Was to postwar sculpture what Jackson Pollock was to postwar painting (and, like Pollock, was killed at his peak in an automobile accident). Influenced by the work of Picasso and by a summer vacation he’d spent as a welder in a Studebaker factory, and intent on glorifying, rather than apologizing for, the workaday world, Smith constructed his work instead of casting or molding it. The result: shapes that are “ready-made” rather than solid, arrangements that look provisional instead of stately, and a mood that is anything but monumental. Whereas the Englishman Henry Moore (the other “sculptor of our time”) always seemed to be making things for museum foyers and urban plazas, Smith’s work is more likely to rise, oil-well-style, from a spot nobody could have guessed would be home to a work of art. ANDREW WYETH (1917–)
Of course, not everybody was really ready to deal with de Kooning’s Woman II or Smith’s Cubi XVIII, and they almost certainly hadn’t given a thought to owning one of them. For those thus resistant to Art, but still desirous of a bona fide art acquisition, there was Andrew Wyeth, working in the American realist tradition of Grant “American Gothic” Wood and Edward “All-Night Diner” Hopper, and given to painting in a manner middlebrow critics liked to call “hauntingly evocative,” as with the much-reproduced Christina’s World. As to whether Christina is trying to get away from the house (à la Texas Chainsaw Massacre) or back to it (à la Lassie, Come Home), don’t look at us. Don’t look at Wyeth for too long, either: You’ll lose all credibility as intellectual, aesthete, and cosmopolite. ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (1925-) JASPER JOHNS (1930-)
Counts as one selection: Not only were Rauschenberg and Johns contemporaries, not only did they together depose, without really meaning to, the reigning abstract expressionists, they also, for a time, lived together. However, they couldn’t have been less alike, temperamentally and philosophically. Think of them as a vinaigrette dressing. Rauschenberg is the oiclass="underline" applied lavishly, sticking to everything, rich, slippery, viscous. Probably best known for his so called combines (like this freestanding angora goat, with a tire around its belly), he scoured the streets and store windows of downtown Manhattan for junk; believed that art could exist for any length of time, in any material, and to any end; and, as one critic said, “didn’t seem house-trained.”
Monogram and Robert Rauschenberg (1955–1959)
Johns, by contrast, is the vinegar; poured stintingly, cutting through everything, sharp, stinging, thin. In his paintings of flags, targets, stenciled words and numbers, and rulers—all as familiar, abstract, simple, and flat as objects get—he endowed the pop icons of the twentieth century with an “old master” surface, reduced painting to the one-dimensionality it had been hankering after for a generation, and got to seem sensuous, ironic, difficult, and unavailable—all those hipper-than-hip things—in a single breath. Together, Rauschenberg and Johns did for art (whose public, such as it was, had been getting tired of not being able to groove on the stuff Rothko, de Kooning, et al. were turning out) what the Beatles did for music. Note: Rauschenberg and Johns are usually billed as proto-pop artists; the former is not to be confused with pop artists Roy Lichtenstein (the one who does the paintings based on comic-book panels), Claes Oldenburg (the one who does the sculptures of cheeseburgers and clothespins), and James Rosenquist (the one who does mural-sized canvases full of F-111 fighter-bombers and Franco-American spaghetti).
Three Flags and Jasper Johns (1958) ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Needs no introduction here. But forget for a minute Andy, the albino in the silver fright wig, the guy who painted the Campbell’s soup cans and the Brillo boxes, Liz and Marilyn; who made underground movies like The Chelsea Girls and Flesh; who founded Interview and took Studio 54 as his anteroom; and who got shot in the gut by Valerie what’s-her-name. Concentrate instead on Warhol, the tyrant and entrepreneur, the man who taught the art world about the advantages of bulk (a few hundred was a small edition of his prints, and the two hundredth of them was presented, promoted, and, inevitably, purchased, as if it were the original) and who persuaded the middle class that hanging a wall-sized picture of a race riot, or an electric chair, or an automobile accident, or Chairman Mao, over the couch in the family room not only was chic, but made some kind of sense. More recently, there were the commissioned portraits: Not since Goya’s renditions of the Spanish royal family, it’s been observed, has a group of people who should have known better so reveled in being made to look silly. FRANK STELLA (1936-)
“All I want anyone to get out of my paintings … is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. What you see is what you see.” Thus spake Frank Stella, who’d learned something from Jasper Johns, and who would go on, while still in his twenties, to help launch the movement known as Minimalism, according to some the most self-consciously American of all the isms (and according to others the last, wheezy gasp of modernism itself). The idea was to get away from the how-often-have-you-seen-this-one-before literalness of pop and back to abstraction—a new abstraction that was fast, hard, flat, and hauntingly unevocative. Key words here are “self-referentiality” and “reduction”; the former meant that a painting (preferably unframed and on a canvas the shape of a lozenge or a kite) had no business acknowledging the existence of anything but itself, the latter that the more air you could suck out of art’s bell jar the better. By the 1970s, Stella would be making wall sculptures of corrugated aluminum and other junk, cut by machine then crudely and freely painted, that relate to his early work approximately as Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula relates to The Godfather. CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE
(1935-, 1935–)
It started as an obsession with wrapping. The Bulgarian-born artist Christo spent years swaddling bicycles, trees, storefronts, and women friends before moving on to wrap a section of the Roman Wall, part of the Australian coastline, and eventually all twelve arches, plus the parapets, sidewalks, streetlamps, vertical embankment, and esplanade, of Paris’ Pont Neuf. And yes, together they did wrap the Reichstag. But Christo and his wife/manager/collaborator Jeanne-Claude are quick to insist that wrappings form only a small percentage of their total oeuvre. There were, for instance, those twenty-four and a half miles of white nylon, eighteen feet high, they hung from a steel cable north of San Francisco; the eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, Florida, they “surrounded”—not wrapped, mind you—with pink polypropylene fabric; and the 3,100 enormous blue and yellow “umbrellas” they erected in two corresponding valleys in California and Japan. Not to mention their 2005 blockbuster, “The Gates,” 7,503 sixteen-foot-tall saffron panels they suspended, to the delight of almost everybody, over twenty-three miles of footpaths in New York’s Central Park.