by Judy Jones
Six isms, One ijl, and Dada
Be grateful we edited out Orphism, Vorticism, Suprematism, and the Scuola Metafisica at the last minute. FAUVISM
Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (1907)
Headquarters:
Paris and the South of France.
Life Span:
1905–1908.
Quote:
“Donatello chez les fauves!” (“Donatello among the wild beasts!”), uttered at the Salon d’Automne by an anonymous art critic upon catching sight of an old-fashioned Italianate bust in a roomful of Matisses.
Central Figures:
Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, all painters.
Spiritual Fathers:
Paul Gauguin, Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau.
Salient Features:
Raw, vibrant-to-strident color within bold black outlines; moderately distorted perspective; an assault on the Frenchman’s traditional love of order and harmony that today reads as both joyous and elegant; healthiest metabolism this side of soft-drink commercials.
Keepers of the Flame:
None (though Matisse is a big, and ongoing, influence on everybody). EXPRESSIONISM
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden (1908)
Wassily Kandinsky, Black Lines (1913)
Headquarters:
Germany.
Life Span:
1905–1920s.
Quotes:
“He who renders his inner convictions as he knows he must, and does so with spontaneity and sincerity, is one of us.”—Ernst Kirchner.
“Something like a necktie or a carpet.”—Wassily Kandinsky, of what he feared abstract art might degenerate into.
Central Figures:
In Dresden (in “The Bridge”): Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, painters. In Munich (in “The Blue Rider”): Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, painters. Under the banner “New Objectivity”: George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, painters. Confrères and honorary members: Arnold Schoenberg, composer; Bertolt Brecht, dramatist; Franz Kafka, writer.
Spiritual Fathers:
Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Salient Features:
A tendency to let it all—pathos, violence, morbidity, rage—hang out; distortion, fragmentation, Gothic angularity, and lots of deliberately crude woodcuts; the determination to shake the viewer up and to declare Germany’s artistic independence from France. Down in Munich, under Kandinsky—a Russian with a tendency to sound like a scout for a California religious cult—abstraction, and a bit less morbidity
Keepers of the Flame:
The abstract expressionists of the Forties and Fifties, the neo-expressionists of the Eighties, and a barrioful of graffiti artists. CUBISM
Georges Braque, Soda (1911)
Headquarters:
Paris.
Life Span:
1907–1920s.
Quote:
Anonymous tasteful lady to Pablo Picasso: “Since you can draw so beautifully, why do you spend your time making those queer things?” Picasso: “That’s why.”
Central Figures:
Picasso, of course, and Georges Braque. Also, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, all painters. Guillaume Apollinaire, poet.
Spiritual Father:
Cézanne.
Salient Features:
The demise of perspective, shading, and the rest of the standard amenities; dislocation and dismemberment; the importance of memory as an adjunct to vision, so that one painted what one knew a thing to be; collage; analytic (dull in color, intricate in form, intellectual in appeal), then synthetic (brighter colors, simpler forms, “natural” appeal); the successful break with visual realism.
Keepers of the Flame:
Few; this half century has gone not with Picasso but with antiartist and master debunker Marcel Duchamp. FUTURISM
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)
Headquarters:
Milan.
Life Span:
1909–1918.
Quotes:
“A screaming automobile is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” “Burn the museums! Drain the canals of Venice!” —Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
Central Figures:
Marinetti, poet and propagandist; Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, painters; Umberto Boccioni, sculptor and painter; Antonio Sant’Elia, architect.
Spiritual Fathers:
Georges Seurat, Henry Ford.
Salient Features:
Dynamism, simultaneity, lines of force; vibration and rhythm more important than form; exuberant, optimistic, anarchic, human behavior as art. Had an immediate impact bigger than Cubism’s—on Constructivism, Dada, and Fascism.
Keepers of the Flame:
Performance artists (who likewise stress the theatrical and the evanescent), conceptualists. CONSTRUCTIVISM
Naum Gabo, Column (1923)
Headquarters:
Moscow.
Life Span:
1913–1932.
Quotes:
“Engineers create new forms.”—Vladimir Tatlin.
“Constructivism is the Socialism of vision.”—László Moholy-Nagy.
Central Figures:
Tatlin, sculptor and architect; Aleksandr Rodchenko, painter and typographer; El Lissitzky, painter and designer; Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, sculptors.
Spiritual Fathers:
Kasimir Malevich, Lenin, Marinetti.
Salient Features:
Art as production, rather than elitist imaginings, and squarely in the service of the Left; abstract forms wedded to utilitarian simplicity; rivets, celluloid, and airplane wings; the State as a total work of Art.
Keepers of the Flame:
None: The State ultimately squashed it. DE STIJL (“THE STYLE”)
Piet Mondrian, Composition 7 (1937–1942)
Gerrit Rietveld, armchair (c. 1917)
Headquarters:
Amsterdam.
Life Span:
1917–1931.
Quote:
“The square is to us as the cross was to the early Christians.”—Theo van Doesburg.
Central Figures:
Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, painters; Gerrit Rietveld and J. J. P. Oud, architects.
Spiritual Father:
Kandinsky.
Salient Features:
Vertical and horizontal lines and primary colors, applied with a sense of spiritual mission; Calvinist purity, harmony, and sobriety; purest of the abstract movements (and Mondrian the single most important new artist of the between-the-wars period); say “style,” by the way, not “steel.”
Keepers of the Flame:
Minimalists. DADA
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)
Headquarters:
Zurich (later Berlin, New York, and Paris).
Life Span:
1916–1922.
Quotes:
“Like everything in life, Dada is useless.” “Anti-art for anti-art’s sake.”—Tristan Tzara.
Central Figures:
Zurich: Tzara, poet, and Jean Arp, painter and sculptor. New York and Paris: Marcel Duchamp, artist; Francis Picabia, painter; Man Ray, photographer. Berlin: Max Ernst, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters.
Spiritual Father:
Marinetti.
Salient Features:
Anarchic, nihilistic, and disruptive; childhood and chance its two most important sources of inspiration; the name itself a nonsense, baby-talk word; born of disillusionment, a cult of nonart that became, in Berlin, overtly political.
Keepers of the Flame:
Performance artists, “happenings” and “assemblages” people, conceptualists. SURREALISM
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Headquarters:
Paris (later, New York).
Life Span:
1924–World War II.
Quote:
“As beautiful as the chance meetin
g on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”—Comte du Lautréamont.
Central Figures:
André Breton, intellectual; Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, writers; Jean Cocteau, writer and filmmaker; Luis Buñuel, filmmaker. Abstract wing: Joan Miró, painter. Explicit wing: Salvador Dalí, Yves Tan-guy, Max Ernst, René Magritte, painters.
Spiritual Fathers:
Sigmund Freud, Giorgio de Chirico, Leon Trotsky.
Salient Features:
Antibourgeois, but without Dada’s spontaneity; committed to the omnipotence of the dream and the unconscious; favored associations, juxtapositions, concrete imagery, the more bizarre the better.
Keepers of the Flame:
Abstract expressionists, “happenings” people.
Thirteen Young Turks
Well, not all that young. And certainly not Turks. In fact, the Old World has nothing to do with it. For the last forty years, it’s America—specifically, New York—that’s been serving as the clubhouse of the art world. Now shake hands with a dozen of its most illustrious members. That’s Jackson Pollock in the Stetson and Laurie Anderson in the Converse All Stars. JACKSON POLLOCK (1912-1956)
Jackson Pollock’s One (1950)
Don’t settle for the “cowboy” legend, in which Pollock—the most talked-about artist of the last half century years—blows into New York City from Cody, Wyoming, riding his canvases like broncos and packing his frontier image like a six-gun. The man had a rowdy streak, it’s true, spattering, flinging, and dripping paint by day and picking fights in artists’ bars by night, but his friends always insisted that he was a sensitive soul; inspired by the lyricism of Kandinsky and steeped in the myths of Jung, all he wanted was to be “a part of the painting,” in this case “all-over” painting, with no beginning, no end, and no center of interest. Some nomenclature: “Action painting” is what Pollock (alias “Jack the Dripper”) did, a particularly splashy, “gestural” variant of Abstract Expressionism, the better-not-hang-this-upside-down art turned out by the so called New York School. MARK ROTHKO (1903-1970)
Declaring that he painted “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” Rothko was pleased when people broke down and cried in front of The Work—and withdrew from an important mural commission for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant because he couldn’t stand the idea of them eating in front of it. Here we’re in the presence of Abstract Expressionism’s so called theological wing (which also sheltered Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still), typified by—in addition to a fondness for monasticism and bombast—large, fuzzy-edged rectangles of color, floating horizontally in a vertical field. Renunciation is the keyword. In a sense, minimalism begins here, with Rothko. WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)
The other “action” painter, and the most famous New York School artist (even if he was born in Holland) after his Wyoming colleague. De Kooning never totally lost faith in recognizable imagery—most notably, a gang of big-breasted middle-aged women (of whom he later said, “I didn’t mean to make them such monsters”)—and never tossed out his brushes. But he did paint in the same hotter-than-a-pepper-sprout fever, allowing paint to dribble down the canvas, as soup down a chin, and he did reach beyond where he could be sure of feeling comfortable. DAVID SMITH (1906-1965)
Was to postwar sculpture what Jackson Pollock was to postwar painting (and, like Pollock, was killed at his peak in an automobile accident). Influenced by the work of Picasso and by a summer vacation he’d spent as a welder in a Studebaker factory, and intent on glorifying, rather than apologizing for, the workaday world, Smith constructed his work instead of casting or molding it. The result: shapes that are “ready-made” rather than solid, arrangements that look provisional instead of stately, and a mood that is anything but monumental. Whereas the Englishman Henry Moore (the other “sculptor of our time”) always seemed to be making things for museum foyers and urban plazas, Smith’s work is more likely to rise, oil-well-style, from a spot nobody could have guessed would be home to a work of art. ANDREW WYETH (1917–)
Of course, not everybody was really ready to deal with de Kooning’s Woman II or Smith’s Cubi XVIII, and they almost certainly hadn’t given a thought to owning one of them. For those thus resistant to Art, but still desirous of a bona fide art acquisition, there was Andrew Wyeth, working in the American realist tradition of Grant “American Gothic” Wood and Edward “All-Night Diner” Hopper, and given to painting in a manner middlebrow critics liked to call “hauntingly evocative,” as with the much-reproduced Christina’s World. As to whether Christina is trying to get away from the house (à la Texas Chainsaw Massacre) or back to it (à la Lassie, Come Home), don’t look at us. Don’t look at Wyeth for too long, either: You’ll lose all credibility as intellectual, aesthete, and cosmopolite. ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (1925-) JASPER JOHNS (1930-)
Counts as one selection: Not only were Rauschenberg and Johns contemporaries, not only did they together depose, without really meaning to, the reigning abstract expressionists, they also, for a time, lived together. However, they couldn’t have been less alike, temperamentally and philosophically. Think of them as a vinaigrette dressing. Rauschenberg is the oil: applied lavishly, sticking to everything, rich, slippery, viscous. Probably best known for his so called combines (like this freestanding angora goat, with a tire around its belly), he scoured the streets and store windows of downtown Manhattan for junk; believed that art could exist for any length of time, in any material, and to any end; and, as one critic said, “didn’t seem house-trained.”
Monogram and Robert Rauschenberg (1955–1959)
Johns, by contrast, is the vinegar; poured stintingly, cutting through everything, sharp, stinging, thin. In his paintings of flags, targets, stenciled words and numbers, and rulers—all as familiar, abstract, simple, and flat as objects get—he endowed the pop icons of the twentieth century with an “old master” surface, reduced painting to the one-dimensionality it had been hankering after for a generation, and got to seem sensuous, ironic, difficult, and unavailable—all those hipper-than-hip things—in a single breath. Together, Rauschenberg and Johns did for art (whose public, such as it was, had been getting tired of not being able to groove on the stuff Rothko, de Kooning, et al. were turning out) what the Beatles did for music. Note: Rauschenberg and Johns are usually billed as proto-pop artists; the former is not to be confused with pop artists Roy Lichtenstein (the one who does the paintings based on comic-book panels), Claes Oldenburg (the one who does the sculptures of cheeseburgers and clothespins), and James Rosenquist (the one who does mural-sized canvases full of F-111 fighter-bombers and Franco-American spaghetti).
Three Flags and Jasper Johns (1958) ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Needs no introduction here. But forget for a minute Andy, the albino in the silver fright wig, the guy who painted the Campbell’s soup cans and the Brillo boxes, Liz and Marilyn; who made underground movies like The Chelsea Girls and Flesh; who founded Interview and took Studio 54 as his anteroom; and who got shot in the gut by Valerie what’s-her-name. Concentrate instead on Warhol, the tyrant and entrepreneur, the man who taught the art world about the advantages of bulk (a few hundred was a small edition of his prints, and the two hundredth of them was presented, promoted, and, inevitably, purchased, as if it were the original) and who persuaded the middle class that hanging a wall-sized picture of a race riot, or an electric chair, or an automobile accident, or Chairman Mao, over the couch in the family room not only was chic, but made some kind of sense. More recently, there were the commissioned portraits: Not since Goya’s renditions of the Spanish royal family, it’s been observed, has a group of people who should have known better so reveled in being made to look silly. FRANK STELLA (1936-)
“All I want anyone to get out of my paintings … is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. What you see is what you see.” Thus spake Frank Stella, who’d learned something from Jasper Johns, and who would go on, while still in his twenties, to help launch the movement known as Minimalism,
according to some the most self-consciously American of all the isms (and according to others the last, wheezy gasp of modernism itself). The idea was to get away from the how-often-have-you-seen-this-one-before literalness of pop and back to abstraction—a new abstraction that was fast, hard, flat, and hauntingly unevocative. Key words here are “self-referentiality” and “reduction”; the former meant that a painting (preferably unframed and on a canvas the shape of a lozenge or a kite) had no business acknowledging the existence of anything but itself, the latter that the more air you could suck out of art’s bell jar the better. By the 1970s, Stella would be making wall sculptures of corrugated aluminum and other junk, cut by machine then crudely and freely painted, that relate to his early work approximately as Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula relates to The Godfather. CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE
(1935-, 1935–)
It started as an obsession with wrapping. The Bulgarian-born artist Christo spent years swaddling bicycles, trees, storefronts, and women friends before moving on to wrap a section of the Roman Wall, part of the Australian coastline, and eventually all twelve arches, plus the parapets, sidewalks, streetlamps, vertical embankment, and esplanade, of Paris’ Pont Neuf. And yes, together they did wrap the Reichstag. But Christo and his wife/manager/collaborator Jeanne-Claude are quick to insist that wrappings form only a small percentage of their total oeuvre. There were, for instance, those twenty-four and a half miles of white nylon, eighteen feet high, they hung from a steel cable north of San Francisco; the eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, Florida, they “surrounded”—not wrapped, mind you—with pink polypropylene fabric; and the 3,100 enormous blue and yellow “umbrellas” they erected in two corresponding valleys in California and Japan. Not to mention their 2005 blockbuster, “The Gates,” 7,503 sixteen-foot-tall saffron panels they suspended, to the delight of almost everybody, over twenty-three miles of footpaths in New York’s Central Park.
