Week 6

October 3, 2006

Andy Warhol, Close Cover Before Striking, 1962
Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962
Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955
Jasper Johns, Gray Alphabet, 1956
Al Held, The Dowager Empress, 1965
Ed Ruscha, Annie, 1962
Ed Ruscha, E Ruscha, 1959
Al Held, untitled #57, 1956 

Ad Reinhardt, untitled Black Painting, and Black Paintings, 1960-66, installed at Jewish Museum
Ellsworth Kelly, Study for Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Ellsworth Kelly, Painting for a White Wall, 1952
Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Blue. 1963
Ellsworth Kelly, Orange White, 1964
Kenneth Noland, Sweep, 1959
Kenneth Noland, Virginia Site, 1959

Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950
Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950
Ad Reinhardt, untitled, 1938
Arshile Gorky, Organization 1936
Alfred Barr, frontispiece from Cubism and Abstract Art, Museum of Modern Art 1936
Jackson Pollock, Cut Out, 1948-50
Jackson Pollock, Out of the Web, 1949

Helen Frankenthaler, Magic Carpet, 1964
Helen Frankenthaler, Flood, 1967
Morris Louis, Salient, 1954
Morris Louis, Intrigue, 1954
Morris Louis, Bet Samach, 1956
Morris Louis, While, 1959-60
Morris Louis, Tet, 1958
Morris Louis, Saraband, 1959

“Sensibility of the Sixties,”  Artforum, January 1967:
Roy Lichtenstein: “apparent impersonality, predetermined end product, and factory surfaces”
Stephen Greene: “absolute frontality, repetitive forms….a tough clarity”
Will Insley: “engineered, scientific, geometric, calculated, measured, removed, acuteness of perception…painting becomes a diagramed object”
Phillip Pearlstein: “yes, there is a sensibility of the sixties.  …It is objective rather than subjective, constructed (planned, pre-determined) rather than improvised.”
Paul Brach:  “the sensibility of the sixties is tough, deadpan, ironic, anti-confessional, anti-individual, aware of its audience…and of the conventions of art.”  And Brach would go on to say, “Things have changed.  There are more artists, more collectors, more dealers, more critics, more money, more action.”

Allan Kaprow (1958): “In the past 75 years the random play of the hand upon the canvas or paper has become increasingly important.  Strokes, smears, lines, dots, etc., became less and less attached to represented objects and existed more and more on their own, self-sufficiently.  But from Impressionism up to say, Gorky, the idea of an “order” to these markings was explicit enough….one colored shape balanced (or modified, or stimulated) others and these in turn were played off against (or with) the whole canvas, taking into account size and shape—for the most part, quite consciously.  In short, part to whole and part to part relationships, no matter how strained, were a good 50 percent of the making of a picture (most of the time they were a lot more, maybe 90 precent).  With Pollock, however, the so called dance of dripping, slashing, squezzing, daubing, and whatever else went into the work placed an almost absolute value upon a diaristic gesture.  …with the huge canvas placed upon the floor thus making it difficult for the artist to see the whole or any extended section of its parts, Pollock could truly say he was in his work.”

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October 5, 2006

Al Held, The Dowager Empress, 1965
Al Held, Mao, 1967 
Al Held, untitled #57, 1956 
Ellsworth Kelly, Red, Blue, Green, 1962
Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Blue. 1963

Morris Louis, Salient, 1954
Morris Louis, Bet Samach, 1956
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950
Willem DeKooning, Excavation, 1950
Barnett Newman, Covenant, 1949
Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I, 1966
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, 1929-30
Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV, 1969-70

Morris Louis, Saraband, 1959
Morris Louis, Tet, 1958
Morris Louis, Alpha Tau, 1960-61
Morris Louis, Mu, 1960
Morris Louis, Pillar of Fire, 1961
Morris Louis, no. 1-71, 1962

Gene Davis, Cool Buzz Saw, 1964
Gene Davis, Moon Dog, 1966
Jules Olitski, Flaubert Red, 1964
Jules Olitski, High A Yellow, 1967

Kenneth Noland, Sweep, 1959 
Kenneth Noland, Whirl, 1960
Kenneth Noland, Every Third, 1963
Kenneth Noland, Magenta Haze, 1964
Kenneth Noland, Prime Course,  1964
Kenneth Noland, And Again, 1964 
Kenneth Noland, Grave Light, 1965
Kenneth Noland, Ado, 1967
Kenneth Noland, Via Blues, 1967, and installation

Frank Stella, Tomlinson Court Park, 1959
Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch, 1959
Frank Stella, Gezira, 1960
Frank Stella, Marriage of Reason and Squalor, 1959
Carl Andre, Cedar Piece, 1959
Carl Andre, Lever, 1966
Frank Stella, Luis Miguel Dominguin, 1960
Frank Stella, The Marquis de Portago, 1960 
Frank Stella, Carl Andre, 1963
Frank Stella, installation at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1964

Clement Greenberg (1961): “The essence of modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of the discipline to criticize the discipline, not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” 

Michael Fried (1965):  “once a painter who accepts the basic premises of modernism becomes aware of a particular problem thrown up by the art of the recent past, his action is no longer gratuitous but imposed.”

Donald Judd (1965):  "The stripes are nowhere near being discreet parts.  Since the surface is exceptionally unified and involves little or no space, the parallel plane is unusually distinct.  The order is not rationalistic or underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.  A painting isn't an image.  The shapes, the unity, projection, order and color are specific, aggressive and powerful."

Carl Andre (1959):  "Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.  Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his paintings.  He is not interested in sensitivity or personality, either his own or those of his audience.  He is interested in the necessities of painting.  Symbols are counters passed among people.  Frank Stella’s paintings are not symbolic.  His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas.  These paths lead only into painting."

Frank Stella:  “I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting—the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas.  If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides paint on the canvas.  My paintings are based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.”