Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [132]
Stella deliberately sacrificed personal handling, using commercial house paint and metallic paint. In his large-scale “protractor” series of paintings based on intersecting protractor arcs in fluorescent colors, he based both the shape of the canvas and design on a mechanical drawing tool. From the 1960s through the ‘80s, in series after series, Stella determined his composition by such mechanical means, using rulers, T-squares, and French-curve templates to sketch on graph paper. In the ’70s, Stella entered what he called his “baroque phase” and developed a new, 3-D format straddling the border between painting and sculpture.
Stella, “Star of Persia II,” 1967, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Stella emphasizes the painting as an independent object in his canvases fusing design and shape.
PRE-POP ART
For an art movement that began so far outside the mainstream, Abstract Expressionism entrenched itself surprisingly fast. Within ten years, its founders and its style seemed over-bearingly trite. Wannabe Action Painters, in shameless imitation, were splashing gallons of paint, cashing in on what rapidly became a standardized schtick. Innovative young painters of the mid-fifties rebelled against these faux abstractions. “It was not an act of hostility,” said Jasper Johns, explaining why he chose a different path from Pollock. “It was an act of self-definition.”
As Robert Rauschenberg, Johns’s co-leader in the breakaway, said, “I had decided that ideas are not real estate. There’s enough room to move in that you don’t have to stand in the same place or imitate. Everyone was doing de Kooning, Newman, Reinhardt. There were only two artists that didn’t copy other artists: Jasper Johns and I.” In a quintessential act of defiance, Rauschenberg in 1953 produced a work of art by erasing a de Kooning drawing. This off-with-their-heads gesture symbolized how the movement Rauschenberg and Johns began wiped out Abstraction’s dominance of world art.
Rouschenberg, “Monogram,” 1955-56, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In this “combine,”Rauschenberg mounted a stuffed angora goat wearing an automobile tire on a collaged convas base to prove that all materials ore equally worthy of art.
RAUSCHENBERG: FORM EQUALS FACT. Rauschenberg (b.1925) was the postwar artist most responsible for liberating the artist from a compulsion to record his own emotions. A recycler of throwaways before salvage was chic, Rauschenberg invented a hybrid form of art, half-painting and half-sculpture, he called “combines.” After combing New York streets for junk, or sculpture-waiting-to-be-discovered in his opinion, Rauschenberg attached eccentric materials like rusted traffic signs, frayed shirt cuffs, and a stuffed eagle to his expressionistically painted canvases. “A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with,” he said, than oil and canvas. “I wanted the images to still have the feeling of the outside world rather than cultivate the incest of studio life.”
In a famous statement that explains his appropriation of found objects, Rauschenberg said, “Painting relates to both art and life.... I try to act in the gap between the two.” Acting in the gap meant nothing was off-limits. “A picture,” he said, “is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.” In this equal-opportunity approach, Rauschenberg resembles his mentor, avant-garde composer John Cage, who made music out of silence (actually, the sounds of the restless audience). When once complimented on a composition, Cage stared out the window, saying, “I just can’t believe that I am better than anything out there.”
MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS. “Multiplicity, variety, and inclusion” Rauschenberg called the themes of his art. During forty prolific years he has merged Dada’s radical questioning of accepted practice with an energetic, Abstract Expressionist brushstroke and Surrealist faith in accident. In the process, he acquired