Pop Art Assemblage Minimalism Conceptual Art Total Art Neorealist and Social Conscience Art

Assemblage

Assemblage is the practice of creating two-dimensional or iii-dimensional artistic compositions past combining and manipulating plant objects.

Learning Objectives

Draw the origins and growth of assemblage fine art.

Fundamental Takeaways

Fundamental Points

• Though the term was not in use until the 1950s, assemblage originates with early on 20th century avant garde movements that sought to challenge traditional artistic media.
• One of the most significant aggregation artists, agile kickoff in the 1930s and 40s, was Louise Nevelson, whose wooden wall-like sculptures disguised their plant-object components under spray paint.
• In the 1960s, neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg became notable for his "combines." These pieces served to suspension the boundaries between fine art, sculpture, and the everyday then that all were present in a single piece of work of art.

Key Terms

• establish-object: A natural object, or one manufactured for another purpose, considered as part of a work of art.

Aggregation is an artistic process whereby ii- or three-dimensional artistic compositions are created by combining found objects. While similar to the process of collage, information technology is distinct in its deliberate inclusion of non-art materials.

The origin of the term in its artistic sense tin can be traced dorsum to the early 1950s, when French artist Jean Dubuffet created a serial of collages of butterfly wings titled "assemblages d'empreintes." Yet, the origin of the artistic practice dates to the early 20^th century, as both Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso equally well every bit others worked with found objects for many years prior to Dubuffet. Russian constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin created his "counter- reliefs " in the eye of 1910s. Alongside Tatlin, the earliest woman artist to endeavour her hand at aggregation was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Dada Baroness. The nigh recognizable aggregation pieces from this menstruum are the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, such as Fountain, 1917. Readymades were institute objects that Duchamp chose and presented as art. The thought was to question the notion of art and the accepted catechism, besides as the adoration of art, which Duchamp establish "unnecessary. "

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain: Duchamp's cribbing of a urinal every bit a piece of art challenged the prevailing definition of sculpture.

Another early and prolific assemblage artist was Louise Nevelson, who began creating her sculptures from institute pieces of wood in the late 1930s. Nevelson's most notable sculptures are wooden, wall-similar, collage-driven reliefs consisting of multiple boxes and compartments that hold abstract shapes and plant objects from chair legs to balusters. Nevelson described these immersive sculptures every bit "environments." The wooden pieces were cast-off scraps institute in the streets of New York. Different Duchamp'southward poor effort to mask the urinal'due south truthful grade, Nevelson spray painted found objects to disguise them of their actual utilise or meaning. Nevelson called herself "the original recycler" because of her extensive use of discarded objects, and credited Pablo Picasso for the cube that served as the groundwork for her cubist-style sculpture.

In 1961, the exhibition "The Art of Assemblage" was featured at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition showcased the work of early 20^th century European artists such as Braque, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters alongside Americans Human Ray, Joseph Cornell, Robert Mallary, and Robert Rauschenberg. Information technology also included bottom-known American Due west Coast aggregation artists such as George Herms, Bruce Conner, and Edward Kienholz. William C. Seitz, the curator of the exhibition, described assemblages equally preformed natural or manufactured materials, objects, or fragments not originally intended every bit art.

Robert Rauschenberg is a pregnant proponent of aggregation art. Rauschenberg picked upwardly trash and found objects that interested him on the streets of New York City and brought these back to his studio where they could become integrated into his work. These works, which he called "combines," served as instances in which the delineated boundaries between art, sculpture, and the everyday were broken downwards so that all were nowadays in a unmarried piece of work of art. Technically "combines" refers to Rauschenberg's work from 1954 to 1962, but the impetus to combine both painting materials and everyday objects such as clothing, urban debris, and taxidermic animals continued throughout his creative life.

Robert Rauschenberg, Coulee: This aggregation combines the materials of oil, housepaint, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, buttons, nails, paper-thin, printed paper, photographs, woods, paint tubes, mirror string, pillow, and bald eagle on canvas.

Operation Art

Functioning art is a genre which presents live fine art with a conceptual basis.

Learning Objectives

Evaluate the various manifestations and goals of operation art

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Though Western performance art began with early 20th century advanced movements, it flourished during the 1960s and 70s when minimalism and abstract expressionism fell out of favor.
• Performance art oftentimes seeks to blur the line betwixt art and life, with 1960s enthusiasm for this medium also reflecting the period's frustrations with traditional fine art.
• Because performance art shifts betwixt venues, audiences, and styles, information technology is unattached to established traditions, thriving during sociopolitical unrest and provoking free thought.

Central Terms

• Conceptual fine art: A genre of art in which the transmission of ideas is more than of import than the creation of an art object.
• Dada: A cultural motility that began in Zürich, Switzerland during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The motility primarily involved visual arts, poetry, theatre, and graphic design, and was characterized past nihilism, deliberate irrationality, disillusionment, cynicism, chance, randomness, and the rejection of the prevailing standards in art.

Operation fine art is a genre that presents alive fine art, usually referring to conceptual art that conveys content through dramatic interaction rather than traditional performances solely for amusement.

Origins

Western cultural theorists trace performance art to early 20^th century advanced movements such as Russian Constructivism, Futurism and Dada. The Dada movement led the way with its unconventional poesy performances, often at the Cabaret Voltaire, by the likes of Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara. However, the virtually significant wave of operation fine art occurred in the 1960s and 70s when abstract expressionism and minimalism became less popular. The enthusiasm for live and innovative performance reflected this period'southward interest in moving past preconceptions that limited what could qualify as fine fine art.

Styles

Performance art was one of many disparate trends that developed as abstract expressionism and minimalism faded. Its breadth and widespread usage, forth with each operation existing every bit a unique occurrence, makes information technology difficult to summarize functioning fine art'southward characteristics. Functioning fine art in the 1960s and 70s included "deportment," body art, happenings, endurance-focused, and ritual -focused performances. "Cutting Piece," an action performed by Yoko Ono in several venues, demonstrates the genre. Ono walked onstage and so knelt on the floor while audience members were encouraged to come onstage and cutting off all of her vesture.

Yoko Ono "Cut Piece" Functioning Fine art

Happenings, a term coined by Allan Kaprow in 1958, are unique, improvisational events that can accept place in any venue and require participation from spectators. At that place is no structured beginning, eye, or finish, and no hierarchy or distinction between the artist and the viewers. The viewers' reactions determine the art piece, making each happening a unique experience that cannot be replicated. Through happenings, the separations between life, fine art, artist, and audience become blurred.

Argentine creative person Marta Minujín in a 1965 happening: Reading the News, a happening in which the creative person got into the Río de La Plata wrapped in newspapers.

The early works of Marina Abramović exemplify endurance-focused, ritual-based performances that explored bug of human being determination, patience and bodily limits. In her commencement functioning, Rhythm 10 (1973), Abramović explored ritual and gesture. Using twenty knives and two tape recorders, she played a Russian game in which she aimed rhythmic knife jabs between her splayed fingers. With this piece and as a performer, Abramović was exploring states of consciousness. Each fourth dimension she cut herself, she picked upward a new knife, began again, and recorded her results. After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listening to the sounds she had made and repeating her previous movements. By replicating her mistakes, she was merging her past actions with the present moment. She explored her concrete and mental limits by injuring herself, and then honored what she had done by repeating the gestures, encouraging the audition to think about what her ritual symbolized and what it meant to repeat the gestures after her ritual had already been performed.

Operation art seeks to demystify fine fine art by blurring the line between art and life. Because information technology can shift fluidly between venues, audiences, and styles and is unattached to traditional forms, performance fine art thrives in times of social upheaval and political unrest, providing a public forum for word, experimentation, and outrage. In the 1980s, performance art vicious from favor following renewed interest in painting, but was resurrected in the 1990s in response to problems involving race, clearing, gay rights, and AIDS. Since and so, performance art has get increasingly accepted in mainstream culture, shown in art museums and becoming a topic for scholarly research.

Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, MOMA, 2010: The Artist Is Nowadays is a 736-hour and thirty-minute static, silent piece in which Abramovic sits immobile while spectators are invited to take turns sitting opposite her, for as long as they want, while she maintains focused eye contact with them.

Photography in the Latter 20th Century

In the early 20th century, photography evolved through multiple styles as information technology became accepted equally a legitimate fine art medium.

Learning Objectives

Discuss the progression of photography from pictorialism and direct photography to the snapshot aesthetic and conceptual work

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• The primeval art photography imitated painting styles, often using soft focus for a dreamy, romantic look known as pictorialism.
• In reaction to pictorialism, some fine art photographers advocated for "straight photography," giving the sharply focused photograph the status of fine art in its own right.
• Following the World Wars, artistic tastes inverse and led to the harsher, cleaner aesthetics of modern art and more interest in urban subject matter.
• Genre photography persisted and the 1960s saw the evolution of the "snapshot aesthetic," featuring bland everyday subject matter and off-centered framing.
• Conceptual photography developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While these artists utilize photography to illustrate an idea, they ofttimes practise not consider themselves photographers merely rather use photography every bit a means to document performances, imperceptible sculpture, or actions.

Key Terms

• Conceptual fine art: A genre of art in which the transmission of ideas is more than important than the cosmos of an art object.

During the 20^th century, both fine art photography and documentary photography became accepted by the English-speaking art world and the gallery arrangement. In the United States, pioneer photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, John Szarkowski, F. Holland Day, and Edward Weston spent their lives advocating for photography as a art. A culminating moment for pictorialism and for photography in general occurred in 1910, when the Albright Gallery in Buffalo bought fifteen photographs from Alfred Stieglitz'south 291 Gallery. This was the start fourth dimension photography was officially recognized as an art form worthy of a museum collection.

Pictorialism

At commencement, fine fine art photographers tried to imitate painting styles, giving rise to pictorialism, a style that uses soft focus to create a dreamy, romantic look. Pictorialism dominated photography from about 1885 to 1915, though information technology was even so promoted by some equally late every bit the 1940s. In general, this term refers to a style in which the lensman has somehow manipulated what would otherwise exist a straightforward photo as a means of "creating" an image rather than just recording it. Typically, a pictorial photograph lacks sharp focus, is printed in ane or more colors rather than blackness-and-white (ranging from warm chocolate-brown to deep blueish), and may have visible brush strokes or other surface manipulation. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, was a style of projecting emotional intent into the viewer 'due south imagination.

George Seeley, The Blackness Bowl: George Seeley, The Black Bowl, c. 1907. Published in Photographic camera Work, No. twenty, 1907, is a good example of a Pictorialist photograph due to its soft focus and painterly aesthetic.

As the harsh realities of Earth State of war I began to spread around the globe, the public'due south gustation for the art of the past began to change. Pictorialism gradually declined in popularity after 1920, fading out of popularity completely by the terminate of World War Two. Weston, Ansel Adams, and others afterward began to move away from pictorialism and created the Grouping f/64, which advocated for 'direct photography', or, the literal representation of a discipline rather than an imitation of something else. During this period, the new style of photographic modernism came into vogue, and the public'due south involvement shifted to more sharply focused images. As developed countries turned their focus to industrialism and growth, art reflected this change by featuring hard-edged images of new buildings, airplanes, and industrial landscapes. Until the late 1970s several genres predominated, including nudes, portraits, and natural landscapes (exemplified by Ansel Adams).

Ansel Adams, Church, Taos Pueblo: Ansel Adams, Church, Taos Pueblo National Historic Landmark, New United mexican states, 1942. From the serial Ansel Adams Photographs of National Parks and Monuments, compiled 1941-42, documenting the period ca. 1933-42.

Snapshot Artful

Around 1963, the term "snapshot aesthetic" entered the vocabulary of the fine art photography world. John Szarkowski, who was head of the photography department at the Museum of Mod Art from 1962 to 1991, became ane of the trend's largest promoters, and it became peculiarly fashionable from the late 1970s until the mid 1980s. The snapshot aesthetic typically features off-centered framing and everyday subject matter oft presented without apparent link from image-to-image, relying instead on the juxtaposition and disjunction of individual photographs. Notable practitioners include Garry Winogrand, Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Martin Parr, William Eggleston, Diane Arbus, and Terry Richardson. These photographers aimed not "to reform life merely to know it" (John Szarkowski, Diane Arbus).

Diane Arbus, Kid with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, 1962: Diane Arbus exemplifies the "snapshot aesthetic" in her work which presents images from the everyday.

Conceptual Photography

Cindy Sherman, Chromogenic Color Print, 1981: Cindy Sherman used a type of functioning in her work by photographing herself dressed in costume, expanding the possibilities of the medium.

Conceptual photography is a type of photography that illustrates an thought. While illustrative photographs have been made since the medium 's invention, the term conceptual photography derives from conceptual art, a movement of the late 1960s. Today the term describes either a methodology or a genre. Conceptual fine art of the late 1960s and early 1970s ofttimes involved photography that documented performances, ephemeral sculpture, or deportment. The artists did not draw themselves as photographers. Since the 1970s, artists like Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Need have been described as conceptual. Although their piece of work does not generally resemble the lo-fi artful of 1960s conceptual art, they accept sure methods in mutual such as documenting performance (Sherman), typological or serial imagery (Ruff), or the restaging of events (Demand).

Contemporary photography has seen a trend of carefully staging and lighting a picture rather than hoping to "discover" it ready-made. Photographers such equally Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall are noted for the quality of their staged pictures. Additionally, new technological trends in digital photography take created the possibility of full-spectrum photography, where conscientious filtering choices across the ultraviolet, visible, and infrared lead to new creative visions.

Pop Fine art

The popular art move began in the 1960s and questioned the boundaries between "loftier" and "low" art.

Learning Objectives

Identify examples of American popular art

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books, and mundane, cultural objects in its work. 1 of the goals of pop fine art was to mistiness and question the boundaries between "high" art and "low" art.
• Neo-Dada was i minor creative motility that contributed to the formation of pop art. In reaction to abstract expressionism, neo-Dadaists sought to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols and icons such every bit targets, flags, letters, and numbers.
• The works of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol exemplify popular art's direct attachment to commonplace images in American popular culture, while treating the subject matter in a cool, impersonal manner. This detached way illustrated the idealization of mass production and its inherent anonymity.

Key Terms

• Ben-Solar day dots: The Ben-Mean solar day dots press process, named subsequently illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr., is similar to pointillism. Depending on the result, colors, and optical illusion needed, small colored dots are closely spaced, widely spaced, or overlapping. Pulp comic books of the 1950s and 1960s used Ben-Solar day dots in the iv process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to inexpensively create shading and secondary colors such as dark-green, purple, orange, and flesh tones.
• mass: A big quantity; a sum.
• abstract expressionism: An American genre of modern art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstract forms
• silk-screen press: A method of reproducing colored artwork using a cut stencil attached to a stretched, fine-meshed silk screen.

Although it originated in Britain in the late 1950s, pop art did not proceeds momentum in America until a full decade later. By this time, American advertising had adopted many elements and inflections of mod art and functioned at a sophisticated level. Consequently, American artists had to search deeper for dramatic styles that would distance fine art from well-designed and clever commercial materials. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art past including aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books, and mundane, cultural objects. One of the goals of Pop Art was to blur and draw into question the boundaries between "high" and "depression" art.

Neo-Dada

2 important painters in the institution of America'southward pop art vocabulary were the American neo-Dadaists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. In the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns began to advisable popular abstract iconography for painting, allowing a fix of familiar associations to answer the need for a subject. In contrast to the abstract expressionists, who not only disdained subject thing simply likewise took their paintings to be an alphabetize of the creative person's presence on the canvas, Neo-Dadaists sought to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols and icons such as targets, flags, letters, and numbers. These neutral subjects rejected a reliance on the mitt of the artist in the production of meaning–the surface of the painting could declare itself without reference to the persona that created it.

Robert Rauschenberg as well was considered a Neo-Dadaist, and his "combines" incorporated found objects, printed materials, and urban droppings with traditional fine art materials. Combines served to pause down the delineated boundaries betwixt art, sculpture, and the everyday object so that all were recontextualized in a single work of art.

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55, Encaustic, oil, collage on cloth mounted on plywood, 42 ten 61 in. Museum of Modern Fine art, New York.: Flag past Jasper Johns presents the American flag as subject matter, thus invoking a plethora of associations and juxtapositions between the popular prototype, symbol, and art.

Roy Lichtenstein

Of equal importance to American pop art is Roy Lichtenstein. His work defines the basic premise of pop art better than whatsoever other through parody. Selecting the quondam-fashioned comic strip equally subject matter, Lichtenstein produced difficult-edged, precise compositions that documented mass culture while simultaneously creating soft parodies. Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such every bit Drowning Girl (1963), which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Clandestine Hearts #83. His characteristic way featured thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots to correspond certain colors, every bit if created past photographic reproduction. Lichtenstein's contribution to Popular Art merged popular and mass civilisation with the techniques of fine art while injecting humor, irony, and recognizable imagery and content into the terminal production. The paintings of Lichtenstein, like the works of many other popular artists, shared a straight attachment to the commonplace image of American popular culture while treating the bailiwick thing in a cool, impersonal style. This detached style illustrated the idealization of mass product and its inherent anonymity.

Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963, MOMA: Lichtenstein calls into question notions of cribbing while simultaneously blurring the lines between loftier and depression fine art in this painting of a scene from a popular comic book.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is probably the most famous figure in pop art. Warhol attempted to take popular beyond fine art to go a lifestyle, and his work ofttimes displays a lack of human affectation that dispenses with the irony and parody of many of his peers. Warhol's artwork uses many forms of media including and cartoon, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. His studio, The Mill, was a famous gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. New York'south Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on Pop Art in December 1962, during which artists similar Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol'south open embrace of market culture. This symposium set the tone for Warhol's reception.

Throughout the decade it became increasingly articulate that there had been a profound alter in the culture of the art world, and that Warhol was at the center of that shift. In the early 60s, Warhol pared his image vocabulary down to the icon itself–brand names, celebrities, dollar signs–and removed all traces of the creative person's hand in the production of his work. Eventually, he moved from hand painting to silk-screen printing, removing the handmade element birthday. The element of detachment reached such an extent at the top of Warhol's fame that he had several assistants producing his silk-screen multiples.

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962, synthetic polymer on 32 canvases. twenty x 16 in each. Museum of Modern Art, New York.: Warhol's Campbell'due south Soup Cans have become synonymous with the popular art movement and exemplify his preoccupation with notions of pop civilisation and capitalism.

The legacy of Pop Art is expansive, and much of the Pop art of the 1960s is considered incongruent as many different conceptual practices fed into the motility and are reflected by a broad variety of artists. The list of notable Pop artists is all-encompassing, but some major proponents include Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Yayoi Kusama, John McHale, Claes Oldenburg, Julia Opie, Eduardo Paolozzi, Sigmar Polke, Ed Ruscha, George Segal, and Tom Wesselman.

Photorealism

Photorealism or super-realism is a genre of art that began in the late 1960s,  encompassing painting, drawing, and other graphic media in which an artist studies a photo and then attempts to reproduce the epitome as realistically as possible.

Learning Objectives

Evaluate photorealism within the era's gimmicky fine art movements

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Pop art and photorealism were both reactionary movements stemming from the ever-increasing and overwhelming affluence of photographic media, which by the mid 20th century had go such a massive phenomenon that it was threatening to lessen the value of imagery in art.
• Photorealism uses photographs transferred to sail in paint with tight and precise composition.
• Super-realist painters chose hard bailiwick matter that emphasized the technical prowess and virtuosity required to simulate, such as reflective surfaces or embellished environments.

Key Terms

• abstract expressionism: An American genre of modern art that used improvised techniques to generate highly abstract forms.
• Popular fine art: An art movement of the 1950s that presented a claiming to traditions of fine art by including imagery from pop civilisation such as advertising and news.

Photorealism, likewise known equally super-realism or hyper-realism, is a genre of art that makes use of photography to create a highly realistic art work in another medium. The term was commencement applied in America during the late 1960s. Like popular art, photorealism was a reactionary movement that stemmed from the overwhelming abundance of photographic media, which past the mid 20^th century had grown into such a massive phenomenon that it threatened to lessen the value of imagery in art. While pop artists were primarily pointing out the absurdity of the imagery that dominated mass culture—such as advertising, comic books, and mass-produced cultural objects—photorealists aimed to reclaim and exalt the value of the image.

Process

Photorealist painters get together imagery and visual information through photographs, which are transferred onto canvas either by slide project or the traditional filigree. The resulting images are often direct copies of the photograph, usually on an increased scale. Stylistically, this results in painted compositions that are tight and precise, often with an accent on imagery that requires a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate; for example, reflections in surfaces and embellished, human-made environments.

Ralph Goings, Ralph's Diner, 1981-82, oil on sail.: This painting by Ralph Goings displays the artists technical prowess in the realistic depiction of many reflective, textured surfaces.

Richard Estes, Telephone Booths, 1968, oil on canvas: Richard Estes reproduces in a pigment the complex epitome of a reflected urban environment on a telephone booth.

The outset generation of American photorealists included such painters as Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Chuck Shut, Charles Bong, Audrey Flack, Don Eddy, Robert Bechte, and Tom Blackwell.

Chuck Close, Mark (1978–1979), acrylic on sail, left; detail of heart, right: Chuck Close is known for his intensely detailed paintings which are substantially indistinguishable from photographic images.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/the-art-world-grows/

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