Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [145]
Close, “Fanny/Fingerpainting,” 1985, Pace Gallery, NY. Working from photos, Close builds remarkable likenesses from a variety of tiny marks.
CLOSE: CLOSE-UP. Since 1967, Chuck Close (b. 1940) has painted gigantic passport photos of his friends’ faces. With dazzling technique, he produces detailed portraits that — seen from a distance — look uncannily like giant blown-up photographs. Yet up close, the viewer becomes aware of the process of representing the image, for Close often paints with unorthodox means, such as building an image out of his own inked fingerprints. This gives an impression of fluctuation. Like Seurat’s pointillist technique, the many small dots forming the image flicker back and forth in the spectator’s mind. One moment, it’s a spitting image of a person, the next it’s an animated pattern of spots.
NEO-EXPRESSIONISM
The Minimalists in 1975 wrote obituaries for painting, insisting the future belonged to video, performance art, and Conceptual Art — things like ball bearings scattered on the floor. Well, like Mark Twain’s death, the Demise of Painting was greatly exaggerated. In the eighties painting was back with a bang. And not zero-content, no-color painting but painting that bashes you over the head like heavy metal music.
The new movement was born in Germany and reached a climax of international esteem in the 1980s. It was termed Neo-Expressionism because it revived the angular distortions and strong emotional content of German Expressionism. Neo-Expressionism brought back such banished features as recognizable content, historical reference, subjectivity, and social comment. It resurrected imagery, the easel painting, carved or cast sculpture, and the violent, personalized brushstroke. Bricks on the floor or shelves on a wall weren’t going to cut it any more. Where art of the ‘70s was cool as ice, art of the ’80s was hot, hot, hot. The leaders were Germans like Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Georg Baselitz and Italians like Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia (pronounced KEY ah), and Enzo Cucchi. Neo-Expressionism marked the rebirth of Europe as an art force to be reckoned with.
BEUYS: GURU OF NEO-EXPRESSIONISM
The father-figure of Neo-Expressionism was Joseph Beuys (1921-86). As a teacher and artist, Beuys taught a generation of young German artists to reexamine their history without illusion. Beuys was a radical in both art and politics. A member of the left-wing Green party who believed everyone was on artist, Beuys wanted to regenerate humanity. He shifted attention from art as an object to the artist os activist. He created a mythic persona for himself, spouting his revolutionary credo to young followers and the press with religious fervor.
Part of Beuys’s heroic status derived from his war experience. As a Lüftwaffe pilot he crashed in the Crimea (the hat he always wore hid scars). Tartar nomads cared for him, wrapping him in felt and fat to keep him warm in subzero temperatures. Beuys used these materials in his work, as well as industrial substances. At his Guggenheim show, Beuys exhibited a large tub of pork fat; he often heaped piles of felt and stacks of iron, copper, or lead as art displays. Beuys was also a performance artist who staged irrational spectacles like chatting with a dead rabbit. Like Germany’s postwar Economic Miracle, Beuys re-energized German art.
Kiefer, “To the Unknown Painter,” 1983, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Kiefer uses thick, dark point to represent charred earth, evoking the horror of the Holocaust.
KIEFER: SCORCHED EARTH. Called by art critic Robert Hughes “the best painter of his generation on either side of the Atlantic,” Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) became an ’80s star due to the new taste for narrative art. The subject he deals with provokes a strong response: German and Jewish history from