ART 330

The Holocaust and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki compounded the pessimism that had gripped intellectual Europeans ever since the turn of the century. Europe itself was devastated (fig. 38.1). How could anyone pretend that the human race was governed by reason, that advances in technology and science were for the greater good, when human beings were not only capable of genocide, but also possessed the ability to annihilate themselves? For French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), the only certainty in the world was death. But he would go on to articulate a philosophy in which each person is capable of defining his or her existence for himself or herself—for good or evil.

In America, the 1950s were years of unprecedented prosperity, a fact reflected in the proliferation of new goods and products—literally hundreds of the kinds of things that Duane Hanson’s Supermarket Shopper has loaded into her shopping cart in his hyperrealistic sculpture of 1970 (fig. 38.2): Corning Ware, Sugar Pops, and Kraft Minute Rice (1950); sugarless chewing gum and the first 33-rpm long-playing records, introduced by Deutsche Grammophon (1951); Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes, the Sony pocket-sized transistor radio, fiberglass and nylon (1952); Sugar Smacks cereal and Schweppes bottled tonic water (1953); Crest toothpaste and roll-on deodorant (1955); Comet cleanser, Raid insecticide, Imperial margarine, and Midas mufflers (1956); the Wham-O toy company’s Frisbee (1957) and Hula Hoop (1958); Sweet’n Low, Green Giant canned beans, and Teflon frying pans (1958). Tupperware, which had been introduced in 1945, could be found in every kitchen after its push-down seal was patented in 1949. In July 1955, Walt Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, the first large-scale theme park in America. That same year, two of the first fast-food chains opened their doors—Colonel Sanders’s Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and McDonald’s. In 1953, the first issue of Playboy magazine appeared, featuring Marilyn Monroe as its first nude centerfold, and by 1956, its circulation had reached 600,000. Sales of household appliances exploded, and women, still largely relegated to the domestic scene, suddenly found themselves with leisure time. Diner’s Club and American Express introduced the charge card in 1951 and 1958 respectively. Both cards required payment in full each month, but they paved the way for the BankAmericard, introduced in 1958 (eventually evolving into the Visa card), which allowed for individual borrowing—and purchasing—at an unprecedented level.

Fig. 38.2

Duane Hanson, SUPERMARKET SHOPPER

Television played a key role in marketing these products and services since advertisers underwrote entertainment and news programming by buying time slots for commercials. In television commercials, people could see products firsthand. Although television programming had been broadcast before World War II, it was suspended during the war and did not resume until 1948. By 1950, four networks were broadcasting to 3.1 million television sets. By the end of the decade, that number had swelled to 67 million. Even the food industry responded to the medium. Swanson, which had introduced frozen potpies in 1951, began selling complete frozen “TV dinners” in 1953. The first, in its sealed aluminum tray, featured turkey, cornbread dressing and gravy, buttered peas, and sweet potatoes. It cost 98 cents, and Swanson sold 10 million units that year. Consumer culture was at full throttle.

Against this backdrop of prosperity and plenty, more troubling events were occurring. After the war, the territories controlled by the Nazis had been partitioned, and the Soviets had gained control of Eastern Europe, which they continued to occupy. Berlin, fully enclosed by Soviet-controlled East Germany, was a divided city, and it quickly became a focal point of tension when the Soviets blockaded land and river access to the city in 1948. President Truman responded by airlifting vital supplies to the 2 million citizens of West Berlin, but the crisis would continue, culminating in the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Events in Asia were equally troubling. In China, the communists, led by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), drove the pro-Western nationalists, led by Chiang Kaishek (1887–1975), off the mainland to the island of Taiwan and established the pro-Soviet People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Korea was likewise partitioned into a U.S.-backed southern sector and a Soviet-backed northern sector, culminating in the 1950 invasion of the South by the North and the Korean War (1950–53), which involved American and Chinese soldiers, the latter supported by Russian advisors and pilots, in another military conflict. As the tension between the Soviet Bloc and the West escalated throughout the 1950s, nuclear confrontation seemed inevitable.

This chapter traces the arc of these years in both Europe and America. In America, the realities of the Cold War and what many perceived as the country’s crass materialism muted the sense of well-being that accompanied the rapid economic expansion. Artists and writers responded by creating a rebellious, individualistic art that, on the one hand, seemed to affirm American creativity and genius even as, on the other, it critiqued the inauthenticity and emptiness of American life. In Europe, the horrors of World War II provoked a profound philosophical uneasiness revolving around the idea of mankind’s existential quest.

Europe after the War: The Existential Quest

1. 38.1 What are the chief characteristics of existentialism and how do they manifest themselves in art and literature?

If, after World War II, the urban landscape of Europe was in no small part destroyed—from Dresden to London, whole cities were flattened—the European psyche was even more devastated. In the face of countless deaths, pessimism reigned, and ideological conflict between the Western powers and the Eastern Bloc exacerbated a growing sense of meaninglessness, alienation, and anxiety. And yet, even in the face of a future some felt was devoid of hope, existentialism, arguably the most important philosophical movement of the twentieth century, offered a path in which every individual might find at least some sense of meaning in life.

Christian Existentialism: Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, and Tillich

Christianity found itself in crisis as well. In the face of World War II’s horrors, Christians had to question God’s benevolence, if not his very existence. Their faith was put to a test that had been first articulated by the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55). Kierkegaard had argued that Christians must live in a state of anguish caused by their own freedom of choice. They must first confront the fundamental Christian paradox, the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being (Jesus). To believe in this requires a “leap of faith” because its very absurdity means that all reason be suspended. So Christians must choose to live with objective uncertainty and doubt, a situation that leaves them in a state of “fear and trembling.” But if the individual Christian can never really “know” God, he or she can and must choose to act responsibly and morally. What humans can define, in other words, are the conditions of their own existence. This is their existential obligation.

After World War II, Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) and Paul Tillich (1886–1965) further articulated this position of  Christian existentialism  in America. When Tillich was forced to leave Germany in 1933 following Hitler’s rise to power, Niebuhr arranged for Tillich to join him on the faculty of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. There Tillich lectured on modern alienation and the role that religion could play as a “unifying center” for existence. Religion, he believed, provides the self with the courage to be. Niebuhr shared Tillich’s dedication to reconciling religion and modern experience. “Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion,” he wrote, “no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair.”

The Philosophy of Sartre: Atheistic Existentialism

During and after World War II, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) rejected the religious existentialism of Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, and Tillich and argued for what he termed  atheistic existentialism . “Existentialism isn’t so atheistic,” Sartre would write, “that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. … His existence is not the issue.” Living in a universe without God, and thus without revealed morality, individuals unable to make Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” must nevertheless choose to act ethically. “Existence precedes essence” was Sartre’s basic premise; that is, humans must define their own essence (who they are) through their existential being (what they do, their acts). “In a word,” Sartre explained, “man must create his own essence; it is in throwing himself into the world, in suffering it, in struggling with it, that—little by little—he defines himself.” Life is defined neither by subconscious drives, as Freud had held, nor by socioeconomic circumstances, as Marx had argued: “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.”

For Sartre there is no meaning to existence, no eternal truth for us to discover. Death is all we can know for sure. Sartre’s major philosophical work, the 1943 Being and Nothingness, outlines the nature of this condition, but his argument is more accessible in his play Huis Clos (No Exit). As the play opens, a valet greets Monsieur Garcin as he enters the room that will be his eternal hell (Reading 38.1):

READING 38.1

from Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit (1944)

GARCIN (enters, accompanied by the VALET, and glances around him):

     So here we are?

VALET Yes, Mr. Garcin.

GARCIN And this is what it looks like?

VALET Yes.

GARCIN Second Empire furniture, I observe … Well, well, I dare say one gets used to it in time.

VALET Some do, some don’t.

GARCIN Are all the rooms like this one?

VALET How could they be? We cater for all sorts: Chinamen and Indians, for instance. What use would they have for a Second Empire chair?

GARCIN And what use do you suppose I have for one? Do you know who I was? … Oh, well, it’s no great matter. And, to tell the truth, I had quite a habit of living among furniture that I didn’t relish, and in false positions. I’d even come to like it. A false position in a Louis-Philippe dining room—you know the style?—well, that had its points, you know. Bogus in bogus, so to speak.

VALET And you’ll find that living in a Second Empire drawing-room has its points.

GARCIN Really? … Yes, yes, I dare say … Still I certainly didn’t expect—this! You know what they tell us down there?

VALET What about?

GARCIN About … this—er—residence.

VALET Really, sir, how could you believe such cock-and-bull stories? Told by people who’d never set foot here. For, of course, if they had—

GARCIN Quite so. But I say, where are the instruments of torture?

VALET The what?

GARCIN The racks and red-hot pincers and all the other paraphernalia?

VALET Ah, you must have your little joke, sir.

GARCIN My little joke? Oh, I see. No, I wasn’t joking. No mirrors, I notice. No windows. Only to be expected. And nothing breakable. But damn it all, they might have left me my toothbrush!

VALET That’s good! So you haven’t yet got over your—what-do-you-call-it?—sense of human dignity? Excuse my smiling.

The play was first performed in May 1944, just before the liberation of Paris. If existence in existential terms is the power to create one’s future, Garcin and the two women who will soon occupy the room with him are in hell precisely because they are powerless to do so. Garcin’s “bad faith” consists in his insistence that his self is the creation of others. His sense of himself derives from how others perceive him. Thus, in the most famous line of the play, he says, “l’enfer, c’est les autres”—“Hell is other people.” In the drawing room, there need be no torturer because each character tortures the other two.

De Beauvoir and Existential Feminism

Sartre’s existential call to self-creation resonated powerfully with the writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), who argued that women had passively allowed men to define them rather than creating themselves. Sartre and de Beauvoir lived independent lives, but they maintained an intimate relationship that intentionally challenged bourgeois notions of decency. The open and free nature of their liaison, described and defended by de Beauvoir in four volumes of memoirs, became part of the mystique of French existentialism.

In her classic feminist text The Second Sex, which first appeared in 1949, de Beauvoir debunked what she called “the myth of femininity.” She was well aware, as she said, that woman “is very often very well pleased with her role as Other”—that is, her secondary status beside men, what de Beauvoir describes as “the inessential which never becomes the essential.” The reason for this, she writes, is women’s unwillingness to give up the advantages men confer upon them (Reading 38.2):

READING 38.2

from Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

Now, woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. … To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal—this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road. … But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence.

The need to create an authentic existence is what motivates de Beauvoir’s feminism. How much she personally succeeded in realizing her own existence, given her lifelong dedication to Sartre, remains a matter of some debate. What is indisputable, however, is the centrality of The Second Sex in defining the boundaries of the ever-growing feminist movement.

The Art of Existentialism

Faced with the lack of life’s meaning that Sartre’s existentialism proposed, painters and sculptors sought to explore the truth of this condition in their own terms. The Swiss-born Paris resident Alberto Giacometti took up sculpture while exiled from France in Switzerland during World War II, abandoning his earlier Surrealist mode (see fig. 35.16). The existential position of his new figurative sculpture was clear to Jean-Paul Sartre, whose essay “The Search for the Absolute” appeared in the catalog for the 1948 exhibition of Giacometti’s sculpture at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in Paris. It was Giacometti’s first exhibition in ten years, and Sartre tells the story of the artist beginning with life-size plaster sculptures and working at them obsessively until, in Sartre’s words, “these moving outlines, always half-way between nothingness and being, always modified, bettered, destroyed and begun once more” were reduced to the size of matchsticks.

What impressed Sartre most was Giacometti’s commitment to a search for the absolute, admittedly doomed to failure, but important for that very reason. The figures on the giant metal field in City Square are all uniformly striding men, each heading in a different direction to seek fulfillment (fig. 38.3). These figures, which do not interact, do not merely embody the alienation of the human condition. In their very frailty, they also embody the will to survive, which Giacometti guaranteed by finally casting his plaster sculptures in bronze.

Fig. 38.3

Alberto Giacometti, CITY SQUARE (LA PLACE)

One of the most important ideas contributing to postwar artists’ understanding of what an existential art might be was the notion that writer Georges Bataille (1897–1962) first articulated in 1929, that beneath all matter lies a condition of formlessness that requires the artist to “un-form” all categories of making. This notion led the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–85) to collect examples of what he called  art brut , “raw art,” from psychotics, children, and folk artists—anyone unaffected by or untrained in cultural convention. His own work was characterized in France as an example of  art informel , from the French informe, meaning “formless.” It ranges from scribbled gestures and cut-up canvases reconstructed as collages to paintings employing sand and paste. In a series of nudes created during 1950 and 1951, he expanded the human body to fill the whole canvas (fig. 38.4). He described the result in the following terms:

… disorder of images, of beginnings of images, of fading images, where they cross and mingle, in a turmoil, tatters borrowed from memories of the outside world, and facts purely cerebral and internal—visceral perhaps.

The existential basis of Dubuffet’s art resides both in its acceptance of the formlessness of experience and its quest for what he called an “authentic” expression, divorced from convention and tradition. The Literature of Existentialism

Apart from Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s closest companions were the novelists Albert Camus (1913–60), Jean Genet (1910–86), Boris Vian (1920–59), and fellow philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), editor-in-chief of Les Temps modernes, the journal founded by Sartre in 1945 to give “an account of the present, as complete and faithful as possible.” Merleau-Ponty was a particular champion of Camus, whose novels he believed embodied the existential condition. The main protagonist of Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger is a young Algerian, Meursault, who is more an antihero than a hero, since he lacks the personal characteristics that we normally associate with heroes. Meursault becomes tangled up with a local pimp whom he somewhat inexplicably kills. He is imprisoned and brought to trial. His prosecutors’ case is absurdly beside the point—they demonstrate, for instance, that he both was unmoved by his mother’s death and, worse, attended a comic movie on the eve of her funeral. Despite the irrelevance of the prosecutors’ evidence, the jury convicts Meursault. Camus explained why in a preface written for a 1955 reissue of the novel (Reading 38.3):

READING 38.3

from Albert Camus, Preface to The Stranger (1955)

I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game. In this respect, he is foreign to the society in which he lives; he wanders, on the fringe, in the suburbs of private, solitary, sensual life. And this is why some readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage. A much more accurate idea of the character, or, at least one much closer to the author’s intentions, will emerge if one asks just how Meursault doesn’t play the game. The reply is a simple one; he refuses to lie. To lie is not only to say what isn’t true. It is also and above all, to say more than is true, and, as far as the human heart is concerned, to express more than one feels. This is what we all do, every day, to simplify life. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened. He is asked, for example, to say that he regrets his crime, in the approved manner. He replies that what he feels is annoyance rather than real regret. And this shade of meaning condemns him. For me, therefore, Meursault is not a piece of social wreckage, but a poor and naked man enamored of a sun that leaves no shadows. Far from being bereft of all feeling, he is animated by a passion that is deep because it is stubborn, a passion for the absolute and for truth.

The absurdity of Meursault’s position found its fullest expression in what critic Martin Esslin in the 1960s termed the  Theater of the Absurd , a theater in which the meaninglessness of existence is the central thematic concern. Sartre’s own No Exit was the first example, but many other plays of a similar character followed, authored by Samuel Beckett (1906–89), an Irishman who lived in Paris throughout the 1950s, the Romanian Eugène Ionesco (1909–94), the Frenchman Jean Genet, the British Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the American Edward Albee (1928–2016), and the Czech-born Englishman Tom Stoppard (1937–). All of these playwrights share a common existential sense of the absurd plus, ironically, a sense that language is a barrier to communication, that speech is almost futile, and that we are condemned to isolation and alienation.

The most popular of the absurdist plays is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, written between early October 1948 and late January 1949, and first performed in French in 1953 and in English in 1955. Subtitled A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, the play introduced audiences to a new set of stage conventions—for all practical purposes as important as the actual dialogue—from its essentially barren set (only a leafless tree decorates the stage), to its two clownlike characters, Vladimir and Estragon, whose language is incapable of affecting or even coming to grips with their situation. The play demands that its audience, like its central characters, try to make sense of an incomprehensible world in which nothing occurs. In fact, the play’s first line announces, as Estragon tries without success to remove his boot, “Nothing to be done.” In Act 1, Vladimir and Estragon await the arrival of a person referred to as Godot (Reading 38.4a):

READING 38.4a

from Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Act 1 (1953)

VLADIMIR: What do we do now?

ESTRAGON: Wait.

That is exactly what the audience must do as well—wait. Yet nothing happens. Godot does not arrive. In despair, Vladimir and Estragon contemplate hanging themselves but are unable to. Then they decide to leave but do not move. Act 2 takes place the next day. As Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot in this scene from the beginning of Act 2, contradictions of their interchange with each other are matched by the wide range of feelings Beckett demands of them in his stage directions (Reading 38.4b). Nothing has changed—Vladimir and Estragon again wait for Godot, who does not arrive, and again contemplate suicide. There is no development, no change of circumstance, no crisis, no resolution. The play’s conclusion, which repeats the futile decision to move on that ended Act 1, demonstrates this (Reading 38.4c):

READING 38.4c

from Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Act 2 (1953)

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go? ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go. (They do not move.) (Curtain.)

The promise of action and the realization of none—that is the Theater of the Absurd.

America after the War: Triumph and Doubt

1. 38.2 What various approaches to painting distinguish the Abstract Expressionists and what do they have in common?

Only in Europe, where economic recovery lagged far behind the United States because its industries had been devastated by the war, did the magnitude of American consumption seem obvious. It was in Europe, specifically London, that the first artistic critiques of consumer culture were produced by a group of artists known as the Independents (see Closer Look). But, at the same time, the U.S. Department of State toured mammoth exhibitions of paintings and sculpture by contemporary American artists across Europe—and in Paris, especially—in order to demonstrate the spirit of freedom and innovation in American art (and, by extension, American culture as a whole). The individualistic spirit of these artists, whose work was branded  Abstract Expressionism , was seen as the very antithesis of communism, and their work was meant to convey the message that America had not only triumphed in the war, but in art and culture as well. New York, not Paris, was now the center of the art world.

The Triumph of American Art: Abstract Expressionism

These artists included immigrants like Arshile Gorky (1904–48), Hans Hoffmann (1880–1966), Milton Resnick (1917–2004), and Willem de Kooning (1904–97), as well as slightly younger American-born artists like Franz Kline (1910–62) and Jackson Pollock (1912–56). All freely acknowledged their debts to Cubism’s assault on traditional representation, German Expressionism’s turn inward from the world, Kandinsky’s near-total abstraction, and Surrealism’s emphasis on chance operations and psychic automatism. Together the Abstract Expressionists saw themselves as standing at the edge of the unknown, ready to define themselves through a Sartrian struggle with the blank canvas, through the physical act of applying paint and the energy that each painted gesture reveals.

Action Painting: Pollock and de Kooning

In 1956, Willem de Kooning commented that “every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cézanne did it. Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.” Around 1940, Pollock underwent psychoanalysis in order to explore Surrealist psychic automatism and to reveal, on canvas, the deepest areas of the unconscious. His 1943 Guardians of the Secret is an expression of that effort (fig. 38.5). Locked in the central chest are indecipherable “secrets,” watched over by a dog (perhaps the id) and two figures at each side (perhaps the ego and the superego). Rising from the trunk are a mask, a rooster, and perhaps even a fetus.

This depiction of a mental landscape would soon develop into large-scale “ action paintings ,” as described by the critic Harold Rosenberg in 1942. The canvas had become, he said, “an arena in which to act.” The painting was no longer “a picture but an event.” Pollock would drip, pour, and splash oil paint, house and boat paint, and enamel over the surface of the canvas, determining the top and bottom of the piece only after the process was complete. The result was a galactic sense of space, what Rosenberg called “allover” space, in which the viewer can almost trace Pollock’s rhythmic gestural dance around the painting’s perimeter (fig. 38.6). De Kooning was 12 years Pollock’s senior and had begun in the late 1930s and early 1940s in a more figurative vein. His 1940 Seated Woman shows the influence of Picasso’s Cubist portraits of the 1930s (see Girl Before a Mirror, fig. 35.13), even as it allows various anatomical parts to float free of the body or almost dissolve into fluid form (fig. 38.7). By the mid-1940s, in works like Pink Angels, the free-floating forms seem to refer to human anatomy even as they remain free from it (fig. 38.8). An eye here, a seated figure there, an extended arm, a breast, all set free of any logical skeletal relationships, begin to create the same allover space that distinguishes Pollock’s work. The difference is that de Kooning’s space is composed of shapes and forms rather than the woven linear skein of Pollock’s compositions. By 1950, the surface of de Kooning’s paintings seemed densely packed with free-floating, vaguely anatomical parts set in a landscape of crumpled refuse, earthmoving equipment, concrete blocks, and I-beams. None of these elements is definitively visible, merely suggested. Excavation is a complex organization of open and closed cream-colored forms that lead from one to the other, their black outlines overlapping, merging, disappearing across the surface (fig. 38.9). Small areas of brightly colored brushwork interrupt the surface. When, in 1951, Excavation was featured in an exhibition of abstract painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, de Kooning lectured on the subject “What Abstract Art Means to Me.” His description of his relationship to his environment is a fair explanation of what we see in the painting: “Everything that passes me I can see only a little of, but I’m always looking. And I see an awful lot sometimes.”

De Kooning’s abstraction differs from Pollock’s largely in this. As opposed to plumbing the depths of the psyche, he represents the psyche’s encounter with the world. Even in early figurative works such as Seated Woman, where the curvilinear features of his sitter contrast with the geometric features of the room, de Kooning’s primary concern is the relation of the individual to his or her environment. The tension between the two is the focus of his works.

Women Abstract Expressionists

In many ways, women Abstract Expressionist artists held a position in the movement as a whole that is comparable to that of the women associated with the Surrealists in Europe. From the point of view of the men—and the critics who wrote about the men—they were spouses or lovers and, when noticed at all as artists, were seen as part of a “second generation” following on the heels of the great male innovators of the first generation. In 1948, for instance, the male Abstract Expressionists organized a group known as The Club, a social gathering that met regularly in a rented loft on East 8th Street in New York City. According to Pat Passlof, herself a painter and married to fellow Abstract Expressionist Milton Resnick, The Club’s charter explicitly excluded communists, homosexuals, and women because, she was told, “those are the three groups that take over.” In fact, women did attend meetings, though they were excluded from board meetings or policy discussions.

Although excluded from the inner circle, a number of the women associated with Abstract Expressionism were painters of exceptional ability. Elaine de Kooning (1918–89), who married Willem in 1943, was known for her highly sexualized portraits of men. Lee Krasner (1908–84), who married Jackson Pollock in 1945, developed her own distinctive allover style of thickly applied paint consisting of calligraphic lines. Though these lines sometimes enclose symbol-like forms, in White Squares their architecture possesses some of the energy of automatic writing—a kind of visual equivalent to “noise poetry” (fig. 38.10). Krasner later defined her relationship to the Abstract Expressionists and Pollock in particular:

I was put together with the wives. They worked, they supported their husbands, they taught school and kept their mouths absolutely closed tight. I don’t know if they were instructed never to speak publicly, I don’t know if they had a thought. Jackson always treated me as an artist but his ego was so colossal, I didn’t threaten him in any way. So he was aware of what I was doing, I was working, and that was that. That was our relationship.

Fig. 38.10

Lee Krasner, WHITE SQUARES

One of the major tensions in Abstract Expressionism is the dynamic relationship between figuration and abstraction. As de Kooning once said, “Even abstract shapes must have a likeness.” In River Bathers by Grace Hartigan (1922–2008), the broad, gestural abstract washes of color have a powerful emotional and visual presence (fig. 38.11). She would later say, “My art was always about something,” which in this case is five or six figures standing at a river’s edge. For Hartigan the painting is not realistic, but it captures real feelings experienced in a specific place and time. Inspired by de Kooning, Joan Mitchell (1925–92) began painting in New York in the early 1950s, but after 1955, she divided her time between Paris and New York, moving to Paris on a more permanent basis in 1959. Ten years later, she moved down the Seine to Vétheuil, living in the house that Monet had occupied from 1878 to 1881. Although she denied the influence of Monet, her paintings possess something of the scale of Monet’s water lily paintings, and her brushwork realizes in large what Monet rendered in detail. Like Monet, she was obsessed with water, specifically Lake Michigan, which as a child she had constantly viewed from her family’s Chicago apartment. “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed.” As in most of her works, the unpainted white ground of Piano Mécanique takes on the character of atmosphere or water, an almost touchable and semitransparent space that reflects the incidents of weather, time, and light (fig. 38.12). The Color-Field Painting of Rothko and Frankenthaler

A second variety of Abstract Expressionism offered viewers a more meditative and quiet painting based on large expanses of relatively undifferentiated color. Mark Rothko (1903–70) began painting in the early 1940s by placing archetypal figures in front of large monochromatic bands of hazy, semitransparent color. By the early 1950s, he had eliminated the figures, leaving only the background color field.

The scale of these paintings is intentionally large. Green on Blue, for instance, is over 7 feet tall (fig. 38.13). “The reason I paint [large pictures],” he stated in 1951,

is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.

Viewers find themselves enveloped in Rothko’s sometimes extremely somber color fields. These expanses of color become, in this sense, stage sets for the human drama that transpires before them. As Rothko further explains:

I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.

The emotional toll of such painting finally cost Rothko his life. His vision became darker and darker throughout the 1960s, and in 1970, he hanged himself in his studio.

In 1952, directly inspired by Pollock’s drip paintings, 24-year-old Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) diluted paint almost to the consistency of watercolor and began pouring it onto unprimed cotton canvas to achieve giant stains of color that suggest landscape (fig. 38.14

). The risk she assumed in controlling her flooding hues, and the monumentality of her compositions, immediately inspired a large number of other artists.

The Dynamic Sculpture of Calder and Smith

Sculpture, too, could partake of the same gestural freedom and psychological abstraction as Abstract Expressionist painting. It could become a field of action, like Pollock’s and de Kooning’s paintings, in which the sculptor confronts the most elemental forms of being.

When the American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898–1976) arrived in Paris in 1926, his studio was a favorite haunt of the Surrealists, who came to witness performances of Cirque Calder (1926–31), a miniature arena in which he manipulated diminutive figures built of wire and wood, including bareback riders, acrobats, sword swallowers, and the like. So time and chance—the happenstance of live performance—were built into his work. By the early 1930s he began to make what Marcel Duchamp labeled  mobiles , which in French refer not only to things that move but “motives” as well, the causes or incentives for action (fig. 38.15). The movement of Calder’s mobile comes from accidental and often unpredictable currents of air that hit the suspended sculpture—a breeze, a sudden gust from the air-conditioning system, a wave of air from a passing bus. The mobile’s appearance changes as continuously and as arbitrarily as a cumulus cloud on a summer’s day, suggesting familiar shapes—fish, lily pads, birds—in the manner of a cloud. As the mobile turns in space, it defines a virtual volume like that defined by the linear tracery of a handheld light swung in an arc and photographed with a long exposure time. In other words, its path is like a dancer’s over the space of a stage, a choreography of graceful forms. In a 1946 catalog for an exhibition of Calder mobiles, Jean-Paul Sartre summed up the mobile’s appeal as stemming from “the beauty of its pure and changing forms, at once so free and so disciplined.”

The sculpture of David Smith (1906–65) offers the same sense of change but in a more stable form. Here it is not the sculpture that moves, but the viewer who must. For instance, when one views Blackburn: Song of an Irish Blacksmith from the front, the sculpture seems totally open and airy, consisting of negative spaces defined by linear elements, whereas from the side it becomes a complex network of densely packed forms (fig. 38.16). There is really no way for the viewer to intuit all of the sculpture’s aspects without walking around it. From any single view it remains unpredictable. And the surprises that the sculpture presents extend to its materials. It is constructed out of found objects from the industrial world—bent steel rods, cotter pins, and what appears to be the metal seat of a farm tractor—all transformed, in a consciously Surrealist manner, into something new, unique, and marvelous. What most distinguishes Smith’s work is the requirement of active participation from the viewer to experience it fully. So the responsibility for the creation of meaning in art begins to shift from artist to audience, as it does in Abstract Expressionism generally, if less clearly. This shift was to profoundly alter the direction of art in the second half of the twentieth century, when a work of art would increasingly have as many meanings as the viewers it attracted. The Beat Generation and the Art of Inclusiveness

1. 38.3 What aesthetic principles govern the work of the Beats, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, and do they have anything in common?

The participation of the audience and the multiple perspectives that the work of both Calder and Smith embody became the central focus of the group of American poets, writers, and artists that we have come to call Beats or hipsters. Beat was originally a slang term meaning “down and out,” or “poor and exhausted,” but it came to designate the purposefully disenfranchised artists of the American 1950s who turned their backs on what they saw as the duplicity of their country’s values. The  Beat generation  sought a heightened and, they believed, more authentic style of life, defined by alienation, nonconformity, sexual liberation, drugs, and alcohol.

Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac

The Beats’ material lay all around them, in the world, as they sought to expose the tensions that lay under the presumed well-being of their society. One of their contemporary heroes was the Swiss photographer Robert Frank (1924–), who with the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship had traveled across America for two years, publishing 83 of the resulting 2,800 photographs as The Americans in 1958. The book outraged a public used to photographic compilations such as the 1955 exhibition “The Family of Man,” which drew 3,000 visitors daily to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in celebration of its message of universal hope and unity. Frank’s photographs offered something different. They capture everyday, mundane things that might otherwise go by unseen, with a sense of spontaneity and directness that was admired, especially, by writer Jack Kerouac (1922–69), who had chronicled his own odysseys across America in the 1957 novel On the Road.

On the Road describes Kerouac’s real-life adventures with his friend Neal Cassady (1926–68), who appears in what Kerouac called his “true-story novel” as Dean Moriarty. Cassady advocated a brand of writing that amounted to, as he put it in a letter to Kerouac, “a continuous chain of undisciplined thought.” In fact, Kerouac wrote the novel in about three weeks on a single, long scroll of paper, improvising, he felt, like a jazz musician, only with words and narrative. But like a jazz musician, Kerouac was a skilled craftsman, and if the novel seems a spontaneous outburst, it reflects the same sensibility as Robert Frank’s The Americans. Frank, after all, had taken over 2,800 photographs, but he had published only 83 of them. One senses, in reading Kerouac’s rambling adventure, something of the same editorial control.

Ginsberg and “Howl”

The work that best characterizes the Beat generation is “Howl,” a poem by Allen Ginsberg (1926–97). This lengthy poem in three parts and a footnote has a memorable opening (Reading 38.5):

READING 38.5

from Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (1956)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall …

Ginsberg’s spirit of inclusiveness admitted into art not only drugs and alcohol but also graphic sexual language, to say nothing of his frank homosexuality. Soon after “Howl” was published in 1956 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, federal authorities charged Ferlinghetti with obscenity. He was eventually acquitted. Whatever the public thought of it, the poem’s power was hardly lost on the other Beats. The poet Michael McClure (1932–) was present the night Ginsberg first read it at San Francisco’s Six Gallery in 1955:

Allen began in a small and intensely lucid voice. At some point Jack Kerouac began shouting “GO” in cadence as Allen read it. In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before—we had gone beyond a point of no return—and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision. …

Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power-support bases.

Here, in fact, in the mid-1950s were the first expressions of the forces of rebellion that would sweep the United States and the world in the following decade. John Cage: The Aesthetics of Chance and the Art of Inclusiveness

Ginsberg showed that anything and everything could be admitted into the domain of art. This notion also informs the music of composer John Cage (1912–92), who by the mid-1950s was proposing that it was time to “give up the desire to control sound … and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves.” Cage’s notorious 4' 33" (4 minutes 33 seconds) is a case in point. First performed in Woodstock, New York, by pianist David Tudor on August 29, 1952, it consists of three silent movements, each of a different length, but when added together totaling four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The composition was anything but silent, however, admitting into the space framed by its duration all manner of ambient sound—whispers, coughs, passing cars, the wind. Whatever sounds happened during its performance were purely a matter of chance, never predictable. Like Frank’s, Cage’s is an art of inclusiveness.

That summer, Cage organized a multimedia event at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, where he occasionally taught. One of the participants was 27-year-old artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). By the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg had begun to make what he called  combine paintings , works in which all manner of materials—postcards, advertisements, tin cans, pinups—are combined to create the work. If Rauschenberg’s work does not literally depend upon matters of chance in its construction, it does incorporate such a diverse range of material that it creates the aura of representing Rauschenberg’s chance encounters with the world around him. And it does, above all, reflect Cage’s sense of all-inclusiveness. Bed literally consists of a sheet, pillow, and quilt raised to the vertical and then dripped not only with paint but also with toothpaste and fingernail polish in what amounts to a parody of Abstract Expressionist introspection (fig. 38.17). Even as it juxtaposes highbrow art-making with the vernacular quilt, abstraction with realism, Bed is a wryly perceptive transformation of what Max Ernst in the early days of Surrealism had called “The Master’s Bedroom” (see fig. 35.11).

Fig. 38.17

Robert Rauschenberg, BED

The Art of Collaboration

Rauschenberg had known Cage since the summer of 1952 when, not long before the premiere of 4' 33" in New York state, Cage had organized an event, later known as Theater Piece #1, in the dining hall of Black Mountain College. Although almost everyone who participated remembers the event somewhat differently, it seems certain that the poets M.C. Richards (1916–99) and Charles Olson (1910–70) read poetry from ladders, Robert Rauschenberg played Edith Piaf records on an old windup phonograph with his almost totally “White Paintings” hanging around the room, Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) danced through the audience, a dog at his heels, while Cage himself sat on a stepladder, sometimes reading a lecture on Zen Buddhism, sometimes just listening. “Music,” Cage declared at some point in the event, “is not listening to Mozart but sounds such as a street car or a screaming baby.”

The event inaugurated a collaboration between Cunningham (dance), Cage (music), and Rauschenberg (decor and costume) that would span many years. Their collaboration is unique in the arts because of its insistence on the independence, not interdependence, of each part of the dance’s presentation. Cunningham explained:

In most conventional dances there is a central idea to which everything adheres. The dance has been made to the piece of music, the music supports the dance, and the decor frames it. The central idea is emphasized by each of the several arts. What we have done in our work is to bring together three separate elements in time and space, the music, the dance and the decor, allowing each one to remain independent.

So Cunningham created his choreography independently of Cage’s scores, and Rauschenberg based his decors on only minimal information offered him by Cunningham and Cage (fig. 38.18). The resulting dance was, by definition, a matter of music, choreography, and decor coming together (or not) as a chance operation.

The music Cage composed for Cunningham was also often dependent on chance operations. For instance, in 1959, Cage recorded an 89-minute piece entitled Indeterminacy (Track 38.1). It consisted of Cage narrating short, humorous stories while, in another room, out of earshot, pianist David Tudor performed selections from Cage’s 1958 Concert for Piano and Orchestra as well as a pre-recorded tape from another 1958 composition, Fontina Mix. For a 1965 collaboration with Cunningham, Variations V, Cage’s score consisted of sounds randomly triggered by sensors reacting to the movements of the dancers. This resulted in what Gordon Mumma, a member of Cunningham’s troupe, called “a superbly poly: -chromatic, -genic, -phonic, -morphic, -pagic, -technic, -valent, multi-ringed circus.” Johns and the Obvious Image

Whereas the main point for Cunningham, Cage, and Rauschenberg was the idea of composition without a central focus, Rauschenberg’s close friend and fellow painter Jasper Johns (1930–) took the opposite tack. Throughout the 1950s, he focused on the most common, seemingly obvious subject matter—numbers, targets, maps, and flags—in a manner that in no way suggests the multiplicity of meaning in his colleagues’ work. Johns’s painting Three Flags is nevertheless capable of evoking in its viewers emotions ranging from patriotic respect to equally patriotic outrage, from anger to laughter (fig. 38.19). But Johns means the imagery to be so obvious that viewers turn their attention to the wax-based paint itself, to its almost sinuous application to the canvas surface. In this sense, the work—despite being totally recognizable—is as abstract as any Abstract Expressionist painting, but without Abstract Expressionism’s assertion of the primacy of subjective experience.

Allan Kaprow and the Happening

Cage’s aesthetic of diversity and inclusiveness also informs the inventive multimedia pieces of Allan Kaprow (1927–2006). In an essay called “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” written just two years after Pollock’s death in an automobile accident in 1956, Kaprow described Pollock’s art, with its willingness to bury nails, sand, wire, screen mesh, even coins in its whirls of paint, as pointing toward new possibilities for the subsequent generation of artists (Reading 38.6): READING 38.6

from Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958)

Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Not only will these bold new creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents. An odor of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano; three taps on the front door, a scratch, a sigh, or a voice lecturing endlessly, a blinding staccato flash, a bowler hat—all will become materials for this new concrete art.

Young artists of today need no longer say, “I am a painter” or “a poet” or “a dancer.” They are simply “artists.” All of life will be open to them.

It is hardly surprising that it was Kaprow who founded the  Happening , a new multimedia event in which artists and audience participated as equal partners. Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts took place over the course of six evenings in October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York. It was inspired by Theater Piece #1. In order to add sound to his environment, Kaprow enrolled in Cage’s music composition course at the New School for Social Research in New York. Included in the environment were record players, tape recorders, bells, a toy ukulele, a flute, a kazoo, and a violin. Kaprow scored the directions for playing them in precisely timed outbursts that approximated the cacophony of the urban environment. He divided the gallery into three rooms, created by plastic sheets and movable walls, between which audience members were invited to move in unison. Performers played instruments and records, painted, squeezed orange juice, spoke in sentence fragments—all determined by chance operations. The audience, although directed to move according to Kaprow’s instructions, was also invited to participate in the work, and Kaprow would increasingly include the audience as a participant in his later Happenings.

Architecture in the 1950s

If the Beat generation was antiestablishment in its sensibilities, the architecture of the 1950s embodied the very opposite. The International Style aesthetic that Mies van der Rohe brought to his 1954–58 Seagram Building (see fig. 37.30) could also be applied to the private residence, as he made clear with the 1950 Farnsworth House (fig. 38.20). A more direct homage to Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (see fig. 37.9), though more severe in its insistence on the vertical and the horizontal, it is virtually transparent, opening out to the surrounding countryside, with views of the Fox River, and also inviting the countryside in.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is a conscious counterstatement to Mies van der Rohe’s severe rationalist geometry, which, in fact, Wright despised (fig. 38.21). Situated on Fifth Avenue directly across from Central Park, the museum’s organic forms echo the natural world. The plan is an inverted spiral ziggurat, or stepped tower, that dispenses with the right-angle geometries of standard urban architecture and the conventional approach to museum design, which led visitors through a series of interconnected rooms. Instead, Wright whisked museumgoers to the top of the building via an elevator, allowing them to proceed downward on a continuous spiral ramp from which, across the open rotunda in the middle, they can review what they have already seen and anticipate what is to come. The ramp is cantilevered to such an extent that several contractors were frightened off by Wright’s plans. The plans were complete in 1943, but construction did not begin until 1956 because of a prohibition of new building during World War II and permit delays stemming from the radical nature of the design. It was still not complete at the time of Wright’s death in 1959. In many ways, Wright’s Guggenheim Museum represents the spirit of architectural innovation that still pervades the practice of architecture to this day.

The tower behind Wright’s original building was designed much later by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates. It contains 51,000 square feet of new and renovated gallery space, 15,000 square feet of new office space, a restored theater, new restaurant, and retrofitted support and storage spaces. Wright had originally proposed such an annex to house artists’ studios and offices, but the plan was dropped for financial reasons. Pop Art

1. 38.4 How does Pop Art reflect American culture?

In the early 1960s, especially in New York, a number of artists created a “realist” art that represented reality in terms of the media: advertising, television, comic strips—the imagery of mass culture. The famous paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans created by Andy Warhol (1928–87) were among the first of these to find their way into the gallery scene (fig. 38.22). In the fall of 1962, he exhibited 32 uniform 20 by 16-inch canvases, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Each depicted one of the 32 different Campbell’s Soup “flavors.” Even as the paintings debunked the idea of originality—are they Campbell’s or Warhol’s?—their literalness redefined the American landscape as the visual equivalent of the supermarket aisle. (For a more contemporary take on the questions of originality that Warhol raises, see The Continuing Presence of the Past.) The works were deliberately opposed to the self-conscious subjectivity of the Abstract Expressionists. It was, in fact, as if the painter had no personality at all. As Warhol himself put it, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

The term Pop Art quickly became attached to work such as Warhol’s. Coined in England in the 1950s (see Closer Look earlier in this chapter), it soon came to refer to any art whose theme was essentially the commodification of culture—that is, the marketplace as the dominant force in the creation of “culture.” Thus, Still Life #20 (fig. 38.23) by Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004) is contemporaneous with Warhol’s Soup Cans, though neither was aware of the other until late in 1962, and both are equally “pop.” Inside the cabinet with the star stenciled on it—which can be either opened or closed—are actual household items, including a package of SOS scouring pads and a can of Ajax cleanser. Above the blue table on the right, covered with two-dimensional representations (cut out of magazines) of various popular varieties of food and drink, is a reproduction of a highly formalist painting by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. The implication, of course, is that art—once so far removed from everyday life, not even, in this case, referring to the world—has itself become a commodity, not so very different from Coke or a loaf of Lite Diet bread. In fact, the structure and color of Wesselmann’s collage subtly reflects the structure and color of Mondrian’s painting, as if the two are simply two different instances of “the same.” Two Marilyns: Warhol and Rosenquist

By late 1962, Warhol had stopped making his paintings by hand, instead using a photo-silkscreen process to create the images mechanically and employing others to do the work for him in his studio, The Factory. One of the first of these was the Marilyn Diptych (fig. 38.24). Marilyn Monroe had died, by suicide, in August of that year, and the painting is at once a memorial to her and a commentary on the circumstances that had brought her to despair. She is not so much a person, as Warhol depicts her, but a personality, the creation of a Hollywood studio system, whose publicity shot Warhol repeats over and over again here to the point of erasure.

Also confronted by Monroe’s suicide in 1962, James Rosenquist (1933–2017) approached her celebrity status and the price she had paid for it—her loss of personal identity—in different terms. In the late 1950s in New York, he had worked as a billboard painter, and Marilyn Monroe, I (fig. 38.25) is indeed billboard size. Rosenquist has even used enamel spray paint—as he would if the painting were actually a billboard—to portray Marilyn herself. But he has broken her apart, turned her upside down, and fragmented her as she must have herself felt fragmented and lost. Across the center of the image he has imposed two sets of letterforms. Right-side up in block capitals are the middle letters of Marilyn’s name—ARILY—and upside down in cursive script the first half of the Coca-Cola trademark. However different their imagery—Warhol’s immediately recognizable, Rosenquist’s mysteriously elusive—both see their subject in terms of Hollywood’s transformation of her from a person, Norma Jeane Mortenson, into the commercial commodity, Marilyn Monroe. Lichtenstein and Oldenburg

The enlarged comic strip paintings of Roy Lichtenstein (1923–97) are replete with heavy outlines and Ben-Day dots, the process created by Benjamin Day at the turn of the century to produce shading effects in mechanical printing. Widely used in comic strips, the dots are, for Lichtenstein, a conscious parody of Seurat’s pointillism (see Chapter 33). But they also reveal the extent to which “feeling” in popular culture is as “canned” as Campbell’s Soup. In Oh, Jeff … (fig. 38.26), “love” is emptied of real meaning as the real weight of the message is carried by the final “But ….” Even the feelings inherent in Abstract Expressionist brushwork came under Lichtenstein’s attack (fig. 38.27). In fact, Lichtenstein had taught painting to college students, and he discovered that the “authentic” gesture of Abstract Expressionism could easily be taught and replicated without any emotion whatsoever—carried out as a completely academic enterprise.

One of the most inventive of the Pop artists was Claes Oldenburg (1929–), born in Sweden but raised from age 7 in Chicago. Inspired by Allan Kaprow’s essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in 1961, he rented a storefront on New York’s Lower East Side, and in time for Christmas, opened The Store, filled with life-size and over-life-size enameled plaster sculptures of everything from pie à la mode, to hamburgers, hats, caps, 7-Up bottles, shirt-and-tie combinations, and slices of cake. “I am for an art,” he wrote in a statement accompanying the exhibition,

that is political-erotica-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.

I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top. I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

Admiring the way that cars filled the space of auto showrooms, Oldenburg soon enlarged his objects to the size of cars and started making them out of vinyl stuffed (or not) with foam rubber. These objects toy not only with our sense of scale—a 5-foot-high toilet, for instance, or a giant lightplug—but with the tension inherent in making soft something meant to be hard (fig. 38.28). They play, further, in almost Surrealist fashion, with notions of sexuality as well—the analogy between inserting a lightplug into its socket and sexual intercourse was hardly lost on Oldenburg, who delighted even more at the image of cultural impotence that his “soft” lightplug implied.

Fig. 38.28

Claes Oldenburg, SOFT TOILET

Minimalism in Art

1. 38.5 What is Minimalism in art?

At first it seems that nothing could be further in character from Pop Art than Pagosa Springs (fig. 38.29), a 1960 painting by Frank Stella (1936–). Stella’s work is contemporaneous with Pop, but it seems, in its almost total formality and abstraction—its overtly unsymbolic and minimal means—to turn its back almost entirely on popular culture. Pagosa Springs is composed, simply, of copper metallic parallel lines painted carefully between visible pencil marks on an I-shaped canvas. But in its austere geometry and lack of expressive technique, it represents a revolt against the same commodity culture targeted by the Pop artists. In fact, the onslaught of mass-media images in the culture of consumption seems far removed from Minimalist Art’s almost pure and Classical geometries. Cool and severe where Pop is brash and sardonic, Minimalist Art is nevertheless equally concerned with challenging the presumption that art’s meaning originates in the “genius” of the individual artist. If Warhol could say, “just look at the surface of my paintings and … there I am. There’s nothing behind it,” so Stella would say of paintings such as Pagosa Springs: “What you see is what you see. Painting to me is a brush in a bucket and you put it on a surface. There is no other reality for me than that.”

Like Warhol producing series of silkscreen works at the Factory, Minimalist artists were also intrigued with utilizing the processes of mass production, the use of ready-made materials, and the employment of modular units. A sculptural piece by Carl Andre (1935–), 10 × 10 Altstadt Copper Square (fig. 38.30), is composed of 100 identical copper tiles. In form, it closely parallels Warhol’s 32 Soup Cans or the 50 Marilyns that make up the Marilyn Diptych, except that it has no imagery. The ultimate question Minimalist Art asks is “What, minimally, makes a work of art?” This was not a new question. Marcel Duchamp had posed it with his readymades (see fig. 35.5), and so had Kazimir Malevich with his Suprematist paintings (see fig. 35.8). In many ways, Pop itself was asking the same question: What, after all, made a picture of a soup can or a comic strip “art”? But Minimalist artists stressed the aesthetic quality of their works; they were confident that they were producing works of (timeless) beauty and eloquence. Perhaps most of all, Minimalism invites the viewer to contemplate its sometimes seductively simple beauty. It invites, in other words, the active engagement of the viewer in experiencing it.

This is precisely the point of a room installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) by Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), one of 105 wall drawings installed at the museum in 2008 as part of a survey exhibition of LeWitt’s work that will be on display until 2033 (fig. 38.31). The piece literally surrounds the viewer, covering every wall of a 26 by 46-foot room. Like the other wall drawings in the exhibition, which cover over 1 acre of interior walls in a 27,000-square-foot, three-story historic old mill building situated at the heart of Mass MoCA’s campus, the drawing began as a set of instructions to be followed by workers who would execute the work independently of the artist. “The idea,” LeWitt said, in one of his most famous statements, “becomes the machine that makes the art.” The instructions are comparable to a composer’s musical score—notations designed to guide those executing the piece as if it were a performance. For Wall Drawing #146A, LeWitt proposed a “vocabulary” of 20 different kinds of lines to be combined in pairs of 2 in order to realize 192 different pairs. His inspiration was the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who in the late nineteenth century created photographic sequences of animals and humans in motion (see fig. 34.19). “I’ve long had a strong affinity toward Muybridge,” LeWitt declared. “A lot of his ideas appear in my work.” In this case, LeWitt captures the sense of a logical, serial movement through space.

Nevertheless, the “art” in works such as Andre’s and LeWitt’s is extremely matter-of-fact—unmediated, that is, by concerns outside itself. One hardly needs to know of LeWitt’s interest in Muybridge to find oneself totally immersed in and engaged by the work. The wall drawing is about the simple beauty of its form, insisting specifically that we pay attention to its order and arrangement. But the order reflected in Andre’s and LeWitt’s work does not represent belief in a transcendent, universal order, as the work of Mondrian and Van Doesburg did (see fig. 37.5). Andre’s copper squares and LeWitt’s white chalk lines are simply conscious arrangements of parts, without reference to anything outside themselves. To paraphrase Frank Stella: What they are is what they are. Continuity & Change: The Civil Rights Movement

Soon after Reconstruction, the period immediately following the Civil War, Southern states passed a group of laws that effectively established a racial caste system that relegated black Americans to second-class status and institutionalized segregation. In the South, the system was known as Jim Crow, but discrimination against blacks was entrenched in the North as well. At the outset of World War II, A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) had organized a march on Washington “for jobs in national defense and equal integration in the fighting forces.” Ten thousand blacks were scheduled to march on July 1, 1941, when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, banning discriminatory hiring practices in the defense industry and the federal government.

But it was not until 1954 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated schools violated the Constitution. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Court found that it was not good enough for states to provide “separate but equal” schools. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the Court declared, and were in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. The Justices called on states with segregated schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”

Within a week, the state of Arkansas announced that it would seek to comply with the Court’s ruling. The state had already desegregated its state university and its law school. Now it was time to desegregate elementary and secondary schools. The plan was for Little Rock Central High School to open its doors to African-American students in the fall of 1957. But on September 2, the night before school was to start, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state’s National Guard to surround the high school and prevent any black students from entering. Faubus claimed he was trying to prevent violence. The nine black students who were planning to attend classes that day decided to arrive together on September 4. Unaware of the plan, Elizabeth Eckford arrived alone (fig. 38.32). The others followed, but were all turned away by the Guard. Nearly three weeks later, after a federal injunction ordered Faubus to remove the Guard, the nine finally entered Central High School. Little Rock citizens then launched a campaign of verbal abuse and intimidation to prevent the black students from remaining in school. Finally, President Eisenhower ordered 1,000 paratroopers and 10,000 National Guardsmen to Little Rock, and on September 25, Central High School was officially desegregated. Nevertheless, chaperoned throughout the year by the National Guard, the nine black students were spat at and reviled every day, and none of them returned to school the following year.

Fig. 38.32

ONE OF THE “LITTLE ROCK NINE,” ELIZABETH ECKFORD, BRAVES A JEERING CROWD, SEPTEMBER 4, 1957

Alone, as school opened in 1957, Elizabeth Eckford faced the taunts of the crowd defying the Supreme Court order to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The image captures perfectly the hatred—and the determination—that the civil rights movement inspired.

Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images

The momentum of the civil rights movement really began soon after, on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks (1913–2005) was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to move to the Negro section of a bus. Dr. Martin Luther King, then pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, called for a boycott of the municipal bus system in protest. The boycott lasted over a year. In November 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the segregation of buses violated the Fourteenth Amendment. A federal injunction forced Montgomery officials to desegregate their buses, and Dr. King and a white minister rode side by side in the front seat of a city bus, setting the stage for a decade of liberation and change that reached across American society. Chapter Review: After the War

1. 38.1 Outline the principles of existentialism and how they manifest themselves in art and literature.

After the war, Europe was gripped by a profound pessimism. The existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre was a direct response. What did Sartre mean by the phrase “Existence precedes essence”? He agreed that the human condition is defined by alienation, anxiety, lack of authenticity, and a sense of nothingness, but he said that this did not abrogate the responsibility to act and create meaning. How did Sartre’s lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir, extend Sartre’s argument in The Second Sex? In art, Alberto Giacometti’s emaciated figures seemed to capture the human condition as trapped halfway between being and nothingness. Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, “raw art,” projected a condition of formlessness that reflected the disorder and chaos of the age. Others in Sartre’s circle contributed to the existential movement. What existential virtue does Albert Camus’s antihero Meursault, in The Stranger, possess? Sartre’s own play No Exit and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are examples of the Theater of the Absurd. What are the characteristics of this brand of theater?

1. 38.2 Compare and contrast the varieties of Abstract Expressionist painting.

The unprecedented prosperity of the United States after the war included the introduction of new products and services and the mass adoption of television as the primary form of entertainment. A counternote of sincerity was struck by the Abstract Expressionists. How did they apply Sartre’s theories to the act of painting? Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning inspired a generation of artists, including their own wives, to abandon representation in favor of directly expressing their emotions on the canvas in totally abstract terms. Color-field painters Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler created more meditative spaces based on large expanses of undifferentiated color. The sculptors Alexander Calder and David Smith created dynamic works that, in the first instance, literally moved, and in the second, required the viewer to move around them. How does responsibility for the creation of meaning in art begin to shift in Smith’s work?

1. 38.3 Describe the aesthetic principles governing the work of the Beats, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg.

At the same time, the Beat generation, a younger, more rebellious generation of writers and artists, began to critique American culture. Swiss photographer Robert Frank’s The Americans revealed a side of American life that outraged a public used to seeing the country through the lens of a happy optimism. Allen Ginsberg lashed out in his poem “Howl” with a forthright and uncensored frankness that seemed to many an affront to decency. What was the nature of the collaboration between composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, and artist Robert Rauschenberg? What characterizes Rauschenberg’s combine paintings? What defines Cage’s 4' 33" as music? What are the characteristics of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings? In what ways do the American Beats reflect the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre?

In architecture, Mies van der Rohe, transplanted from the Bauhaus to Chicago, brought the International Style to America. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, however, is a conscious counterstatement to Mies van der Rohe’s rationalist geometry, its organic forms echoing the natural world. To the Beats, the architecture of both represented all that was wrong with America. How would you explain their thinking?

1. 38.4 Discuss Pop Art as an American cultural phenomenon.

Pop Art reflected the commodification of culture and the marketplace as a dominant cultural force. In what terms did Andy Warhol compare Marilyn Monroe to Campbell’s Soup? How did James Rosenquist convey the same ideas but in different terms? How did Tom Wesselmann suggest that painting itself was a commodity? How did Roy Lichtenstein parody Abstract Expressionist painting? Claes Oldenburg created witty reproductions of American goods. How did he change them?

1. 38.5 Define Minimalism in art.

Minimalism reduces art to almost total formality and abstraction in terms that at first seem diametrically opposed to Pop Art. But, in fact, Pop Art and Minimalist Art have much in common. What values do they share? What differentiates them?

Book info

Chapter 38 in The Humanities: Culture, Continuity, and Change by Sayre, H. M