Tony Smith: “Presences”

Tony Smith - Cigarette - 1961 - Painted steel - 15' 1" x 25' 6" x 18' 7” - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY (click photo for larger image)American sculptor and visual artist Tony Smith (1912-1980)  was a pioneering figure in Minimalist sculpture, despite having close personal ties with the Abstract Expressionists Rothko, Pollock, Newman and Still.

Heavily influenced by his one-time employer Frank Lloyd Wright, Smith's sculptures were comprised of modular block formations, designed to physically alter the space in which they existed. 

Like the creative pioneers of the Bauhaus, Smith was not constrained by medium-boundaries. However, he moved in the opposite direction to many of the luminaries associated with that school, turning from architecture to art, rather than vice versa, to realize his creative principles. He referred to his sculptures as “presences”.

Barnett Newman: “Zips”

Barnett Newman - Concord - 1949 - Oil and masking tape on canvas - 89 3/4 x 53 5/8 in. (228 x 136.2 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (click photo for larger image)Barnett Newman (1905-1970) shared the Abstract Expressionists' interests in myth and the primitive unconscious, but the huge fields of color and trademark "zips" in his pictures set him apart from the gestural abstraction of many of his peers. 

The response to his mature work, even from friends, was muted when he first exhibited it. It was not until later in his career that he began to receive acclaim, and he would subsequently become a touchstone for both Minimalists and a second generation of Color Field painters.

“Claiming that he sought ‘to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before,’ he saw his compositions as forms of thought, as expressions of the universal experience of being alive and individual.”

“Concord was painted during Newman's most prolific year. He exhibited the painting in his first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950, which was installed with the help of his friend, Mark Rothko. Concord's green layer of paint is uncharacteristically brushy, and it was perhaps with its atmospheric wash in mind that Newman titled the picture after the town famous for Henry David Thoreau's Walden, where he and his wife, Annalee, had honeymooned fourteen years earlier.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Jules Olitski: Material, Surface and Color

Jules Olitski - Pink Alert - 1966 - Acrylic on canvas - 113 x 80 in. - National Gallery of Art Washington, DC

Jules Olitski (1922-2007) was a Russian-born American painter who was instrumental in the development of the Color Field school. Like his contemporaries, Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Olitski stained the surface of his canvases in a technique that rejected the gestural brushwork of the then-popular Abstract Expressionist artists.

With their emphasis on material, surface, and color's emotional strength, his signature works eliminated the illusion of depth and any evidence of the artist's touch. Although Olitski did not remain as well known as some of his fellow Color Field painters, his abstract "spray paintings" of the 1960s are still considered landmark works of this movement.

George Baselitz: Coming to Terms…

George Baselitz - Georg Baselitz - Dresdner Frauen-Karla - 1990 - Wood and tempera - Staatliche Kunstsammlungen (click photo for larger image)German artist George Baselitz (born 1938) was enormously influential in showing a generation of German artists (and people) how they might come to terms with issues of art and national identity, in the wake of the Second World War. 

Briefly trained in the officially sanctioned social realism of Communist East Berlin, he soon moved to West Berlin and encountered abstract art. Ultimately, however, he was to reject both approaches. At a time when others turned to Conceptual art, Pop Art, and Arte Povera (“poor art”) a return to simple objects and messages, Baselitz revived the German Expressionism that had been denounced by the Nazis, and returned the human figure to a central position in painting.

Working in nearly every artistic medium, Baselitz has established himself as a visual artist of international stature. His work confronts the gut realities of history, and the tragedy of being German in a post World War II era. He was best known for his inverted, or upside-down paintings that shift emphasis from subject to the properties of painting itself, creating not just a painted canvas, but a nearly sculptural object. The anamorphic quality of his heroic and rebellious figures has had a powerful and international influence on Neo-Expressionist artists.

The work featured here is one of a series of eleven monumental sculptural busts of women, which commemorate the destruction of Dresden at the end of World War II. Baselitz grew up not far from the city, and remembered its destruction vividly. He wanted to pay homage to what he called the "rubble women," who he believed embodied the reconstruction efforts of a broken city. The rough portrayal but penetrating gaze of the figure suggest a person terribly scarred by war, but simultaneously defiant and determined to survive it.

Donald Judd: Getting Rid of Illusionism

Donald Judd - Untitled - 1963 - Oil on wood with Plexiglas - 49.5 x 123.2 x 123.2 cm (19 1/2 x 48 1/2 x 48 1/2 in.) - National Gallery of Art - Washington, D.C.American artist Donald Judd’s (1928-1994) rejection of both traditional painting and sculpture led him to a conception of art built upon the idea of the object as it exists in the environment. Judd's works belong to the Minimalist movement, whose goal was to rid art of the Abstract Expressionists' reliance on the self-referential trace of the artist, in order to form pieces that were free from emotion. The credo of Minimalism is, “it is what it is”.

Judd and other Minimalists created works comprised of single or repeated geometric forms produced from industrialized, machine-made materials that eschewed the artist's touch. Judd's geometric and modular creations have often been criticized for a seeming lack of content; it is this simplicity, however, that calls into question the nature of art, and becomes art itself.