America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

All

16 / 23

Previous Next

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.

Back

1 / 8

Previous Next

The simplicity of the elements of Jo Baer’s Untitled belies the complexity of the whole: subtle differences in the weight and shape of the lines draw in the eye, colors vibrate and merge in peripheral vision, and the white edge that extends beyond the black border seems to bleed into space. Untitledbelongs to a series from 1962–63, later titled the “Korean” paintings, in which Baer repeated this format, varying only the geometry along the upper edge within an otherwise strict template.

This series was Baer’s first important statement as a painter and marked her entrance into the emerging discourse of Minimalism. Like other New York artists in the 1960s, Baer made abstract works that engaged the viewer’s perceptual experience, often through seriality and geometric form. Yet, while most of her contemporaries began to work with industrial materials, regarding painting as burdened by illusionism, Baer pursued painting’s potential as a radical, nonobjective medium. Her application of paint emphasizes the flatness of the canvas, producing “paintings that picture their own shapes.” Baer’s commitment to Minimalist painting was informed by gestalt and other theories of perception, which she had studied in the 1950s. The color and shape of Untitled produce such optical phenomena as Mach bands (where contrast between a light and dark field heightens the luminosity of both) and retinal glare (in which a white area appears to expand). Baer described her works as “painted light,” asserting that they “do not represent light, they are light.”

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 52. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 648 works

America Is Hard to See

White Target

16

JO BAER (B. 1929), UNTITLED, 1962

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

White Target

16

JO BAER (B. 1929), UNTITLED, 1962

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection