Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [130]
Louis, “Point of Tranquility,” 1959-60, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Louis poured paint in several distinct patterns that resemble veils, stripes, or floral designs.
The Twentieth Century and Beyond: Contemporary Art
The problem with assessing Contemporary art is that it’s still alive and growing. History has yet to tell the tale of who will fade from memory and who prevail. What is clear, however, is that movements have come and gone since 1960 at a brisk clip. A common thread linking them is their opposition to Abstract Expressionism. It’s as if the shadow cast by Jackson Pollock loomed so large that future offshoots had to hack down the tree to find their own spot in the sun. Hard Edge painters and Minimalist sculptors annihilated Action Painting’s cult of personality by creating machinelike forms. Pop artists embraced commercial imagery, and Conceptualists pared the idea of a hand-wrought art object to ground zero, where art existed in the mind more than on canvas. All these movements centered in New York, where it began to seem as if painting was terminally passé.
Then around 1980 Europe seized the spotlight. German and Italian painters known as Neo-Expressionists returned figure painting and recognizable images to the mainstream, infusing their intense, emotional canvases with autobiographical and social concerns. In Post-Modern art of the next generation, everything was up for grabs. Allowable forms, materials, media, and content were expanded to such a degree that nothing seemed off limits, and artists grappled with the challenge of being truly original rather than merely novel. As the twentieth century draws to a close, art is more international, with no geographical area dominating, and more diverse than ever before. After a century of experimentation, the legacy is wide-open freedom.
HARD EDGE
Around 1948, Abstract Expressionism burst on the scene with fierce emotionalism, impulsiveness, and signature brushstrokes. The painters of ten years later defined themselves as everything Abstract Expressionists were not. It was as if they took to heart Minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt’s slogan, “a cleaner New York is up to you.” Hard Edge painters cleaned up the act of Action Painters.
Hard Edge took the Expressionism out of Abstract Expressionism. What it offered instead of spontaneous, subjective abstraction was calculated, impersonal abstraction. Hard Edge painting uses sharply contoured, simple forms. The paintings are precise and cool, as if made by machines. It took even further the Modernist tendency to view the artwork as an independent object rather than a view of reality or the painter’s psyche. In Hard Edge, the painted surface is nothing more than a pigment-covered area bordered by canvas stretchers. Frank Stella summed it up best: “What you see is what you see.”
Albers, “Homage to the Square: ‘Ascending,’” 1953, Whitney, NY. A color theorist, Albers demonstrated the effect of one color on another. Here the bottom and side bands of gray and blue rectangles appear darker than the upper bands, even though the shades ore uniform throughout.
ALBERS: THE SQUARE SQUARED. The patron saint of Hard Edge painting was German-American painter and color theorist Josef Albers (1888- 1976). After teaching at the Bauhaus, Albers came to the United States and taught a course called “Effect Making” at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Throughout Albers’s long career as a teacher, his obsession was one color’s effect on another or, as he said, “how colors influence and change each other: that the same color, for instance, — with different grounds or neighbors — looks different. ”
At Albers’s first class he asked the students, “Vich of you children can draw a straight line?” Facing the blackboard, Albers then walked sideways, dragging a piece of chalk across the board until he produced a perfectly level line ten feet long. Soon thereafter he set his pupils to mastering nearly impossible technical tasks like drawing letters