Art Everywhere: An Explosion of Art Movements

ART EVERYWHERE: AN EXPLOSION OF ART MOVEMENTS

HAPPENINGS

Happenings were introduced in the art world in the late 1950s and were identified as a distinct form with Allan Kaprow's ninety-minute piece 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959). Very much an avant-garde form, happenings attracted only small audiences during their height in the early 1960s.

Using ordinary objects and avant-garde theatrical techniques, the creators of happenings consciously posed several challenges to the conventional art world. First, in staging exhibits as events rather than as a collection of objects, they questioned the notion of art as static. By employing commonplace objects, they questioned the division between art and life. By occasionally encouraging audience participation, they broke down the division between artist and public. Sometimes described as "living sculptures," happenings were often staged in art galleries, though other locations were not uncommon. In 1962, for instance, Kenneth Koch and Jean Tinguely's The Construction of Boston was presented Off-Broadway. It included projections with captions and a Venus de Milo that bled different colors when shot with a replica of a Revolutionary War rifle.

Happenings had their roots in artistic movements from early in the century such as dada and surrealism as well as the more recent multimedia experiments of artists such as John Cage and others at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the early 1950s. Some were carefully planned; others were spontaneous. All, however, gave the appearance of spontaneity, since they included discontinuous pieces employing music, drama, and art in unpredictable combinations. Though happenings became less popular with artists by the mid 1960s, they were an important predecessor to performance art.

Sources:

Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings (London: Thames 6c Hudson, 1974);

Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Abrams, 1966).

Growing Museums, Growing Audiences

Increased funding for the arts and humanities led to increased public exposure to art and ideas during the 1960s. In addition to regional theaters and public radio and television—the most obvious results of this funding—new museums and new programs in existing museums attracted a larger audience. For example, the new Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York, which opened in 1960, included a baby-sitting service and an art room for children in an effort to attract families. Also popular were the increased number of museums on college campuses, successfully linking art history and appreciation with actual exhibits, including exhibits of photography, which gained increased acceptance as an artistic medium during the 1960s. Established museums also re-ported increased attendance throughout the 1960s—partially the result of highly publicized exhibits such as the 1963 loans of Leonardo da Vinci's La Gioconda (better known as Mona Lisa, 1503-1507) and James Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black (better known as Whistler's Mother, 1871-1872) by the Louvre in Paris.

Growing Prices

Art was also in the news as art prices continued to rise to unprecedented levels. In a 1961 New York auction the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid $2.3 million for Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653), the highest amount ever paid for a single painting and just one of a series of records set and broken. In 1962, for instance, the Dallas Museum paid $58,000 for a painting by Andrew Wyeth, the highest then given for a work by a living American artist. In 1967 New York art dealer David Mann purchased Picasso's Mother and Child (1902) for $532,000, the record for a single work by a living artist, and in the same year the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., was said to have paid $5.8 million for Ginevra dei Benci (1474?), the first painting by Leonardo da Vinci to find a permanent American home, setting a record price for a single work.

Abstract Expressionism

The 1950s were dominated by abstract expressionism, the art movement linking wildly abstract painting with highly emotional expressiveness. It was controversial during the 1950s but emerged in the 1960s as the most important style—or so the influential magazine Art News claimed in a 1960 article. Other critics, however, believed that the movement had peaked and that something new was on the horizon, They were right. Fitting the popular image of the 1960s as a decade of experimentation and protest, painters and sculptors rebelled against the authority of abstract expressionism, which itself had been a rebellion against earlier orthodoxies.

Other Styles

Abstract expressionism did not grind to a halt during the 1960s, but its position as the American painting style was no longer secure. A hallmark of American art during the 1960s is its variety, with representational and various abstract styles existing almost comfort-ably together. Some abstract painters turned to geometric forms devoid of emotional content, while other painters returned to figurative works. In 1963, for example, the Jewish Museum in New York featured an exhibit called "Towards a New Abstraction," in which the "hard-edge" works of geometric abstract painters such as Ellsworth Kelly were displayed, while several exhibits of the work of Wyeth, the most respected representational painter in America at the time, drew large crowds.

Pop Art

One type of revolt against prevailing standards in painting and sculpture was at first labeled new realism, which included works by sculptors George Segal and Claes Oldenburg and painters Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. In the early 1960s, for instance, Oldenburg created fanciful versions of everyday consumer objects from papier-mache, plaster, and cloth. The painters' use of popular culture—Lichtenstein used comic books and strips and Warhol used artifacts such as soup cans, soap boxes, and movie magazines—led to one of the most discussed movements during the 1960s, pop art.

Both a critique and celebration of popular culture, pop art, like many art movements of the 1960s, broke down the boundary between art and ordinary life. Some saw pop art as a challenge to artistic conventions, while more-skeptical observers saw it as blatantly commercial, since works were sold for high prices. Its popularity also spread to dance, as modern-dance and even some ballet companies adopted pop art settings for new works.

Op Art

On the heels of pop art came op art, a distant cousin of the geometric abstraction of hard-edge painting that relied on patterned effects creating the optical illusion of movement or depth within the work. Enthusiastically greeted by some art lovers bored with abstract expressionism or pop art, this international movement was featured in a 1964 exhibit called "The Responsive Eye" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Like pop art, op art was denounced as a gimmick by some critics.

Sculpture

In all this diversity was a hunger for art, even of avant-garde works, on the part of the public. By 1966, however, art sales were diminishing, with some speculating that buyers were waiting to see what the next new thing in art would be. The answer was sculpture: in the late-1960s kinetic sculptures, which employed moving parts similar to Alexander Calder's well-known mobiles, and minimalist works came to the fore. Both kinetic sculptures and process art—such as Hans Haacke's condensation cubes, clear plastic cubes with moisture that changed states according to climatic changes—introduced time as an element of the artwork, thus removing the focus from the work as a completed object. These and other artistic approaches also challenged what artists saw as the objectification and commercialization of art. Conceptual artists, for instance, responded to the success of minimalism by asserting the importance of the ideas be-hind the art rather than the completed object. Earth art was even more drastic, as artists such as Robert Smithson created enormous sculpural works from natural materials. Such pieces naturally could not be shown in galleries, nor were they finished products; instead, they were intended to be subjected to the processes of erosion over time.

Welcome to Postmodernism

By the end of the decade some critics and scholars were speculating that art had passed out of a modernist phase and had entered postmodernism. Two aspects of postmodernism that fit the arts during the 1960s are diversity of style and the use of previous styles in new works. These trends characterize subsequent art in America.

Sources:

Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958-1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art / Norton, 1984);

Bruce D. Kurtz, Contemporary Art 1965-1990 (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1992);

Frank Popper, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1968);

Irving Sandier, American Art of the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1988);

Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present (New York: Vendome, 1989).