Theme 2: Conceptual Art and the Dematerialization of Art (1960-70s)

 In the 1960s, the dematerialization of the art object was a major theme and movement. Pop Art, abstraction and the removal of the artist’s hand in Minimalism also contributed to this further breakdown of medium specificity. For example, neither Lichtenstein’s paintings made up of individual Benday dots nor Donald Judd’s industrial sculptures contain traces of the human or idiosyncratic hand. Their artistic merit relies on the concept behind the work, not its unique physical execution. 

The conceptual work of art does not come from any material tradition, unlike previous movements. For example, the Bauhaus school taught art as practical workshops in the early 1900s. 

In the 1970s, performance art also emerged as a popular medium. More and more, art continued to emphasize the conceptual over the material, rejecting the object. In 1970, John Baldessari famously burned all of his paintings made in the 1960s and reemerged as a conceptual artist. This performative act, titled The Cremation Project, is the ultimate embodiment of this ideological trend. To many critics and artists, painting was no longer relevant — only the idea behind an artwork mattered.

 Art critic Clement Greenberg, artist Frank Stella and artist Donald Judd famously declared painting “dead” in the 1960s. In his 1965 essay “Specific Objects,” Judd wrote about the state of painting,  “Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture… The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it. In work before 1946 the edges of the rectangle are a boundary, the end of the picture.” He believed that only individual specific objects were now being produced, rather than movements pertaining to a single medium.

Theme 3: The “Return” of Painting, Postmodernism and Appropriation (1980-90s)

In the 1980s, there was a resurgence of interest in painting and in figuration, reacting against the previous rejection of art’s objecthood. Still, while painting had seemingly “returned,” it had been undeniably changed. Paintings from this time period often incorporated mixed media, producing highly textured surfaces, and they expressed an awareness of their art historical lineage.

Anselm Kiefer and George Baselitz are two prominent examples of this return to painting. Kiefer’s artistic practice attempts to address the burden of the past and particularly the legacy of WWII. In his 1981 painting Margarete inspired by Paul Celan's 1940s poem about the Holocaust “Todesfuge,” the artist uses straw to depict Margarete’s hair in addition to paint. Baselitz often parodied German expressionism of the early 1900s, referencing the painting group Die Brücke while turning his canvases upside down – he quite literally twists tradition. 

Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh were two prominent critics of the time that debated the reemergence of painting. Was it pandering to the market? Had painting really died, and was it being resurrected? In 1991, Douglas Crimp also wrote on the death of painting. 

Postmodernism suggests that there is not a fixed idea of things, that everything is referential. Painting therefore must reference what has come before it. Can painting be original on its own? Many critics of the 80s and 90s argued no — painting was no longer original.

An artist of the “Pictures generation,” a loose movement in the 1970s and 80s that appropriated and collaged images to reveal their constructed nature, Julian Schnabel’s Painting Without Mercy (1980) shows how far painting as a medium has moved from flatness. Actual china plates are used on the canvas, and in this particular scene Schnabel references a common subject in Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the 1840s and 50s, which were in turn inspired by John Keats’ 1819 poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (“The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy”). 

Another example of appropriation and reference is Vik Muniz’s Floor Scrapers, which is not a painting but a collage of shredded magazine pages. The title and the composition directly refer to Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers painting (1875), intending to  demonstrate how the idea of labor has transformed in the modern industrial age. 

Theme 4: Street Art, Social Turmoil and the Rise of New Media (1980s-90s)

Another big influence on contemporary painting is street art. The de-materialization of the object encouraged artists to go out and create accessible work in public spaces, rather than on canvases. Street art was also a popular form of protest, during the AIDS crisis and against the neo-conservative political atmosphere of the time. 

Importantly, artwork on the street is created to be easily accessible. Moving this work from the street to the museum context can change the meaning of the piece, or remove from its intent.

The presence of art on the street then filtered back into painting through new materials, found objects and quick mark-making inspired by graffiti. Keith Haring, for example, made over 5,000 drawings in NYC subways between 1981-85 in his flat, childlike style of illustration. These drawings were not sanctioned by the city and most were destroyed. Jean Michel Basquiat also started out as a street artist in the East Village scene. He became known for his heavily layered combinations of text and image. Both of these artists fundamentally challenged the concept of what constitutes painting. 

In the 1990s, obscenity was a big topic in the arts and in government. In late 1989, Robert Mapplethorpe’s traveling solo exhibition The Perfect Moment stirred up a major controversy due to the homoerotic and sadomasochistic themes of many of his photographs. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. canceled its iteration of the show, and multiple obscenity lawsuits were filed when the work was shown at other venues. This national debate on censorship and obscenity continued into the next decade with artists such as Andres Serrano and Chris Ofili. Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) and Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), which was made with elephant dung, combined the sacred and the profane.

Theme 4: Major Themes in Contemporary Painting (2000s to present)

Contemporary painting is better considered and explored in terms of themes instead of movements. This is a different approach than 20th century art history, where painting can be structured in movements like Modernism, Minimalism, etc.

A few major themes in contemporary painting today:

1.     Identity – In this theme, artists directly challenge the white, Eurocentrist history of painting and confront the power dynamics that are embedded in the Western canon.

o   Faith Ringgold’s (an earlier influence on this trend) American Peoples series from 1967 is an example of the new modernism emerging  in the 60s. Ringgold visited MOMA often, and she was inspired by Picasso’s Guernica (1037) for its chaotic  composition and multi-perspective viewpoint. Her  painting American People Series #20: Die does not flinch from the atrocities of the Civil Rights movement and race riots. In a slight contrast to Picasso, she paints in a more realistic style in order to make her reference to actual current events explicit. 

o   David Hammond’s (also an earlier influence on this trend) African American Flag (1990), made of dyed cotton, was created the year Nelson Mandela was released from prison and first black mayor of NYC was elected. Hammond reference to Jasper Johns, while  offering a new identification with the flag. Is this a painting, or a hung sculpture? Is paint a necessary component to be considered a painting?

o   Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War (2019) is a bronze equestrian statue installed publicly in Times Square, drawing on the classical ancient Roman composition of the man on horseback as a hero. In Wiley’s version, the man is contemporary, wearing dreads and a hoodie. His practice at large inserts black figures into the art historical canon, and he was also selected to paint President Obama’s official portrait. Here he paints not only Obama as an individual—the flowers in the background symbolize his heritage—but the idea of an American president, of a role, of American democracy. 

o   Amy Sherald was selected to paint Michelle Obama’s official portrait. Her distinctive use of greyscale to represent skin is a reference to the history of photography and the fact that she paints from photographs. Although Sherald exclusively depicts people of color in her work, her use of greyscale conceptually distinguishes color from race. On Obama’s dress, she also references Mondrian’s patterning and Manet’s portraits of everyday people against flattened backgrounds.

o   Titus Kaphar is an artist who explores identity and recontextualizes the art historical canon through the lens of racism.  The Cost of Removal(2017) is a portrait Andrew Jackson, a US president known for the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forcibly removed Native Americans from their land. In Kaphar’s version, he depicts Jackson on a white horse, while covering his figure with a shredded depiction of the Act, with actual nails embedded into the canvas. There is a physical violence to the painting. 

o   Zhang Xiaogang is a Chinese artist whose paintings are inspired by family photos from the Cultural Revolution period. Largely in greyscale, depicted against cloudlike backgrounds, his figures are nameless and timeless, with highly similar facial features. Xiaogang conveys individual identity in hairstyle, clothing and different paint colors, contrasting Western individualism with the Chinese culture of collectivism. 

o   Dana Schutz’s controversy at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, centered around her painting of Emmett Till and the subsequent protests of its inclusion, presents a challenge to this theme of identity. How is identity defined, and which artists have the authority have to talk about or depict which subjects? 

2.    Figuration & Representations of the Human Body

o   Dana Shutz’s painting Sneeze (2003) is representative of her work dealing with the figure and the body. She often depicts fictional subjects of births, deaths and strange creatures, in a strange and unappealing color palette.

o   Marlene Dumas is a South African artist who explores the image as a burden. She does not depict specific people she knows or people from photographs but rather universal emotional states. Dumas prioritizes the process of painting rather than the final image.

o   Elizabeth Peyton is known for her portraits of famous people, such as the actress Chloe Sevigny. Her small watercolor portraits of celebrities and friends are based on photographs and interactions in life.

o  Henry Taylor is a California painter known for his portraits of family, friends, fellow artists, strangers, historical figures and celebrities—there is an emphasis on everyday Black American life.  

o   Cecily Brown feminizes the energy and aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism, although she does reference real life and bodies in her work within swaths of gestural brushstrokes, infusing abstraction with content. Night Passage (1999) is demonstrative of her work, abstractly depicting tangled bodies and sex. Her paintings explore power dynamics betweeån genders, while formally emphasizing the animated, luscious paint handling.

o   Jenny Saville is known for her monumentally scaled paintings of fleshy women, often pregnant or obese. There is a tactile, physical quality to the paint as well as the subject matter. The size of the canvas is overwhelming, and her work cannot be viewed on an intimate scale.

o   Peter Doig gives equal attention to both landscape and figure in his mysterious scenes. Photography, record albums, art history and news clippings are used as visual inspiration. While his work is based on photos, his scenes are not photorealistic—he references but does not reproduce. He also incorporates autobiographical elements in his paintings. He also pours, dabs and moves paint with a palette knife, utilizing different kinds of brushwork on a single canvas to produce a heavily textured, even juicy surface.

o   John Currin’s paintings focus on kitschy, distorted and exaggerated forms that often unsettle—while alluring—the viewer. In Maenads (2015), he depicts mythological creatures who devour men, half-dress and eerily proportioned.

 o   Figuration does not only necessarily refer to human figures. Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara are two artists who depict non-human forms. Murakami is known for his bright Anime-like figures, often smiling flowers and animals, portraying cartoons as if they were portraits. Nara is inspired by his latchkey kid past (a child who is given their own key to the home to let themselves in after school, because their parents work until late at night), as he was left to entertain himself by drawing. His drawings of children are creepy and even sinister, yet cute.

3.    Memory: Links to History Painting, Photography and Landscape

o   Gabriel Orozco’s Stream in the Grid (2011), a pigment ink and acrylic on canvas work, depicts the suspended moment in time just before the second tower fell on 9/11. This is a contemporary revival history painting – a big theme in contemporary painting, relying on memory of recent events and creating a historical narrative. Stream in the Grid is painted in a way that looks pixelated, referencing the way that we experience news on television and screens.

o   Vija Celmins’s photorealistic paintings and graphite drawings must be viewed both up close and from afar, straddling multiple modes of looking — microcosm and macrocosm. Her scenes depict vast expanses of distance on small scale, becoming abstracted without any horizon line to reference. While her scenes of water and constellations are recognizable, they are also from an unfamiliar vantage point. For example, the viewer recognizes the waves of the ocean based on memory, but in Celmins’s works they experience it in a new way.

o   Lucas Arruda is a Brazilian artist whose intimately scaled paintings are created fully from memory, depicting landscapes but abstracted—a composite of reality and memory. Up close, it becomes clear that Arruda has actually scratched individual lines into the surface of the canvas.

o   Matthew Wong, a Chinese painter who lived in Canada, was known for his lonely, empty and beautiful landscapes. He did not work from preparatory drawings but painted only on instinct.

4.    Abstraction: Mining Modernism, Looking Back

o   Yayoi Kusama, while she can also be considered an earlier influence on this current trend, still produces work today—she is both a Modern and contemporary artist. Her Infinity Net series started in 1958 in New York and is ongoing to this today. Her work is purely abstract, with no relationship between figure and ground relationship.

o   Damien Hirst is another  example of an artist whose work spans multiple generations, like Kusama. His Dot paintings are part of the contemporary story while also an influence on this trend.

o   Julie Mehretu is an abstract painter who mixes acrylic and ink on canvas. She creates an architectural framework, layering her compositions from multiple viewpoints.

o   Mary Weatherford combines minimalism with the gestures of Abstract Expression, on a large scale.

o   Jennifer Guidi’s large textured paintings are made of pigmented sand, using an almond-shaped tool to carve indentations into the surface. She lays her works flat in her studio like Pollock, relating her body to its overall scale. Her work recalls the Minimalist tradition, particularly Agnes Martin.

o   Korean artist Kwang Young Chun creates ‘paintings’ that are individual aggregates of folded paper.  Some works are more sculptural in nature, others are hung on the wall.

o   Katherine Grosse approaches painting not just a canvas on the wall but as a total environment, as an installation.