimed at Youth); Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; and Big Business’. Hamilton set out, in paintings such as £he (1958–61; London, Tate), to explore the hidden connotations of imagery taken directly from advertising and popular culture, making reference in the same work to pin-ups and domestic appliances as a means of commenting on the covert eroticism of much advertising presentation (for illustration see Hamilton, Richard)


American Pop art emerged suddenly in the early 1960s and was in general characterized by a stark and emblematic presentation that contrasted with the narrative and analytical tendencies of its British counterpart. At its most rigorous, American Pop art insisted on a direct relationship between its use of the imagery of mass production and its adoption of modern technological procedures. Whereas British Pop art often celebrated or satirized consumer culture, American Pop artists tended to have a more ambiguous attitude towards their subject-matter, nowhere more so than in the mixture of glamour and pathos that characterized Andy Warhol’s silkscreened icons of Hollywood film stars, as in The Marilyn Diptych (1962; London, Tate).

Compared to the disparate nature of British Pop art, from the early 1960s American Pop art appeared to be a unified movement. Its shared formal characteristics included aggressively contemporary imagery, anonymity of surface, strong, flatly applied colours and a stylistic unity often associated with centralized compositions. Each of the American artists was quick to establish his or her identity, often with the ironic suggestion that the art was like any consumer product or brand name to be marketed. Foremost among them were Warhol’s testaments to machine-line production and to capitalism, such as 80 Two-dollar bills (1962; Cologne, Mus. Ludwig), and Roy Lichtenstein’s formalized enlargements of the frames of comic strips, often violent or melodramatic, for example Drowning Girl (1963; New York, MOMA; for further illustration see Lichtenstein, Roy). 

Richard Hamilton

Palindrome

Richard Hamilton is credited with single-handedly launching the British school of Pop Art with his famous collage "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?"  in 1956, years before that movement arrived on American shores. Trained as a painter and draftsman at the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, his oeuvre also includes a large number of prints in a variety of media, as well as full-scale installations, book production, and industrial design objects. His work in printmaking has been particularly innovative and utilizes the newest technologies available, notably computer-generated images.

In this optically complex print, Hamilton recreates the illusion of someone (in this case, the artist) touching the surface of a mirror, and then simultaneously seeing the back of his own hand, and the frontal reflection of his face and body. The lifesize proportions of the figure add to the scene's veracity. The piece is symbolically titled Palindrome, a word whose Greek derivatives mean "fast (palin) return (dromos)," or rebound, and applies both to words with alphabetic symmetry (e.g., "eye"), and photons bouncing off a reflective surface. Created especially for a group portfolio, Mirrors of the Mind published by Marian Goodman and Multiples Inc. (New York), the project gave the artist the impetus to try a new technology—lenticular laminated three-dimensional printing.

References:

http://www.moma.org/collection/theme.php?theme_id=10170

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2000.382

Post-Painterly Abstraction

The term Post-painterly abstraction was coined by critic Clement Greenberg in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, featuring contemporary American and Canadian artists.

In his essay for the catalogue Greenberg distinguished between Painterly abstraction—his preferred designation for what others have called Abstract Expressionism—and the artistic work that it precipitated by such artists as Gene Davis, Paul Feeley, John Ferren, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Alfred Jensen, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, and others. Some of these artists continued the painterly, loose facture of color and contour pursued by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, while others moved toward a more hard-edged style.

What they shared, according to Greenberg, was the kind of linear clarity and physical openness of design that had begun with Painterly abstraction and continued in its wake, as well as a new tendency to stress contrasts of pure hues, and a rejection of the tactile application of paint in favor of staining the canvas with diluted paint. Often they also sought a flat, anonymous style of execution.

Morris Louis

Alpha-Pi

After a visit to New York in April 1953, where they saw the recent paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, Washington-based friends Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland began to similarly stain raw canvases with diluted pigment, rather than apply it with a brush. Experimenting with different painting techniques and media, compositional formats and canvas sizes in the nine remaining years before his untimely death (from lung cancer), Louis produced an astonishingly large body of work. These paintings are divided into three basic series: the Veils (1954–60), the Unfurleds (summer 1960–January/February 1961), and the Stripes (January/February 1961–summer 1962).

Alpha-Pi is one of about 150 Unfurleds he created, generally on mural-size canvases (this one measures over 8 feet by 14 feet). In all of them, irregular rivulets of different colors flow diagonally down toward the lower center of the canvas, but never quite meet; the center of the unprimed canvas remains blank. Heavily diluted, the poured colors soak into the canvas, becoming one with the surface, and maintain the flatness of the modern picture plane. Color retains its optical purity (since it is not used to describe or define something else) and there is no sense of narrative, image, or perspectival space as in traditional painting. Eschewing illusionistic references, the artist forces the viewer to focus solely on the painting's formal elements—color, size, and shape and the vibrant, light-filled space they inhabit.

References:

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/movement/?search=Post-painterly%20abstraction

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/67.232

Abstract Expressionism

A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world's focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as "Abstract Expressionists" or "The New York School" did, however, share some common assumptions.

Abstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and inspirations. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. The Great Depression yielded two popular art movements, Regionalism and Social Realism, neither of which satisfied this group of artists' desire to find a content rich with meaning and redolent of social responsibility, yet free of provincialism and explicit politics. The Great Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in which many of the group participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a career path.

But it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for the most advanced American art. There were several venues in New York for seeing avant-garde art from Europe. The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. They were also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and retrospectives of Matisse, Léger, and Picasso, among others.

The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man's dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Direct contact with European artists increased as a result of World War II, which caused so many—including Dalí, Ernst, Masson, Breton, Mondrian, and Léger—to seek refuge in the U.S. The Surrealists opened up new possibilities with their emphasis on tapping the unconscious. One Surrealist device for breaking free of the conscious mind was psychic automatism—in which automatic gesture and improvisation gain free rein.

Barnett Newman

Onement I

Newman was interested in creating an art of "pure idea" that could speak to man's tragic condition, yielding metaphysical understanding. To reach that state, the art would have to jettison all narrative, all figuration, and even pare down detail and painterly incident. By 1948, he had honed his concept of "pure idea." He explored the philosophical notion articulated by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century that the merely beautiful be renounced in favor of something greater and more meaningful: the sublime. Newman spoke of artists' need for "freeing ourselves of impediments" in order to produce images of "revelation, real and concrete." And by 1948, Newman had developed his own unique format, designed to express these concerns of meaning and content.

Newman proclaimed Onement, I to be his artistic breakthrough, giving the work an importance belied by its modest size. This is the first time the artist used a vertical band to define the spatial structure of his work. This band, later dubbed a "zip," became Newman's signature mark. The artist applied the light cadmium red zip atop a strip of masking tape with a palette knife. This thick, irregular band on the smooth field of Indian Red simultaneously divides and unites the composition.

References:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/abex/hd_abex.htm

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/68.178

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A4285&page_number=6&template_id=1&sort_order=1

Surrealism

Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I.

According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published “The Surrealist Manifesto” in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

Roberto Matta

Being With (Être Avec)

Matta's enormous mural-size canvas Being With (Être Avec) was painted in 1946 while he was living in New York. Spanning a length of fifteen feet, the composition is a complex labyrinth of architectural structures seen from various perspectives and primitive humanoid figures contorted unnaturally and exploding with sexual exhibitionism. Such imagery certainly drew from his earlier familiarity with architectural design and Surrealist irrationality. Although physically removed from the horrors of the war, Matta's painting clearly expresses his distress at the state of the world. His Surrealist work of the late 1930s to mid-'40s looked within, depicting "psychological morphologies" that invented visual equivalents for various states of personal consciousness. On the other hand, his paintings and drawings of the mid- to late 1940s, such as Being With (Être Avec), which he called "social morphologies," attempted to address the broader societal crisis that the artist felt he was part of (or "being with"). This shift in outlook, and the introduction of figurative and narrative elements into his paintings (no matter how fantastic they appear), eventually led to Matta's alienation from the Surrealist group.

References:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/575336/Surrealism

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2003.270