by Cora Buhlert

News from West Germany

May 1 is not just a public holiday in all of Germany, but also the traditional holiday of the labour movement. The day was celebrated with marches and rallies in both East and West Germany. In East Germany, the marches were the usual propaganda affairs. In West Germany, Turkish, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian flags were spotted at the Mayday marches, as immigrant workers from Southern Europe joined their West German colleagues to demand higher wages and better working conditions. Concerns about the political situation and lack of freedom in the home countries of some of the immigrant workers were raised as well.

In other news, 32-year-old war correspondent Horst Faas became the first West German ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for his haunting photos of the war in Vietnam. Happy as I am for Mr. Faas, I still hope that he will soon have to find more pleasant subjects to photograph.

Maybe one day in the future, press photos like Horst Faas' will hang alongside fine art in museums and galleries around the world. Because there are certainly exciting movements afoot in the art world.

Art News

That's that for current events. Now for the meat of the article — a review of current art movements in this most modern year of 1965 (apropos given our show coming up in a few days):

The Reign of Abstract Expressionism

In the art world, Abstract Expressionism has been ruling supreme since the end of World War II, at least in the West. An outgrowth of prewar movements such as Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism and the Bauhaus, Abstract Expressionism is the art world's equivalent of the International Style in architecture and interior design. It is ubiquitous, wins awards, has the highest prestige and commands the highest prices. Abstract Expressionism also has widespread political support in the West, most likely because the Communists really, really don't like abstract art and prefer what they call Socialist Realism. There are even rumours that the CIA has been promoting abstract expressionism via the so-called Congress for Cultural Freedom, which certainly makes for strange bedfellows.

As a result, what was avantgarde and daring only twenty years ago had now become the very establishment that newer artists are rebelling against. And this rebellion is taking some very exciting forms.

Less is More: Minimalism

One reaction to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism was to take abstraction to its utmost extreme and simultaneously return to roots of modernism and the graphic simplicity of Russian Constructivism, the Dutch "De Stijl" movement or the German Bauhaus. This school, dubbed Minimalism, objects to the expressionist part of Abstract Expressionism and believes that art should not reflect its creator and his or her moods. Instead, art should be neutral, objective and refer only to itself. 29-year-old Frank Stella, one of the most notable figures of the Minimalist movement, sums up the aims of Minimalist art as "What you see is what you see."

So what do you see, when you look at a work of Minimalist art? You'll see simple patterns, geometric shapes, hard edges, primary colours and monochromatic palettes. The so-called "Black Paintings" by the above mentioned Frank Stella consist of concentric stripes painted on raw canvas in the black wall paint that Stella uses in his day job as a house painter. Canadian artist Agnes Martin paints grids and stripes in pastel watercolours. Meanwhile, Dan Flavin eschews paint altogether and instead creates artworks from tubes of neon lights arranged in various geometric patterns.

Minimalism is also a new trend for sculptures, as artists such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt or Tony Smith create sculptures that consist of geometric shapes such as cubes, prisms or triangles. So far, many of those sculptures only exist as sketches or cardboard models, but some such as "Cigarette", a 1961 Minimalist sculpture by Tony Smith made from twisted flat planes of steel, or "Free Ride", another Tony Smith sculpture inspired by the Aurora 7 mission, can be already seen in parks and on museum grounds.

So where can you see Minimalist art in the flesh? So far, New York City is ground zero for Minimalism and that's where you can find the respective artworks in galleries and exhibitions like Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art. So far, there hasn't been a dedicated exhibition of Minimalist art, though there are rumours that there is one planned for next year.

More is More: Pop Art

While the Minimalists responded to what they considered the excesses of Abstract Expressionism by reducing art to pure geometric forms, the Pop Art movement took a different path.

Pop Art arose in the UK in the 1950s, when a group of young artists calling themselves the Independent Group realised that both the prevailing Abstract Expressionism as well as the academic fine art of previous eras had very little to say about them and their lives. So these young artists began to incorporate the imagery they saw in their everyday lives into their works, imagery drawn from advertising, movies, pop music and comic books.

British artist Richard Hamilton describes pop art as follows:

Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business

The Independent Group incorporated pop culture imagery into their works by reviving the collage, a form associated with early Modernism and Surrealism. Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi inadvertently gave the new movement its name, when his collage "I was a rich man's plaything", named after the headline of a True Confessions magazine, that was part of the collage, also included the word "Pop", fired out of a gun.

Meanwhile, British artist Richard Hamilton responded to the theme of an exhibition called This Is Tomorrow by cutting up some American magazines a friend had brought back from the US. The result was a collage called "Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?" which uses aspirational pop culture imagery to create a futuristic interior to brighten up the dreary postwar Britain. Across the pond in the US, Tom Wesselmann created a series of "Still Life" collages assembled from advertising images. Another American artist, Robert Indiana uses the typography and imagery of road signs and company logos to create his brightly coloured paintings.

On the wall of the apartment Hamilton pictured in "Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?", the framed cover of an American romance comic hangs next to works of fine art. And indeed comic book imagery plays a big role in the nascent pop art movement.

Finding Beauty in Everyday Imagery

When his young son showed him a Mickey Mouse comic and said, "I bet you can't paint as good as that, eh, Dad?", American artist Roy Lichtenstein rose to the challenge and began copying and enlarging panels from comic books and even included the characteristic Ben Day dots of the printing process. Lichtenstein is clearly a fan of National/DC Comics and frequently copies panels from DC books such as Secret Hearts, Girls' Romance or All-American Men of War. And so Secret Hearts inspired the Lichtenstein paintings "Drowning Girl" and "Crying Girl", while All-American Men of War inspired "Whaam!", "As I Opened Fire" and "Okay, Hot-Shot". The comic book fan in me rejoices in seeing comic books elevated to fine art, though I wish that Lichtenstein would give credit to the artists whose work he copied, artists like Jack Kirby, Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv Novick and Jerry Grandinetti.

While Roy Lichtenstein finds inspiration in comic books, his fellow American pop artist Andy Warhol looks to his local supermarket, magazine photos and advertising imagery for inspiration, which is not surprising, since he began his career as a commercial artist, specialising in shoe ads. Shoes do not feature prominently in Warhol's art. Instead, he creates large silkscreen prints featuring product packaging such as cans of Campbell's soup, bottles of Coca Cola or packages of Brillo scouring pads.

Reproductions and Originals

Magazine photographs are another source of inspiration for Warhol and so he transformed a publicity shot of Marilyn Monroe for Niagara into his so-called "Marilyn Diptych" and a publicity still of Elvis Presley for the western Flaming Star into prints with titles like "Eight Elvises" or "Double Elvis".

But Warhol also tackles more serious subjects in his art. His print series "Death and Disaster" uses magazine photographs of car crashes, race riots and suicides as well as the Sing Sing electric chair and a mushroom cloud and reproduces them over and over again, because – as Warhol said in a recent interview – "when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have an effect."

West German artist Gerhard Richter eschews the Pop Art moniker, but he also makes paintings based on photographs, slightly blurred to create an estrangement effect. Unlike Warhol and other American artists, Richter's paintings are based on snapshots and family photos such as "Tante Marianne", the haunting portrait of the artist as a baby posing with his then fourteen-year-old aunt Marianne Schönfelder. The portrait becomes even more haunting, if you know that Marianne Schönfelder was mentally ill and was murdered by the Nazis as part of their euthanasia program.

The Democratisation of Art

In the beginning, many art critics were outraged by Pop Art's seemingly uncritical use of "low" subject matter such as comics, movies and advertising imagery. Furthermore, critics accused the Pop Artists of being mere copyists, incapable of creating something original. It seems those art critics have forgotten their art history, because using found objects in art is not exactly a new idea. Marcel Duchamp already did the same thing fifty years ago with his so-called "Readymades" such as his famous 1917 work "Fountain", a commercially produced urinal that Duchamp simply signed. Marcel Duchamp is still alive, though retired, and I like to think that he gets a smile out of the young Pop Artists taking up his methods.

Thirty years ago, philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote a notable essay entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", wherein he postulates that a work of art loses its aura of uniqueness, when it can be infinitely reproduced via new filmic, photographic and printing technologies, and how this influences our perception of art. Benjamin also discusses the political dimensions of the then new mass media both as propaganda for Fascist (and Communist) regimes as well as its potential to democratise art.

The Pop Artists follow the latter path, because their art is both a reproduction of an existing work (comic books, magazine photographs, film stills, product packaging) as well as infinitely reproduceable in itself. Andy Warhol does not create individual paintings, but silk screen prints that he produces in his own workshop in New York City, the so-called "Factory". This makes his works much more affordable than traditional fine art to the point that a Warhol print is not out of reach of the middle classes who want to brighten their homes with some modern art. Though personally, I would go with Marilyn, Elvis, Liz or even the Campbell's soup can rather than the electric chair or a car crash. And if you cannot afford a Warhol print, Pop Artist Robert Indiana is creating a line of greeting cards for the Museum of Modern Art, so you can own a piece of Pop Art for less than a dollar.

Black and White: Op Art

The latest movement to shake up the art world is Op Art, short for Optical Art. The movement got its name last year when the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City exhibited the works of Polish-born artist Julian Stanczak in the show Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings.

Julian Stanczak has a tragic history – he was incarcerated in a Soviet labour camp as a teenager and lost the use of his right arm. Now forced to paint with his non-dominant left hand, Stanczak turned to abstract art as a way to escape his painful past. At the show in New York City, he exhibited striking black and white paintings whose patterns seem to flash, blur and vibrate in front of the observer's eyes due to his use of optical illusions. Look too long at a Stanczak painting and you might well get dizzy.

Meanwhile in the UK, a young artist named Bridget Riley chanced to see the painting "The Bridge at Courbevoie" by pointillist French painter Georges Seurat. The painting and its use of dots to create optical effects impressed Bridget Riley greatly, so much that she copied it and placed the copy in her studio.

 

Inspired by Seurat, Bridget Riley began to create pointillist paintings of her own. She started out with landscapes, but her paintings quickly turned abstract and also made use of black and white contrasts and optical effects.

Another Op Art pioneer, Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely was inspired both by the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism and began to create abstract geometric artworks, which also exploit optical illusions much like the works of Julian Stanczak and Bridget Riley.

It is not known whether Stanczak, Riley and Vasarely were aware of each other's work, but curator William C. Seitz brought their work and those of other optical artists together in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City entitled The Responsive Eye. The exhibition concluded two weeks ago and should help to bring Op Art into the mainstream.

Beyond Modernism: The Future of Art

Whether you prefer Pop Art, Op Art or Minimalism, contemporary art has not been so exciting since the heady avantgarde days of the interwar period.

But unlike the avantgarde of the first few decades of the 20th century, today's contemporary art is a lot more accessible and democratic. You don't need to be wealthy to purchase a print by Andy Warhol, a greeting card by Robert Indiana or the work one of the other exciting new artists. And who knows, if those artists take off, you may find yourself in possession of a very valuable piece someday.

Furthermore, you might even be inspired to create some art of your own. At any rate, the pop art collages by Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Tom Wesselmann inspired me to grab a stack of magazines as well as some scissors and glue and make some collages of my own. Maybe I'll share them here someday!

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Our last three Journey shows were a gas!  You can watch the kinescope reruns here).  You don't want to miss the next episode, May 9 at 1PM PDT, a special Arts and Entertainment edition featuring Arel Lucas, Cora Buhlert, Erica Frank…and Dr. Who producer, Verity Lambert! Register today and we'll make sure you don't forget.