Modern Art and Architecture

A

8

Post-Painterly Abstraction and the Revival of Figuration

Abstract Expressionism represents a great watershed in the history of painting. In the 1950s its leading practitioners received such great acclaim that America for the first time became the world leader of avant-garde art. As with Cubism 40 years or so earlier, it became a reference point for a whole generation of artists, who either took it as the basis for their own work or reacted against its dominance. Many American artists continued to favour the format of large abstract pictures, for example, but some of them rejected the emotionalism and vigorous brushwork of Abstract Expressionism in favour of cooler and clearer composition and handling, leading to such developments as Minimal Art and Op Art. The term Post-Painterly Abstraction is sometimes used as a general label for these various types of abstract painting.

Other American artists returned to figuration and in the late 1950s created a style known as Pop Art, the jokiness and slickness of which contrasted with the high seriousness of Abstract Expressionism. Pop Artists drew their imagery from advertisements, comic strips, films, everyday objects, and popular culture, reflecting the prosperity and consumerism of post-war America. The style was also a great success in Britain from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, although it had comparatively little impact in other countries. The leading exponents included Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol in the United States, and Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton in Britain. Another movement that flourished mainly in America and Britain is Superrealism (sometimes called Photorealism), which emerged in the late 1960s. Superrealist painters work with a precise, impersonal verisimilitude, imitating the effect of photographs; typically their subjects are taken from banal everyday life (with an emphasis on consumer society reflecting the influence of Pop Art), although one of the best-known Superrealists, the American Chuck Close, has specialized in portraits.

At the same time as these developments were taking place, other figurative artists have pursued a more independent path, not least in Britain, where the tormented visions of Francis Bacon, the deft, urbane portraits and domestic scenes of David Hockney, and the unflinchingly realistic nudes of Lucian Freud all testified to the strength of the representational tradition. In France, Bernard Buffet similarly created a highly distinctive style—bleak and spiky, catching the spirit of existential alienation that to many characterized the post-war world.

A

9

Neo-Expressionism

Although many recent avant-garde artists have more or less abandoned traditional methods and materials, painting has continued to flourish, and a style called Neo-Expressionism has made a particularly strong impact since about 1980. Neo-Expressionist paintings are typically large and intensely subjective in feeling, sometimes with deliberately crude handling or materials such as straw or broken crockery embedded in the picture surface; subjects are often concerned with violence or disaster. The most famous exponents of Neo-Expressionism include the American Julian Schnabel, the German Anselm Kiefer, and the Italian Sandro Chia.

B

Sculpture

Many of the movements in painting described above had some kind of sculptural component (Minimal Art, indeed, was more concerned with sculpture than with painting) or exerted a significant influence on sculpture. During the heyday of Cubism, for example, several sculptors experimented with opening up and rearranging forms in a manner similar to that of Braque and Picasso in painting. Alexander Archipenko (Russian by birth but active in Paris at this time) was the most influential of these Cubist sculptors. However, the radical departures from 19th-century tradition that have characterized modern sculpture have perhaps been more clearly revealed in the use of novel materials and techniques than in purely stylistic innovations.

B

1

Direct Carving

During the 19th century the normal procedure for sculptors was to make a preliminary model in plaster and then create from this a finished work in a more permanent material (usually bronze or marble), with assistants carrying out much of the physical labour involved (especially in stonecarving). In the early 20th century, however, a number of sculptors rejected this approach, which they regarded as mechanical, in favour particularly of “direct carving”, in which the artist manipulates the cutting tools with his own hands, believing that the form of the work should be inseparably related to the material from which it is made. Constantin Brancusi (Romanian by birth but active in Paris for most of his career) was the most influential of the early exponents of direct carving, and a host of other eminent sculptors followed his example, including Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore in Britain (although all three also worked in bronze). Direct carving tended to make sculptors move away from surface naturalism and concentrate more on form and texture. Henry Moore summed this up when he wrote of Brancusi: “Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds—all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi’s special mission to get rid of this undergrowth and to make us once more shape-conscious.”

B

2

Constructivism

In the second decade of the 20th century a new method of creating sculpture arose. Previously almost all Western sculpture had been either carved (usually in stone or wood) or modelled (typically in plaster or clay and then often subsequently cast in metal). The new approach involved simply joining together any materials that caught the sculptor’s attention. It was pioneered by Picasso, who in about 1912 began making sculpture from pieces of everyday material such as cardboard, string, and metal. His sculptures in this vein were mainly small and humorous, but his ideas were soon taken up in more ambitious form by the Russian sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, who visited Picasso in Paris in 1914. Tatlin is regarded as the father of Constructivism, an abstract movement involving industrial materials such as glass, plastic, iron, and steel (the use of these metals in sculpture was facilitated by the development of welding to join pieces together; the blowtorch became commercially available in 1901). Constructivism became the dominant movement in Russian art for a few years after the 1917 Revolution (when it was part of the enthusiasm for machinery, which was seen as a way of building a new and better society) and during the 1920s it spread to Western Europe. There it was widely influential, partly through the example of the sculptor brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, who left Russia in the early 1920s and subsequently worked in several countries. Constructivism, indeed, can be considered an enduring trend or ideology in modern art rather than a particular style.