America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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By the mid-1950s, Abstract Expressionism, the dominant artistic movement in the United States, was seen by some to have developed into a mannered style of showy brushwork. The pressing question for a younger generation was how to escape the shadow of painters such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. “Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or Surrealism,” Frank Stella said in 1964, “there’s going to be someone who’s not painting complicated paintings, someone who’s trying to simplify.”

For the painters whose work is on view in this chapter, this simplification involved rejecting traditional modes of composition in which an artist balances various shapes, colors, or textures. “In the newer American painting we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical,” Stella went on to explain. “The balance factor isn’t important. We’re not trying to jockey everything around.” Their approach involved a heightened focus on the basic geometry and physical elements of a painting, starting with the canvas itself. Most of the works in this chapter are divided evenly down or across the middle, like Agnes Martin’s This Rain, or organized around a central point as in the case of Jasper Johns’s White Target, which is based on the transportation of a preexisting image rather than a subjective “jockeying” of parts. In Die Fahne Hoch!, Stella’s stripes are determined by the width of the stretcher, demonstrating the painting’s own material logic, while Ad Reinhardt’s black painting appears monochromatic at first glance but slowly reveals its structured grid of squares. In contrast with Abstract Expressionism’s layers and fervid splatters, the space and brushwork in these paintings is mostly flat, the emotional temperature stark and reserved. Yet in questioning an artist’s subjective powers of expression and invention, they suggested a path both bold and new.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

An artwork with straight white lines on a black background.

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America Is Hard to See

White Target

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Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection