After the end
of World War II would take place in the Unite States a major migration that
would attract many artists from Europe, who would enhance in the country and
significantly influence the evolution of art. In this sense, the first
genuinely american post-war art movement was the known as Abstract
Expressionism, which despite the focus on Noth-America would be indepted to
the contribuitions of german artists such as Josef Albers and Hans Hoffmann.
This trend, emerging by the middle of the 40's, was characterized, as its name
suggests, by the use of abstraction because after the horrors of war, which had
already been witnessed by photography and filming, art could no longer take as
a reference neither the humane figure or any other figurative element. There
was no place for figuration because the photography had release the art from
the burden of represent the reality as faithfully as possible. The art critics
Clement Greenberg and Harodl Rosenberg lead this trend were the main points
were the predominance of the large formats, a rather limited chromatism and the
expression of the agony of the artists throught agressive and violent lines or
other formal resources inherited from Cubism and Surrealism. J. Pollock, W. De
Kooning, L. Krasner, W. Baziotes or R. Motherwell became its most
representatives creatives, althought there were big formal differences between
them and they developed distinct careers. Within this movement it was developed
the so-calle Action Painting, in which the canvas turns rather a field of experimentation for
artists by ignoring the racks and interacting directly with the picture as its
seen in the work of Pollock, Tobey or Kline.
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| Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rythm (n.30), 1950 |
But alongside these
trends, was also developed another movement with more color and compositions
less “improvised”. We are referring to Post-painterly Abstraction, whose
major exponents were C. Still, B. Newman, S. Francis, M. Rothko, M. Louis, K.
Nolandor or F. Stella. The first five represented the most colorful side of
this pictorical trends, while the other two were characterized by a sctrictly
geometric mind that does not allowed the mixture of colors on the canvas,
something called as Color-field-painting or Hard Edge.
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| Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp, 1962 |
By the
mid-fifties there was a new artistic trend in reactions to the consumer society
that found its roots in the works of K. Schwitters, the Cubist collages and
Duchamp's readymade, namely, the Art of Assemblage, which in Europe
became known as New Realism throught artists like César, D. Spoerri or Arman. In
the american scene, artists such as S. Davis, R. Rauschenberg or J. Johns began
to include elements of mass-advertising in their production, making use of
trademarks or objects that eveyone knew, but depriving them of their funcionality
and context to raise them up to the art's category. Perhaps the most extreme
case is R. Rauschenberg whose works, usually saturated by images of mass
culture, were made from things that he gathered in the streets of New York.
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| Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-9 |
This procedure was closely linked to the surrealist concept of the objet
trouvé, which means that a particular object causing an association of
ideas was put out of context, isolated from its function and was given a new
symbolic charge, something that would also be taken to its ultimate
consequences in the Pop Art throught the works of R. Hamilton or
Paolozzi (Independent Group) in England; and A. Warhol, R. Liechtenstein, D.
Hockney, J. Dine, J. Rosenquist and C. Oldenburg in America. Pop Art, a term
attributed to the critic Lawrence Alloway, comes from the end of the decade of
the 50's when young artists feed the art's language with street slang. In that
sense, it is worth referring to the work of Richard Hamilton, usually
considered the beginning of Pop Art: Just what is it that makes today’s
homes so different, so appealing? , a collage in which can be read for the
first time the word “pop”. Its main features are the use of popular culture
images and themes taken from the world of mass communication, rejecting
thematic and stylistic conventions in opositions to the elitist culture and
providing an iconographic value to the society of consum. Also, most of these
pop artists ostensibly altered the scale of everyday objects to elevate it to
the status of painting and/or sculpture, in an attempt to dissolve the
differences between high and low culture, breaking the bounderies between art
and advertising. In short, the idea was
to deprive everything of its functional logic to give them a new reading,
relying on the “vulgarization” of art in dealing with images of everyday life
that had never before been bestowed aesthetic quality. This can be seen in the
screenprinted works of Warhol that reproduced many times the famous Campbell's
soup cans or the bottles of Coca-Cola. In the sculpture field, Claes Oldenburg
is a key reference for understanding the approaches of Pop Art. We just need to
take a look at his megalithic sculptures of everyday objects in contexts in
which we don't spect to find them: clothespins, badminton's feathers, matches,
apples, coffee's spoons, etc... However, it was Warhol who was a real turning
point when he proved with his productions that artwork is no longer an unique
piece but it is thought as a product
made in series.
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| Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup I, 1969 |
Alongside with
this artistic evolution, other artistic movements began their develop, in this
case, based on the aesthetics of movement and requiring the interaction of the
viewer. One of the most important, althought sometimes is related to just a
single personality, was the Op Art, also known as Optical Art, a
pictoric trend that demands an active attitude from the viewer. The inception
of this movement are based on two different concepts of artistic specifity: the
experimental tradition of the Bauhaus and the russian Constructivism. In the
reception of this artworks there is a division between the physical phenomenon
of light and color and, in this sense, it is interesting to note the production
of Victor Vasarély, who develops an art of colors vibration throught the color
experiments of the Bauhaus. On the other hand, in the field of sculpture, it
was developed the so-called Kinetic Art which, as well as the Optical
Art, takes the movement as its main theme and invited the viewer to contemplate
the works from different perspectives. Thereby, in this work-objects the
movement and the change take part of its essential composition. Frank Popper,
in his book Origins and Developments of Kinetic Art, talks about the
psycho-physiological reaction of the spectator and its integration with the
three-dimentional artwork, endowed with movement without any motor and
incorporating light. Among these kind of art we could talk specially about the
work of Alexander Calder: the stabile and the mobile.
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| Alexander Calder, Big Red, 1960 |
However,
this was nothing new or innovative as artists such as L. Moholy-Nagy, M. Ray,
M. Duchamp or A. Rodchenko had already experimented with it in the early 20's.
From this we conclude that the second half of the twentieth century was a
period of high artistic experimentation visible in the many different movements
developed, some with bigger projection than others. But what is
undeniable is that each and everyone of them helped to put the United States in
the forefront of art, turning the country into the world's cultural centre for
over fifty years.
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