Pop Art (pt. 2)

Jasper Johns, for example, began producing collages in the 1950s which formed the image of the American flag.  This 1961 painting, entitled Map, shows in rough order a map of the United States.

Similar to a Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock creation, the artist has slashed paint onto the canvas with strong emotion.  The vibrant colors, red, yellow, and blue—which are the three primary (and most vivid) colors—lend further intensity to the painting.  It's a huge painting and one associated with the Modern Art tradition of Abstract Expressionism; but it displays an image (albeit compromised and messy) with which we are all familiar.  And when you think about the simplicity of the subject, too, you can glean an understanding of what Pop Art centered itself around.  This is a mere map of the United States.  Why paint something which is already so well-known?  What significance is there to be found in such a commonplace image?  This movement of art continually asserts that there is abundant meaning in images from popular culture; that audiences can choose for themselves what such an image means to them.  But here Jasper Johns has slashed away at his subject in an expressionistic approach that causes us to see the map of the U.S. in a fuddled, unattractive, and visually startling light.  This is the ability of Pop Art to alter our perspective on things otherwise taken to be ordinary and familiar.

Pop Art (pt. 1)

It might be a shock to you, but some people don't appreciate Modern Art.  Especially during its upswell, art which was so ahead of its time received little real recognition among the general public, and the new generation of artists noticed this and challenged these techniques with new art styles.  It was time for something new, a breath of fresh air from the higher complexities of Abstract Expressionism.  And in America, the 1960s was most certainly a time of change, both cultural and ideological.  A new art form swept the nation, and it's one that is still with us largely today.

If you ask me, the reason why the Modern Art movement failed was that it didn't connect with its audience.  We can see this by looking at the successive generation of artists and the qualities of their art.  The new generation of artists challenged the old techniques and introduced a style all its own.  Pop Art portrays images from popular culture, and it came to the U.S. around the 1960s .  In England during the 1950s, collages with magazine clippings and pictures of familiar household objects became popular; this theoretical ideal then crossed over to America to influence the next artistic movement.  As we will see, this type of art is wholly devoted to commonly understood and widely recognized objects or people.  Modern Art had been about artistic ideals of stylistic approach and creative technique (such as with Pollock), but that apparently didn't do a whole lot for the general public.  Not everyone can look at a Diebenkorn or Rothko color field painting and appreciate it as a masterpiece; after all, it's just color on a canvas.  But perhaps people would appreciate the images more if those images showed things which they knew and could respond to.  Pop Art dominated in well-known, instantly recognizable images.

Modern Art (pt. 20)

Rothko's Blue and Gray from 1962 is another example of minimalistic color field abstraction in Modern Art paintings.  This is simply blue and grey, and that's it.  There's no subject matter, no story, no likeness to reality, no shapes, no intelligibility whatsoever.  We're just meant to observe the colors and paint on the canvas and absorb that without the distracting entities of subject matter, structure, form, shape, and theme.  In a way, then, it's perhaps one of the truest manifestations of art in all of art history.  If Manet had, a hundred years earlier, sought to rid his paintings of all pretext for illusion and deception and create artwork that admitted sincere awareness of its own two-dimensional medium, then Mark Rothko's color painting series breaks down all formalities of false perspective and artistic realism.  This is merely a painting and professes to be nothing more.  We see colors but no image; we see a painting, but no subject.  Art has rarely ever typified itself so directly.

These meditations on color offer in perfect distillation the same qualities which art has always carried to viewers: simple paint on a canvas.  But rather than the distracting subject matter, here we have a chance to look at art eye-to-eye, seeing only the color and the paint (even the "shapes" in these works are indistinct).  Though abstract and often not readily accessible to the public, these works nonetheless provide viewers with the most elementary essentials of art and beg the question not only of what it could mean unto itself, but what all of the rest of art means in light of the same fundamental revelation: that, in reality, all art is comparable to this, boiled down to this, and in fact is simply this.  It's all just colors and shapes, folks.

Modern Art (pt. 19)

Mark Rothko fused color field painting with the developing artistic style of Minimalism to create some of the art world's most recognizable canvases.  His paintings often comprise only two or three colors, painted in simple shapes that plainly cover the canvas and give no reference to subject matter.  The above painting is his Orange and Yellow.

Again, approaching their art with philosophically and theoretically experimental techniques, painters like Diebenkorn and Rothko saw art as a more complicated invention than a mere visual copying of the physical reality of the world around them.  Abstract emotions and concepts must also exist in the two-dimensional frame of the canvas, but in order to convey these intangible elements the artist's approach to painting needed to change dramatically.  Here we just see patches of color, but more focally we are looking at orange and yellow.  By allowing these colors (mere pigments of light itself) to speak for themselves, the artist opens the door for transcendent, metaphysical significance to permeate the canvas as luminously and vividly as the hues of the painter's palate.  But what truth or meaning do you see in this?  Within the blankness of such abstraction, transcendent significance no doubt lurks, if you'll forgive the pun, in many shades but seldom in definitive, outright clarity.  In such hazy interpretive contexts, therefore, might some of us be vindicated in raising our own arguments as to the questionable integrity such art maintains to its genre or medium?  Do you think this is art?

Modern Art (pt. 18)

Andrew Wyeth's paintings frequently contain profound imagery of stark emptiness, harsher than the soft brushstrokes of Edward Hopper.  Wyeth's colors, too, often muted and considerably darker, tell of a more callous world, tougher and sterner than the subdued melancholy of Hopper's paintings.  In this unconventional portrait, the artist paints a solitary sitter in almost total darkness, with his back and side to us.  That Gentleman (as the work is humbly titled) sits calmly and thoughtfully behind a closed door.  His shoes are neatly placed upon a desk behind him, below a board of hanging scissors, also neatly placed; and in front of him is darkening wall fading off into black.  The only ray of light in the painting glides across part of the man's back, his right shoulder, and his left hand, delicately resting on his lap.  Our only vision of the man's face reveals the back of his balding head, his ear, and his thin cheeks.  Apart from that, the man sits in isolated anonymity and peaceful simplicity.  The rugged man of the world sits in the dark with naught but a small beam of light to illuminate his thumbnail; and yet this, too, is a scene relaxing and quiet, quite calm.

Modern Art (pt. 17)

This famous 1948 work of art, Christina's World, has become one of Modern Art's iconic images.  Recreated in several movies, the scene shows a woman strewn on the ground of a field, her fist clenching the earth, looking up ahead toward a farmhouse on the horizon.  Once again, this painting is accomplished through hard-edge approaches to technique; each blade of grass is especially distinguished to give a thorough vision of the field.  This attention to the detail of the ground brings us nearer the earth, as if we are seeing the grass and dirt up-close.  And amid it is the stark contrast of the woman's pink dress.  Christina refers to a real person, a neighbor of Wyeth's, who was crippled and suffered from polio.  Her struggle in the painting is then a very literal, or physical, one: she must slowly, painfully crawl up the hill to reach the farmhouse—and the distance is daunting.  Suddenly the specificity of the grass all around her has meaning, for all of this she must traverse—each blade of grass—with strained effort and great difficulty in order to reach the house.  Her destination, however, appears grim rather than inviting, resting dark and ominous in the distance.  The struggle is vast and intimidating, and the end result appears equally hopeless: this is the world in which this woman lives, as the title alludes to.  Thematically, the pictured struggle of this woman has come to be recognized also as a spiritual battle, fighting against the nature of the world itself, its apparent cruelty and hopelessness.  She digs her fingers into the earth in defiance and holds her head up to face the horizon while a faint gust of wind lifts a couple locks of her hair to the side.  We never see her face, but we can identify with her anyway to a degree almost as thorough as the realism of the grass all around her—we might as well picture ourselves in the scene, holding such a posture (though it is quite an exaggerated pose).  Faced with similar circumstances, all alone in the world, beaten down by our own infirmities to the bare soil of the earth, and plunged into the desolate waste land of an empty field, would we be able to make it safely to our destination?  Surely, this is not a life for the faint of heart.  But Wyeth's painting broadens its contexts to all of humanity.  It is the state of the modern world; that things are difficult and nature is cruel.  The literal situation for Christina in the painting is for the human race the imminent metaphorical situation in the Postmodern Age.  The poeticism of such a painting still rings cords of profundity in American popular culture today: this is probably the most frequently imitated painting in modern motion picture history.

Modern Art (pt. 16)

Wyeth's artwork mostly all follows the same stylistic approach.  This painting, Turkey Pond, reveals in hard-edge Photo-Realism a similar visual construction of a figure lost within a landscape.  The landscape, it should be observed, is painted with painstakingly precise detail, to the point at which nearly every blade of grass is visible.  The result is a visual feast for viewers, even though the subject of the painting contains very few elements: it's merely a man walking through a field toward a pond in the distance.  Hard-Edge painting, however, turns these simplistic scenes into masterworks of art.  This painting, too, contains a subtle poignancy to it that balances the stark realism of Wyeth's brushwork and technique.