Every modern household today.

In order to counterbalance the utilitarian side, however,

Gropius added the painters Kandinsky, Klee, and Lyonel Feininger to his distinguished faculty to
uphold the expressive and creative aspects of drawing and painting. Mondrian and the architect
Mies van der Rohe also maintained close relations with the Bauhaus. Le Corbusier, unlike
Wright (who had a naturalistic approach), thought of houses variously, as machines for living,
containers for families, ex-tensions of public services. His commissions ranged from country
villas to entire cities, private dwellings to apartment blocks, temporary exposition structures to
pilgrimage churches. Architecture for him was the masterly and magnificent play of masses
brought together in the light. Cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, pyramids, he said, are the great
primary forms that reveal themselves in sun and shadow. While Wright's buildings ex-pressed
harmony with nature, Le Corbusier raised his structures on piers to assert the "independence of
things human." Wright rather tartly called Le Corbusier's cubistic buildings "boxes on stilts." Le
Corbusier's L' Unite d' Habitation (Union for Living) is an apartment house in Marseilles that
brings together in a single structure a community of 1,600 persons with complete facilities for
living, shopping, and recreation (Fig. 21.25). Remembering the dismal mass dwellings in Paris,
which he called "disastrous architectural fortifications where thousands of families never see the
sun," he set Out to build apartments vibrating with color, light, and air. To achieve his goal, Le
Corbusier cantilevered a gigantic structure of rough-textured concrete over a double row of
massive supports called pylons. The outside staircase is both functional and decorative in
sculptures queue fashion. Set at an oblique angle to the horizontal axis, it relieves the rectangular
masses with its rising motion. The exterior is honeycombed with shallow balconies, which have
sunbreaks tinted in many colors on the inner sides. These sunbreaks proved so effective in
protecting the tall living rooms from the sun's glare that they have since become architectural
clichs in warm climates. Each floor has duplex apartments served by a skip-stop elevator
system. At the halfway point an entire floor is allotted to shops, while a day school for children, a
gymnasium, and a theater are found at the roof level.

21 EARLY 20TH-CENTURY STYLES, PART II 625

IDEAS: RELATIVISM
The only thing that is permanent is change. This seeming contradiction points at the very
heart of 20th-century thought, whether expressed in philosophical, scientific, or aesthetic terms.
No static absolute can provide a satisfactory view of the dynamic world of today. Even the ageold principles of mathematics can no longer be regarded as eternal truths but like art, as
expressions relative to the time and place of their creations. So also the firmest articles of
religious faiths and political doc-trines are subject to far more commentary and modification
from time to time4 than their followers would care to admit. The shift from a stable world order
to the present dynamic view of the universe, which began with Copernicus and Galileo, has
swept all be-fore it. Those who believe in orderly progress to-ward a definable goal interpret this

flux as some form of evolution. Those who accept it at face value, as most scientists do, believe
simply in change. Both would agree with Nietzsche when he said that truth has never yet hung
on the arm of an absolute; both must of necessity describe the world in relative terms. In his
observations of physical phenomena, Albert Einstein saw that, in a world where every-thing
moves, any calculation or prediction, to be valid, must be based on the relative position of the
observer. Newton's absolute space, which was immovable, and his absolute time, which flowed
on uniformly both of which were "unrelated to any outward circumstance" had to be discarded
and replaced by the theory of relativity. All space, in the modern view, is measured by mobility
and change of relative position, and all time by the du-ration of movement in the space traveled
across. The world becomes a space-time continuum; all matter, energy, and events are related in
the four dimensions of space-time. The study by anthropologists of the life and customs of
distant peoples has shown how ethical considerations are relative to tribal customs as well as to
social and economic conditions. In Tibet, a woman may have several husbands because one man
may be too poor to support a wife. In Africa, some tribes permit a rich man to have as many
wives as he can afford. The pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey took a long
look at history and a wide view of the world and concluded that when an idea is effective, it must
be true; when it ceases to work, its truth is
no longer valid and another solution must be discovered. Such a relative world, in which
all things appear differently to each person and each group, de-pending on educational,
geographical, historical, ethnic, and psychological backgrounds, can be understood only in terms
of many frames of reference. Any absolutism such a totalitarian society as that of Plato's
Republic, a modern police state, or a military dictatorship insists on a maximum of conformity in
order to assure the stability of government. A relativism such as that of a modern democracy
allows for many different human images in a pluralistic society. This relative world, moreover, is
populated by men and women who see themselves in multiple images and express themselves in
many different styles. In it can be found Marx's proletarian person; speaking in some form of
social protest and bent on bringing about the ultimate triumph of the working classes and masses.
Darwin's jungle people are there, beating on their tom-toms and speaking in existentialist
vocabularies on the survival of the fittest. Nietzsche's Umber mensch, or super being, who is
determined to impose a mighty will on an unwilling world, has been thwarted in two brutal
world wars. The voices of Freud's psychological patients are heard, too, coming from couches
and canvases as they try to share surrealistic nightmares with the world at large. Mechanical men
and women, the spawn of the Industrial Revolution and the machine age, walk robot like at large,
thinking mechanistic thoughts in their electronic brains and expressing futuristic principles in
their mechanical styles. There, too, is Einstein's relativist, who is drawing abstract pictures of the
space-time world in slashing, angular lines that are organized by the many focal points of cubist
perspective. Modern art as the mirror of this relativistic world therefore assumes multitudinous
shapes in order to reflect the great number of diverse human images. Sin all wonder, then, that
this world, which has produced scientists who analyze and synthesize and physicists who work
with fission and fusion, has also given birth to revolutionists who want to destroy a social order

so as to reconstruct it in a different way. Warring nations hope to break down one international
order so as to build up a new balance of power. Idol smashers feel compelled to destroy certain
images people live by so that they can remake the world in their own image. And there are the
artists who distort

REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
Tangible objects so as to reshape them into forms that exist exclusively in their imaginations and
on their canvases.
Relativism and the Arts
In this relative world, therefore, the cubists disintegrate the objects in their paintings so that they
can reintegrate them in patterns of their own choosing. Since each picture creates its own spatial
relationships, space is relative to the mind and mood of the painter rather than an absolute as it is
in Euclidean geometry. It is both impossible and undesirable to make any precise analogy
between cubist principles and the mathematics of space-time. A relationship, however
unsystematic it may be, can nevertheless be found in the cubist concept of several view-points
existing at the same time and showing objects from many sides at once. By representing bodies
at rest or in successive stages of motion, a futurist or mechanical-style picture sets up a spacetime continuum of its own. Similarly, Giorgio de Chirico in The Menacing Muses (Fig. 21.26)
places classical statues in a space bounded by a medieval castle, a contemporary factory, and a
futuristic tower in order to create an image of time in which past, present, and future coexist in
an ex-tended now. In music, the experience of dissonance is freed from its dependence on
consonance, so that it demands neither preparation, anticipation, nor resolution. The absolutes of
tonality, rhythmical regularity, and musical form have yielded to a host of tonal relativisms.
Instead of a single meter, a modern musical score can use poly metric sequences composed of
many meters in which a measure of 4/8 is succeeded by one of 7/8, then 2/8, 9/8, and so on. The
same principle can be used simultaneously with several rhythms going on at the same time, as in
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. This is called polyrhythm. Instead of organizing a work around a
single key center, some composers have employed two tonalities simultaneously in the technique
known as bitonality, while others have gone one step farther into polytonality. This, in turn, led
to Schoenberg's method of composing with twelve tones that are related not to a central tonality
but only to one another. Within the internal organization of the work, the sequence of tones
known as the row can be played forward or backward; normally or upside down, simultaneously
as in a chord, or fragmented into shorter motifs (see
21.26 GIORGIO DE CHIRICO. The Menacing Muses. 1917. Oil on canvas, 37% X 27%1 (96 X
66 cm). Private collection.

p. 601). A given note may not be repeated until all the other tones are heard. The twelve-tone
method emphasizes change and discourages repetition. Its ideal is constant variation creating a
continual and perpetual state of tonal flux. In Ulysses, James Joyce found his answer by making
a simultaneous cross section of the life of a city. In this mazelike literary space-time continuum,
all events, whether memories of the past or premonitions of the future, flow together into a kind
of extended present. Dreamlike, there is no distinction between before and after. While the single
day and night and city in which all takes place have some relation to the Greek unities of time,
place, and action, there is no beginning, middle, or end to Joyce's structure less literary structure.
Readers can begin at almost any place in the book, and the continuity will not be broken. The
series of fleeting images are simply recorded, and the entrance to the dream world of free
association of words and thoughts is left open for the reader to supply the transitions between
moods, the union of the fragments, and thus create their own relative order. Its end is a
conclusion in which nothing is concluded. Many of the forms of expressionism are also relative
to the individual psychology of the artist, just as a Frank Lloyd Wright building is relative to the
need of the human situation. Expressionism presupposes the free-associational techniques of
psychological relativism. Somewhat like the romantic revolutionary of a century earlier, the
expressionistic artist reasserts the,, primacy of the imagination over the intellect and takes flight
from reality in order to find a superior reality in the world of mystery and fantasy. The tendency
is anti-intellectual in the extreme, though the symbols and vocabulary evolve through highly
rationalistic procedures. The emotional content poured on their canvases, pages, and musical
scores derives from a particular human imagination and hence is relative to the infinite number
of unsolved conflicts and suppressed passions of many different private worlds. Historical
relativism has provided the modern artist with an unparalleled number of choices of styles and
techniques from the past as well as the present, and an anticipated future. The artist of the 20th
century is the heir of all the ages. A Picasso exhibit or a Stravinsky concert can present a
bewildering assortment of styles. Picasso drew inspiration from ancient Iberian sculpture,
African masks, Romanesque wall frescoes, and medieval stained glass, as well as from many
different con-temporary sources. His paintings also include provocative variations on Velazquez's
Las Meninas, Delacroix's Pieta, and other masterpieces that caught his eye. His mediums
included pencil drawings, collages constructed of cloth and paper, ceramics, painted pottery, and
woodcuts, as well as oils and watercolors. Sources for Stravinsky include the free rhythms of
medieval plain chant, the dissonant counterpoint of the 14th century, the operas of Mozart, or the
multiple rhythms of African music. To these masters historical relativism provided a complete
freedom of choice without the necessity of sacrificing either their originality or their principles.
Philosophers of history, such as Spengler and Toynbee, through their sweeping historical
panoramas have shown that the past still exists within the living present. From the point of view
of historical relativity, then, tradition is usually a more potent factor than innovation. At all times
including the present evolution has been a more powerful force in the process of change than has
revolution. Most 20th-century ideas and problems are variations on old themes that have
challenged thinkers ever since the 5th century B.c. Those that in the past led to sharp dissonances
have never been resolved. Instead, they have become outmoded, outgrown, temporarily

forgotten; or they are bypassed, circumvented in one way or an-other, or made to assume new
shapes and forms. "Ideas have never conquered the world as ideas," Romain Rolland remarked in
his novel Jean-Christophe, "but only by the force they represent. They do not grip men by their
intellectual contents but by the radiant vitality which is given off from them at certain periods in
history. . . . The loftiest and most sublime idea remains ineffective until the day when it becomes
contagious, not by its own merits, but by the merits of the groups of men in whom it becomes
incarnate by the transfusion of their blood." Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play Rosen krantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) expresses the same thought, but in different words: "There
were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no very great matter." More important
than the solutions or lack of them have been the emotional forces these notions have generated
and the good fruits they have yielded. All the workable ideas eventually have been embodied in
the buildings people erect to house their activities, the statues and pictures that reflect their
human images, the words that express their innermost thoughts, and the music that gives voice to
their strivings and aspirations in a world that is forever changing, forever in flux.
Mid-20th Century Styles
REVOLUTIONS, EVOLUTIONS
The revolutionary spirit continued in full force during the middle part of the 20th century.
Radical changes had come about in science, technology, politics, and economics as well as in the
arts. Social relativity and the pluralistic society replaced absolute values and uniformity.
Anthropologists confirmed the relativity of behavioral patterns and moral values in an expanding
world; psychologists demonstrated the impossibility of clearly defining the normal and
abnormal; artists employed styles ranging from strict formalism to wide-ranging freedom, from
imaginative abstraction to stark realism, and from detached objectivity to passionate
expressionistic involvement. Highly dramatic were the developments in space exploration,
electronic communications, increasingly sophisticated computer techniques, automation, and
robotics. The high-technology revolution changed the human outlook and environment of the era
as much as did the Indus-trial Revolution some two centuries earlier. The antennas and tentacles
of electronic media heightened personal perceptions. Through electronic eyes people could
watch the whole world, while the whole world watched them. Through satellite transmitters and
dishes capable of sending and receiving thousands of beams, communications expanded
dramatically. Information could reach the four corners of the world, transcending national
boundaries. News reached formerly closed societies with such facility that mandated censorship
became nearly impossible to enforce. Equally dramatic was the effect of audio and video
transmission on cultural developments, while vast numbers were added to the potential audience.
As a result. the earth seemed like a huge planetary city in
provincial minorities within a vast global complex. It was found, however, that the process of
growth and expansion generated as much diversity as unity, as much conflict as understanding,
together with boundless possibilities for the future.

MODERNISM
New York School
During the dark days of World War II, from 1939 to 1945, the United States continued to live up
to its image as the refuge from oppression. This time, however, it was not a case of admitting
whole groups of immigrants and refugees, but of welcoming towering figures in their respective
fields. Prior to the American entry into the war, the founder of relativity, Albert Einstein, had
come from Hitler's Germany, while the physicist Enrico Fermi arrived from Italy and Niels Bohr
from Den-mark. Together they succeeded in splitting the atom and ushering in the nuclear age.
Formerly of the Bauhaus in Germany, the renowned Inter-national Style architects Walter
Gropius and Mies van der Rohe began to teach and build in the United States, while Eliel
Saarinen and his son Eero left Finland to make their careers in the Northeast. Such literary
figures as Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley found southern California a congenial place to live
and write. The composers Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Darius Milhaud were also
working and teaching in California, while Paul Hindemith joined the music faculty of Yale
University. New York had had its first taste of the modern movement as early as 1907 with the
opening of a commercial gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue by the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
It was here
which national and regional units functioned as that the first showings of Cezanne, Henri 629
REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
22.1 GEORGIA O'KEEFFE. Radiator BuildingNight, New York. 1927. Oil on canvas, 48 X
30" (117.6 X 73.5 cm). Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fine Arts, Fisk University, Nashville. Alfred
Stieglitz Collection.
II I
Rousseau, Picasso and Brancusi reached a limited audience. Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the young
American painters who exhibited at "291" established her reputation there and succeeded in
capturing the soaring spirit of New York with a series of skyscraper pictures (Fig. 22.1).
Stieglitz's gallery became a fitting herald of the furor caused by the famous Armory Show of
1913, the first full-scale, comprehensive modern art show in the United States. It created a major
sensation with vituperative critics hurling verbal thunderbolts from one side, while staunch
defenders were lined up on the other. Little did both sides know that the ultimate acceptance of
modernism would take. place in their city half a century later.
Modernism first and foremost was a group of styles in opposition to the then-prevailing middleclass establishment values and the way art was taught in schools and academies. At the time it
was dissonant, controversial, shocking. For its part, the establishment considered modernism
scandalous and an offense to good taste, common sense, and the conventions of polite society. It

was also considered subversive and threatening to the established order. However, when the arts
of the modernists began to receive worldwide attention, acceptance eventually followed.
Museums were founded to exhibit modernist works, and col-lectors began to purchase modern
paintings as they rose in commercial value. In short, modernism in art, architecture, literature,
and music became the new establishment. Its painters, writers, and com-posers were appointed as
deans and professors in academies and universities. Its clichs now dominate commercial art,
films, and the media. A similar emigration from Europe was seen among painters and sculptors.
The influential French dada painter Marcel Duchamp was already established in New York. Then
came the out-standing nonobjective artist Piet Mondrian from Holland and the abstractionist
Josef Albers, of the Bauhaus faculty, to open studios. When the war clouds darkened and the
Nazis occupied France, leading figures of the School of Paris also found in New York a
sanctuary where they could live and work. These included the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz and such
painters as Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst. In the 1920s and 1930s aspiring young
American artists and musicians had sailed for Paris in the wake of writers Gertrude Stein, Ernest
Hemingway, and Henry Miller and composers Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland. Then a
reverse migration changed the posture of American artists toward Continental colleagues. In the
early 1940s they stood squarely in the center of things. When such eminent minds combined
forces with their American counterparts, they acted as catalytic agents that hurled the New York
artists to the forefront. After 1945 and the war's end, some European artists returned to the
Continent. The School of Paris, however, had lost its momentum, and most of the younger
creative talents were at this time to be found in New York. American artists were at last free to
effect their own creative syntheses of European and American styles. For the first time in history
an international style originated in the United States. New York
Z.Z. MID-2thli CENTURY STYLES 631
became the worldwide capital of art and music, the achievements of the New York School were
felt throughout the world, and the new style abstract expressionism took its place in the history
of art alongside impressionism, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism. It became the true heir
and logical successor in this great evolutionary sequence of styles. While major architectural
developments de-pended on the expansion of American commerce and industry, painting and
poetry belonged to the dispossessed few. Theirs were the voices of angry young men and women
who had been confronted with the specter of the Great Depression at the be-ginning of their
careers and the horror of war as they matured. At first they had been sustained as artists mainly
through the grace of government-sponsored projects. To relieve mass unemployment, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal included artists and musicians among those aided by the
Works Progress Administration (WPA). These programs brought artists, writers, and composers
together in group enterprises that gave them a modest living. As they worked together creating
murals for public buildings, plays for regional theaters, and music for ballet productions and
symphonic ensembles, American artists found themselves lifted out of their individual isolation
and their sense of alienation. They formed friendships, developed a sense of community, and

discussed philosophies of life and art in a way that could be translated into action. The
Depression years had produced an atmosphere of radical politics among intellectuals and artists
at a time when the basic structures of government and social institutions were scrutinized and
questioned in the light of their apparent collapse. In this context some artists turned to-ward
social realism and their work became an instrument of political propaganda for the exposure of
poverty, hypocrisy, and injustice. It was to the credit of the abstract expressionists, who were
nourished in this environment, that they sublimated their political revolt and transformed it into
an aesthetic radicalism, the purpose of which was to reexamine the basic assumptions and
conventions of the American heritage. Although the dominant theme of American art in the
1930s had been social realism (see Fig. 21.13), such artists as the sculptor David Smith and the
painters Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky possessed the vision and the daring to explore
the aesthetic and expressive potential offered by cubism, expressionism, and surrealism. The
designation New York School was first coined. to distinguish the younger generation of
American painters and sculptors from the School of Paris, the exceptional group of artists who
lived and worked in Paris during the first four decades of the 20th century. Their brilliant
innovations had made the French capital the center and symbol of achievement in modern art. At
first only the abstract expressionists were thought to constitute the New York School, but the
meaning of the term has been widened to embrace most of the styles whose development and
acceptance had centered in New York from 1945 through the mid-sixties.
22 MID-20TH CENTURY STYLES 631
became the worldwide capital of art and music, the achievements of the New York School were
felt throughout the world, and the new style abstract expressionism took its place in the history
of art alongside impressionism, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism. It became the true heir
and logical successor in this great evolutionary sequence of styles. While major architectural
developments de-pended on the expansion of American commerce and industry, painting and
poetry belonged to the dispossessed few. Theirs were the voices of angry young men and women
who had been confronted with the specter of the Great Dt pression at the be-ginning of their
careers and the horror of war as they matured. At first they had been sustained as artists mainly
through the grace of government-sponsored projects. To relieve mass unemployment, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal included artists and musicians among those aided by the
Works Progress Administration (WPA). These programs brought artists, writers, and composers
together in group enterprises that gave them a modest living. As they worked together creating
murals for public buildings, plays for regional theaters, and music for ballet productions and
symphonic ensembles, American artists found themselves lifted out of their individual isolation
and their sense of alienation. They formed friendships, developed a sense of community, and
discussed philosophies of life and art in a way that could be translated into action. The
Depression years had produced an atmosphere of radical politics among intellectuals and artists
at a time when the basic structures of government and social institutions were scrutinized and
questioned in the light of their apparent collapse. In this context some artists turned to-ward

social realism and their work became an instrument of political propaganda for the exposure of
poverty, hypocrisy, and injustice. It was to the credit of the abstract expressionists, who were
nourished in this environment, that they subli-mated their political revolt and transformed it into
an aesthetic radicalism, the purpose of which was to reexamine the basic assumptions and
conventions of the American heritage. Although the dominant theme of American art in the
1930s had been social realism (see Fig. 21.13), such artists as the sculptor David Smith and the
painters Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky possessed the vision
and the daring to explore the aesthetic and expressive potential offered by cubism,
expressionism, and surrealism. The designation New York School was first coined to distinguish
the younger generation of American painters and sculptors from the School of Paris, the
exceptional group of artists who lived and worked in Paris during the first four decades of the.
20th century. Their brilliant innovations had made the French capital the center and symbol of
achievement in modern art. At first only the abstract expressionists were thought to constitute the
New York School, but the meaning of the term has been widened to embrace most of the styles
whose development and acceptance had centered in New York from 1945 through the midsixties.
632 PART 5 REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
Just as the School of Paris had embraced the Spaniards Picasso, Juan Gris, and Joan Miro, the
Italians Modigliani and Chirico, and the Russian Chagall in addition to the Frenchmen Braque
and Matisse, so also the New York School comprised an international group. The German master
Hans Hofmann was already in his fifties when he established an art school on West 8th Street.
The Dutchborn Willem de Kooning had moved to New York in the late 1920s, as had Mark
Rothko from Russia by way of Portland, Oregon, and Arshile Gorky from Turkish Armenia.
Jackson Pollock was born in Wyoming and raised in California, Franz Kline in the coal-mining
cotintry of Pennsylvania, while Robert Motherwell hailed from San Francisco, Clyfford Still
from Spokane, Washing-ton, and the sculptor David Smith from Indiana. Barnett Newman and
Lee Krasner were the native New Yorkers in the group. When WPA projects were eliminated by
the wartime budget, many artists found themselves living on the ragged edge of poverty, even
desperation, in the bare lofts and cold-water flats of the Greenwich Village section of lower
Manhattan off Washington Square. Theirs was not the prosper-ous, glittering New York of Wall
Street, Madison Avenue, and the art galleries of the establishment on 57th Street. Alienation from
American society, which they saw as a machine for brutality, was one of the common bonds
linking their attitudes and giving them shape.
The focal point of these "loft rats," as they called themselves, was The Club, located at 35 East
8th Street, a local New York version of a Paris caf where those who painted by day could talk to
each other by night. In their vigorous arguments the artists often came to blows, but they shared a
com-mon unifying faith. They believed that art should be invested with powerful content and that
the most potent means for giving expression to that content lay in the possibilities of abstraction

in or-der to reduce shapes and forms to their essences. In 1943 Newman, Rothko, and Adolph
Gottlieb three member painters of the group published a statement in the New York Times
declaring that "there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. . . . the subject is crucial
and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless," At the same time, they asserted
that the "impact of elemental truth" called for the "simple expression of the complex thought, and
the importance of the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal." Some evenings
at The Club, Hans Hofmann could be heard discussing the doctrine of abstraction. A naturalist, or
painter of physical life, he declared, could never become the creator of pictorial life. "You must
give the most with the least," he taught, and "a work of art can never be the imitation of life but
only . . . the generation of life." On a Friday night the avant-garde composer John Cage might
give "A Lecture on Nothing" or sit be22.2 JACKSON POLLOCK. Lucifer. 1947. Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas; 3'5" x
6'9" (1.04 x 2.06 m). Collection Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson.

22 MID-20ni CENTURY SrYLEs 633

fore a keyboard for four and a half minutes of silence. W. H. Auden, the British-born poet who
settled in New York in 1939, would drop in to dis-cuss his Age of Anxiety or give voice to some
of the pessimistic existentialist reflections that occupied him in those days. The Welsh poet
Dylan Thomas came to read his lyrics, and the restless Allen Ginsberg, poetic voice of the "beat"
generation, would put in an appearance from time to time. There he read his poem Howl, a hymn
of defeat, a hell of despair. But like a Jackson Pollock web of interpenetrating lines (Fig. 22.2),
Howl weaves a tapestry of images that captures the spirit of the seething metropolis: I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, . . . who poverty
and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water
flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, . . . who were expelled from the
academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, . . . . . wine
drunkenness over the roof tops, storefront boroughs of the tea head joyride neon blinking traffic
light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings
and kind king light of mind, . . . who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out
and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on
the hydrogen jukebox. who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to
Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists
jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon.*
Abstract Expressionism While calling themselves abstract expressionists, the artists of the New
York School did not think of themselves as a coherent group with common ideals. The most that
can be said for the unity of the school was that its members shared a range of attitudes derived
principally from the despair and anxiety of the times, from the opportunity for professional

activity and cooperation afforded by the WPA, from the breakthrough in aesthetic form achieved
by the cubists in their experiments with abstractions, and from the liberation of the subconscious
attained among the surrealists using Freudian methods of analysis. All the abstract expressionists
insisted on spontaneity, intensity of feeling, and a vast range of individual choices, materials, and
situations. In practice,, after all the talking, the goal of these American artists became the
realization of an entirely new pictorial style, one synthesized from cubism and surrealism and
fully equal to these in ambition and accomplishment. Within this spectrum each remained an
individual, each had access to an infinite set of options, each strained in a personal direction. As
the critic Harold Rosenberg noted, each was "fatally aware that only what he constructs for
himself will ever be real to him." Or, as William Baziotes said, " [my paintings] are my mirrors.
They tell me what I am like at the moment." For the New York School as for the existentialist
thinkers, painting was being in nonbeing. Jean-Paul Sartre expressed this view when he observed
that "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the worldand defines himself
afterward."
ORIGINS, DERIVATIONS. From cubism the American artists learned the method of abstracting
the essence from familiar shapes and forms. They also mastered the cubist techniques of
analyzing and dissecting the subject matter of a painting in order to rearrange the parts into a
satisfactory design for pictorial purposes. Like the cubists they frankly acknowledged the twodimensionality and the shape of their canvases and made no attempt to create the illusion of deep
space and fully rounded forms. As their teacher and guide Hans Hofmann put it, "The essence of
pictorial space is flatness."
*From Collected Poems 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright ' 1956, 1959 by Allen
Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.
22.3 ARSHILE GORKY. The Liver is the Cock's Comb. 1944. Oil on canvas, 6 '1'A " X 8'2"
(1.86 x 2.49 m). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1956.
Surrealism also had a powerful effect on the New York group. European surrealists had
discovered the free-association techniques of psychic automatism (see pp. 608-609), the
spontaneous and random quality of which appealed greatly to the New York group. As one of the
group expressed it: "I want to keep a balance just on the edge of awareness, the narrow rim
between the conscious and the subconscious, a balance between expanding and contracting,
silence and sound." Once psychic automatism had released a free flow of creativity, the artist
could work over, revise, and realize from the doodling some designs of a more controlled sort.
Arshile Gorky's nightmarish picture The Liver Is the Cock's Comb (Fig. 22.3) illustrates this
heritage from surrealism. In his gruesome painting the artist conjures up fantastic images of
skeletal shapes jostling imaginary creatures with sharp tooth like claws.
Psychic automatism gave priority to process, or the act of doing, over the logically worked-out
conceptions of form. In effect, it reversed the or-der of previous notions of abstract art, which

were based on intellectually preconceived ideas before starting a work. Once having accepted
automatism as basic to the creative enterprise, the abstract expressionists converted it from the
surrealist process of generating images to the act of painting itself. Thus they found a way of
preserving fresh-ness, of cultivating accidental dribbles and splashes for the evidence they
offered of spontaneity and creative vigor. Surrealism also pointed the way for the abstract
expressionists to discover memory fragments of the innocent and unconscious in modern men
and women. Though long buried in the subconscious, such primordial memories were the source
of the free, the instinctual, and the fantastic in the human imagination. Surrealism thus indicated
a technique for liberating the images trapped in the subconscious and making them available to
the conscious mind of the artist for use as the vehicles of the artist's expressive intent. Then the
abstract expressionists attempted to come to grips with the elemental, the profound, and
universal aspects of
human emotion. For this they needed to develop a visual language of signs and symbols to depict
the pictorial equivalents of human experience. In the process of artistic creation they sought the
metaphors for the myths of universal genesis, as did Bahlett Newman in Genesis The Break
(Fig. 22.4). The stark blacks and whites in his reconstruction of the primal creative force suggest
God separating light from darkness, the essential from the trivial, bringing order out of chaos and
form from the void. In this titanic struggle, it is as if a celestial body is taking shape out of
nothingness. The abstract expressionists' notion of painting as heroic gesture harks back to the
sublime ideal of romanticism. Unlike the romantics, however, they did not rely on subject matter,
but sought to create a poetic art in purely pictorial terms.
ACTION PAINTING. Recognition of the abstract expressionists was slow in coming. Even some
of the avant-garde commercial galleries hesitated to accept their paintings for exhibition. In
1943, however, Jackson Pollock's first one-man show in New York was an event that
commanded international recognition and focused worldwide at tentiorl. on himself and his
fellow abstract expressionists. Pollocks's explosive canvases revealed a teeming vitality, frenetic
energy, and creative invention that heralded a new era in painting. Later he became the original
"action painter" who spread his enormous canvases on the floor so as to feel closer to his
painting (Fig. 22.5). With commercial paints, house-painting brushes, basting syringes, and
sticks and trowels he performed a kind of ritualistic ballet dance as he dripped, squirted,
dribbled, and flung. His "poured paintings," as they have been called, had no predetermined
pattern. They are simply energy made visible, a kind of trancelike pictorial choreography in
which the spectator is invited to join in the dance. With Lucifer (see Fig. 22.2), the viewer is
irresistibly drawn into a web of nervous rhythms pulsating with dynamic energy, a perpetual
motion of lines and colors, as might be com-pounded of such elemental forces of nature as air,
fire, and water. Pollock was a master of curvilinear drawing. He developed the pouring
techniques so that he could achieve a kind of improvisational continuity of extended overlapping
lines in the process of painting. This cannot be done with the traditional way of handling the
brush. In spite of the spontaneous and seemingly accidental quality, Pollock's battery of

techniques is firmly controlled. He once insisted, "I can control the flow of paint. There is no
accident." The result is an amazingly complex web of interwoven lines, colors, and motifs
similar in effect to musical counterpoint. Neither Pollock nor his fellow abstract expressionists
came as bursts from the blue, and no one was more aware of this than the painters themselves.
Their stylistic synthesis, as previously discussed, had included elements derived from cubism,
dada, surrealism, and Kandinsky's passionate nonob jectivism. But there is still larger and
broader historical dimension. As early as 1756 the English writer Edmund Burke had published
his essay on the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful. Beauty in the 18th-century sense was based on order, clarity,
balance, i elegance, and proportion. The sublime, however, could include fear-inspiring
experiences; the magnificent, terrible, picturesque, and awe-some; the horrendous forces of
nature such as storms at sea and eruptions of volcanoes; and even the supernatural. Around 1845,
with the last pictures of the English painter J. M. W. Turner (see Fig. 18.28), one feels the same
perpetual motion of blinding blizZards and wind-driven clouds, the same distillatin of nature's
most potent projections energy, light, and motion that characterize Pol-lock's paintings. As his
contemporary, the author William !Hazlitt, commented, Turner depicts "the elements of air, earth,
and water. The artist de-lights to go back to the first chaos of the world or 22 MID-20TH
CENTURY STYLES 63 7
to that state of things when the waters were separating from the dry land, and light from
darkness, but as yet no living thing nor tree bearing fruit was seen upon the face of the earth. All
is without form and void." The same thrust is carried into American art with the wider sweep of
the romantic movement. Dating from about 1885, Albert Pinkham Ryder's Jonah (Fig. 22.6)
seems to dissolve the material world into an ominous phosphorescent brightness. In his analysis
of this picture, art historian Robert Rosenblum observes that Ryder's conception merges the
"phenomena of sea, sky, moonlight with such awareness of their supernatural potential that he
convinces us that a biblical miracle could take place within the magical environment he usually
creates in landscape alone." Bringing together so many different and fundamentally opposite
elementscubism and surrealism, form and content, reason and emotion, control and freedom, line
and color, drawing and painting, figure and ground, abstraction and expression and doing it on
such a heroic scale and without identifiable subject matter of any sort, Pol-lock achieved a
balance so rare and exquisite that even he could not sustain the delicate poise for long.
Eventually he chose to develop individually certain selected aspects of the totality present in his
masterpieces. In just this way his followers carried modern art forward to new advances in
aesthetic vision by basing their work on one feature or another of the complete statement made
by Pollock in his most fertile and triumphant period, from 1448 through 1950. Fundamental as color
was to many of the abstract-expressionist group, black runs like a leitmotif through much
abstract-expressionist painting. Scientifically, black is the total absorption or absence of light,
which is the medium of color. Thus, by reducing pigmentation to basic simplicity, black could be

seen as a contribution to the quality of abstraction and as a speeding up of the painting process.
For others, black played a symbolic role for moods of renunciation, grief, or despair. Franz
Kline, for instance, created huge angular black figures on white backgrounds. Many of his works
seem like drawings blown up to the scale of large paintings. He reveled in the metallic skeletal
forms so characteristic of the urban scene. Untitled (Fig. 22.7) grows mysteriously in swift,
sooty, gestural strokes like the structural stresses of opposing forces in the skeletons of iron
bridges, railway trestles, and locomotive engines of the artist's coal-country origins. The image
thus created is that of nostalgic, self-revealing memory. Lee Krasner was one of the pivotal
figures in the movement. In her work she sought to com-bine both visual and symbolic imagery
derived from her lifelong interest in such ancient lettering forms , as cuneiform- clay inscriptions
and hieroglyphics (Fig. 22.8). None of her imagery is concerned with specific meaning, rather
she conjures it up from the subconscious. As such, her pictures are both abstract and
expressionistic. Adolph Gottlieb worked in a similar vein. In his Forgotten Dream (Fig: 22.9) he
used a cubist grid and in-vented a kind of surrealistic automatism. But his images have no
referent other than the painting it-self. As in a dream there is persistent repetition of an image
with constant variation.
COLOR-FIELD PAINTING. Pollock and Kline are of-ten regarded as the representatives of
"gestural abstraction" within the New York group, while painters like Mark Rothko and Barnett
Newman
22.9 ADOLPH GoTruEs. Forgotten Dream. 1946. Oil on canvas, 24 X 30" (61.1 X 76.4 cm).
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Gift of Albert A. List.
22 MID-20TH CENTURY S-ryi.Es 639
22.10 MARK Rcraco. Green and Maroon. 1953. Oil on canvas, 7'6'A x 4'6'/2" (2.31 X 1.38 m).
Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
apper as color abstractionists. A comparison of the Pollock and Kline works with Rothko's Green
and Maroon (Fig. 22.10) or with Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Fig. 22.11) provides
evidence of the reason for the distinction. Kline's Pennsylvania, with its blacks and whites,
reproduces quite well on the printed page. To a lesser extent Pollock's Lucifer (see Fig. 22.2),
with its accent on line, would also survive in a black-and-white illustration. The works of Rothko
and Newman, however, with their subtle and sensitive saturationsthat is, purity, vividness, or
intensity of color: would be lost and incomprehensible without their essential element. This fact
emphasizes a fundamental division among the abstract expressionists, with the action painters
appearing on one side and the color-field painters, or color abstractionists, on the other. Rothko's
Green and Maroon (Fig. 22.10) consists of several irregular rectangles floating in an atmospheric
blue space. The rectangles are of un-equal size with unstable contours and are painted in
luminous hues brushed on with such delicacy that flickering light seems to radiate from the films
of color. As the eye runs over the painterly edges of the rectangles, the delicate harmonies of the

colors set off vibrations that make the shapes appear to breathe and shinimer within the colorsuffused space. Barnett Newman was also swept up in the tide of the heroic sublime. In his
Genesis The Break (Fig. 22.4) he had come to grips with the creative force itself with his
contrasting blacks and whites symbolizing the emergence of light from darkness. He also carried
abstraction still further
22.11 BARNETT NEWMAN. Vir Heroicus Sublimis. 1950-51. Oil on canvas, 7'113/8" X
17'91/4" (2.42 X 5.14 m). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller.
640 PART 5 REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
into the forms of densities and saturations of a single color. Such pictures as Vir Heroicus Sub
limis (Fig. 22.11), which might be translated as "Man, the Heroic Sublime," have but one vivid
hue in this case, red expanding horizontally with syncopated interruptions by lean vertical bands
that seem to march across the huge canvas. Newman dazzles the eyes with sweeping color
sensations. His vertical bands dominate his pictures with their nervous, vibrating contours. These
"zips," as Newman called them, serve to "cut" the great field of absolute color and shock it into
waves of visual energy that roll back and forth between the bands and the edges. This creates
dynamic action in what otherwise seems a totally inert situation. These bands can also be read as
abstract figures standing out against their color-field environment. In the way they parallel and
echo the edges that fix the limit of Newman's canvases, they seem to be marking off pictures
within pictures. Both Pollock and Newman in their major pronouncements expanded the size of
their paintings to immense proportions. They considered easel painting of cabinet size to be a
dying form. In their place they projected larger "portable murals" and environmental wall
pictures so that the viewer could have a complete sense of involvement. Smaller canvases, they
reasoned, were of necessity seen in relation to their setting with other objects in the room, the
texture and color of the walls against which they were hung, and in conjunction with other
pictures on the same and surrounding walls. Large-scale murals, on the other hand, are complete
within themselves since they make their own environment. Murals can be said to create space
simply by occupying it, and in so doing they envelop the viewer.
SCULPTURAL DIMENSION. The sculptor David Smith was subject to the same forces and
circumstances that influenced the abstract-expressionist painters. He also associated intimately
with the group, shared their goal of realizing new forms and a new style of abstraction and
expression, and eventually became their sculptural counterpart. He began as a painting student at
the Art Students League of New York but switched in the early 1930s to sculpture after seeing
reproductions of works by Picasso and others using what then constituted an inventive new
technique of joining and welding metal pieces and parts into abstract cubist assemblages (see
Fig. 20.1). Smith was drawn to this technique in part because he had first learned
it by working in automobile and locomotive factories ' where he had assembled and welded
metal components. Throughout his career Smith felt a great fascination for the basic quality of

steel. "The metal," he wrote, "possesses little art history. What associations it has are those of this
century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality." Thus, Smith
worked in the medium of constructed sculpture rather than in the traditional ones of carved stone
and cast bronze. In order to accommodate a machine-shop studio large enough to construct
works on an architectural scale plus ample environment for their display, Smith moved to a farm
at Bolton Landing in upstate New York. There, he could achieve not only the epic scale of the
Cub i works (Fig. 22.12) but also the perspective to conceptualize them within a series of related
materials and forms. Some of Smith's constructions retain the rough blackness of iron; others
have been painted bright hues, while in the Cub i series Smith scored the stainless steel surfaces
of the geometric volumes to make them flash, dazzle, and all but dissolved in refracted sunlight.
The sense of lightness this creates seems a contradiction of the heavy, solid appearance of the
monumental forms, the mass of them raised aloft by cylinders and balanced there in dynamic
majesty. A master draftsman who all his life drew from the model, Smith designed sculptures
with such strong silhouettes and transparent interiors that 'they seem like "drawing-in-space"; in
scale and proportion, they often relate to the human figure. The frontal views he designed also
give many of the works a strong pictorial character. Smith possessed something of the surrealists'
automatism in his astonishing ability to devise new forms. These frequently included standard
industrial units or "found" objects from junkyards, which Smith transformed into artistic
significance by making them integral with the whole of his design. Smith's iron and steel
constructions, like those in the Cub i series, create open and closed spaces that interpenetrate
with their environment, defining space, volume, movement, and color as they stand silhouetted
against trees, buildings, or . sky. Seeing symbol in structure, Smith wrote: "When one chooses a
couple of old iron rings from the hub of a wagon, they are circles, they are suns; they 'all have
the same radius; they all perform the same Euclidean relationships." 'Success eventually came to
the "loft rats"; but after so much poverty, despair, and struggle, it 22 MID-201H CENTURY
STYLES 641
22.12 DAVID SMITH. Cubi Vi. 1963. Stainless steel, height 9'1014" (3.21 m). Israel Museum,
Jerusalem. Donated by Mr. and Mrs. Meshulam Riklis.
seemed not a harbinger of the good life but the end of an epoch and the death of sits heroes.
Gorky committed suicide in 1948 and Pollock perished in an automobile accident in 1956, as did
David Smith in 1965. Kline died in_1962, when he was fifty-one, and Rothko killed himself in
his studio in 1970.
It was the years 1947-1953 that saw the movement experience its most intense activity and
dialog if and achieve the highest quality in innovation ;as well as in production. As late as 1951,
however, the artists' state was so desperate for the want Of recognition that a group calling themselves "the irascible eight," which included Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Newman, de Kooning,
Mother well, Gottlieb, and Reinhardt, picketed the Museum of Modern Art to demand the
establishment of a department of modern American art. In the same year, the Museum of Modern
Art recognized the movement with an exhibition entitled "Abstract Painting and Sculpture in

America." Then about 1958 the prestige of the "heroic generation" soared when the museum
circulated throughout Europe a comprehensive show of their work under the title "The New
American Painting." made abstract expressionism into an international style that transformed the
character and appearance of new painting virtually all over the world. In Memorial in Aeternum
(Fig. 22.13), or In Perpetual Memory, Hans Hofmann, the old master of the style and who
survived many of his younger
22.13 HANS HOFMANN. Memorial in Aeternum. 1962. Oil on canvas, 7' X 6'4" (2.13 x 1.83
m). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist.
642 PART 5 REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
colleagues, paid tribute to the movement. Executed shortly after Kline's death, it is a melancholy
picture of stark color contrasts, but one revealing the artist's astonishingly vigorous "push-pull"
dynamic, a technique by which he caused painterly
planes to achieve a daring structure of pictorial architecture. Helen Frankenthaler extended the
implications of Pollock's method and added yet another dimension to abstraction. She allows her
colors22.14 HELEN FRANKENTHALER. Formation. 1963. Acrylic on canvas, 6'4" X 5'5" (1.93 X
1.65 m). Collection of Mr. Alexis Gregory.
22 MID-20TH CENTURY STYLES 643
stained directly into raw canvas after the manner of Pollock to assume free, shimmering shapes.
She also follows Pollock in working on a canvas spread over the floor rather than set upon an
easel or against a wall. Formation (Fig. 22.14) shows her technique of staining, dyeing, and
washing the canvas with waves of various hues in the manner of a watercolor.
SERIALISM. Serialism was another modernist development that followed in the wake of
abstract-expressionism. With serialism artistic enterprises are seen as aesthetic problems that
admit of many different solutions. Such problems are pursued in a series, with each picture
posing one possible solution. The lineage of serialism can be traced back to Monet, who in 1877
painted seven views of Paris's Old St. Lazare Railway Station (see Fig. 19.19). As he worked, the
scene remained the same, but the atmosphere, light, steam, and color changed constantly,
therefore appearing different in each painting. During the year 1891 Monet
painted tanother series, the subject matter of which consisted of single and double haystacks in a
field. On this occasion, he conceived the group as a whole So as to capture the variables of light
and shadow, wind and weather, colors and hues, through out the four seasons. Later, Monet
rented a second-floor studio in Rouen, where he could face the intricately carved surface of the
cathedral facade and paint it some twenty times. Josef Albers, who had earlier worked in
Germany with Kandinsky and Klee at the Bauhaus and later in New York, extended this idea into

the realm of abstraction (Figs. 22.15 and 22.16). "In visual formation," this founder of modern
serialization declared, "there is no final solution, there-fore I work in series." Serialism,
moreover, can be apprehended fully only when all units in a series are beheld together in a single
room where they have a chance to reveal their relationships, where their reciprocal aspects can
affect one another, and where their spacing against the surrounding walls plays a part as they
form a continuum.
22.15 JOSEF ALBERS. Homage to the Square: Floating. 1957. Oil on canvas, 24" (60 cm)
square. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Gift of Anni Albers and the Josef Albers
Foundation, Inc.
644 PART 5 - REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
22.16 JOSEF ALBERS. Homage to the Square. 1964. Oil on canvas, 30" (75 cm) square. Yale
University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. Gift of Anni Albers and the Josef Albers Foundation,
Inc.Serialism discards the idea of converging and compressing all ideas and elements into a single
masterpiece. In serial painting there is no beginning, middle, or end, implying as this does the
evolution and dramatic development of a single canvas. In the case of Monet, who can say which
haystack or cathedral painting is the one and only great work? Serialism also moves away from
the balanced simultaneity of cubism and extends the experience of space into an unfolding
continuum, or, to put it in mathematical terms, into sets of continuous, independent variables.
Serialism, then, is a process, not a finality. Constant variation is the order of the day as each
picture changes in size, structure, geometry, and shape. Or the shape itself can become the
constant, while the color saturations, the densities of the paint, or the qualities of texture change.
Or an element such as line can go through various vertical, horizontal, diagonal, or circular
manipulations, always allowing for surprise or sport. An
obvious analogy can be made with the theme-and-variation form in music. A more subtle one can
be made with musical serialization, which emphasizes constant variation, as well as the process
of thematic and rhythmic transformation, segmentation, fragmentation, and reassemble age and
recombination of materials. Frank Stella has also worked in the serial list vein and is a unique
presence in the modern movement. In his Tuft on boro series he posed the question "Why do
pictures have to be confined to any predetermined geometrical shape?" Every-thing is first
reduced to the bare minimum of straight lines, severe geometrical forms, and strong colors. With
Tuft on boro I (Fig. 22.17) the viewer is confronted with a slashing triangle that bursts the bonds
of its rectangular base. The pictorial situation is reinforced by the black ground that contrasts
strongly with the bright colors. In Singerli Variation IV (Fig. 22.18) Stella projects a circular
space with a complex interplay of 22 MID-20TH CENTURY SlYLES 645
22.17 FRANK STELLA. Tuftonburo I. 1966. Fluorescent alkyd and epoxy paint on canvas, 8'3"
x 9'1" (2.51 x 2.77 m). Collection Mr. and Mrs. Victor Ganz, New York.

22.18 FRANK STELLA. Singerli Variation IV. 1968. Fluorescent acrylic on canvas, diameter 10'
(3.05 m). Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner
Collection Fund, and Partial Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Sr.
Advance on warm colors and receding cool tones as the curvilinear bands weave in and out, over
and under., The picture recalls some of the heraldic banners and intricate interlaced lettering
found in the pages of medieval illuminated manuscripts. MINIMALISM. The implication behind
minimal art, as the group in the 1960s called their work, is the reduction of sculpture to its
irreducible minimum a form, outline, or shape. Minimal artists were more concerned with the
way their pieces created, enhanced, or blended into their architectural or urban environment than
with the autonomy of their sculptural works as objects. The minimalist point of departure can be
found in David Smith's late Cubic series (Fig. 22.12) but, unlike Sinith, the minimalists
deemphasize personal involvement, expressive content, and hand welding in favor of fabricated
impersonality. They also prefer "primary structures" (Figs. 22.19 and 22.20) basic geometric
volumes so simple as to be redundantover the planes typical of cubist-derived sculpture (see
Figs. 20.20 and 20.21).
646 PART 5 REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
22.19 RONALD BLADEN. X. 1968. Painted wood for aluminum, 22 X 26 X 14' (6.71 x 7.93 x
4.27 m). Miami-Dade College Art Galleries.
Materials tend to be the industrial ones of galvanized iron, aluminum, stainless steel, laminated
wood, fiberglass, and plastics. The minimalists also employ industrial methods, drawing up plans
and specifications and making a small model in painted wood. This then is
22.21 ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG. Monogram. 1955.-59. Construction, 5'4W' X 3'6" x 5
'31/4" (1.64 x 1.07 x 1.61 m). Modern a Museet, Stockholm.
22.201 ISAMU NOGUCHI. Cube. 1968. Painted welded steel and aluminum, height 28' (8.53
m). 140 Broadway, New York.
turned over to an industrial shop for final execution. Like architects, they project their schemes
on a huge scale for public sites and must await patrons with the capital to finance such
enterprises. Before Ronald Bladen could arrange for his massive X (Fig. 22.19) to be constructed
in aluminum,