America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Equal parts painting, collage, carving, and assemblage, Women and Dog was inspired by sources as diverse as its constituent materials. Marisol worked in New York during the emergence of Pop Art in the early 1960s and was one of few women associated with the movement. This sculpture reflects the fascination with everyday life that was fundamental to Pop, and yet its larger-than-life, totemic forms and the multi-faced profiles of the figures belie influences from Pre-Colombian and Native American folk art to analytic Cubism. The trio of females strolling with a child and a dog seem to suggest Marisol’s interest in social norms and conventions relating to women in society, but the composition is ambiguous. Elements of the women’s clothing are colorfully whimsical, yet they are literally “boxed in” by their garments, and their faces are marked by a deadpan impenetrability. The women, and perhaps the child too, are self-portraits—indeed, a photograph of the artist is applied directly onto the face of one of the figures—suggesting a fluid inhabitation of different female roles and identities.

Although Allan D’Arcangelo would become known primarily for his images of US highways, complete with road signs and billboards, he made a number of significant paintings of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, the latter pictured in Madonna and Child with her toddler daughter. D’Arcangelo worked from a contemporary portrait photograph of the First Lady and Caroline Kennedy to make this graphic take on an age-old religious art-historical subject. Mother and daughter are rendered in bold blocks of unmodulated color, their featureless faces ringed in bright yellow halos that elevate them to the status of contemporary icons and saviors of America.

D’Arcangelo highlights the Kennedys’ brand status in his use of the bold style and limited color palette of commercial design and advertising, epitomized in the subjects’ two-tone hair. The image trades on visual legibility: its sitters are recognizable merely by virtue of their signature hair and clothing, and Jackie’s string of pearls. With its graphic style and celebrity subjects, Madonna and Child relates to works by other Pop artists such as Andy Warhol. Like Warhol’s works, this painting points to the more sinister side of celebrity and consumer culture: despite their apparently heavenly status, Jackie and Caroline have been reduced to images to be consumed, devoid of depth, individuality, and voice. The tragic aura of the painting seems particularly poignant given the assassination of President Kennedy just a few months after D’Arcangelo completed this work.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 107. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

Ed Ruscha’s background in commercial illustration and advertising inspired paintings of vernacular subjects such as Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights of 1962. With its long horizontal format, the canvas evokes both movie screen and billboard. One of the Hollywood film industry’s best-known logos—Twentieth Century Fox—occupies the pictorial field like the opening credit of a movie, receding in sharp perspective and illuminated by yellow spotlights against the dark background of the night. The bold, three-dimensional letters and yellow klieg rays telegraph the dominance of the movie industry in Los Angeles while also gesturing to an increasing standardization of cultural icons (which have become, as Ruscha’s title suggests, simply “trademarks”). As in Andy Warhol’s work of this period, the pictorial strategies of graphic design and advertising have displaced the traditional compositional structures of painting.

In Andy Warhol’s Green Coca-Cola Bottles, the iconic form of a single bottle of Coca-Cola is duplicated in regular rows above the company’s logo. The repetitive imagery and gridded composition evoke the mass production of the emblematic Coca-Cola bottle as well as the mechanical printing processes used to advertise the brand. Warhol most likely made the 112 nearly identical bottles using a combination of hand painting and screenprinting. Since he used more or less paint and varying degrees of force for each impression, the work retains something of a handmade look. Later in the same year that he made this work, Warhol more fully developed his pioneering screenprinting technique, which led to a more mechanized process in his studio, which came to be referred to as The Factory.

Warhol saw Coca-Cola as a prime example of the democratic ideals at the heart of American consumer culture. “A Coke is a Coke,” he explained, “and no amount of money can get you a better Coke . . . . All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

Made a few short years after Yayoi Kusama moved from Japan to the United States, Air Mail Stickers is a collage of the titular stickers, which read “VIA AIR MAIL.” Pasted onto paper in overlapping rows that both allow for readability and suggest the result of a formal, ordering principle, the red, white, and blue stickers produce the effect of accumulation from close-range and total coverage from afar. In this, Air Mail Stickersrelates to the “allover” compositions of Kusama’s early abstract paintings, which were comprised of either dense polka-dot fields or infinitely expanding net forms.

Malcolm Bailey based this untitled painting on diagrams of a slave ship that had been published in 1780 by an English abolitionist group. The blue paint is reminiscent of blueprints, underscoring the careful engineering that was integral to the abduction and transportation of millions of Africans from their homelands. At the center of the image is a line drawing of a cotton plant, the basis of the economic system that fed on slave labor. For Bailey, this diagrammatic rendering makes its point more clearly than could simple naturalism. “An artist’s job,” he wrote, “should be more than one of just mirroring life; he must instead interpret life in a very subjective abstract way.”

For An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer, John Baldessari commissioned a commercial sign painter to hand-letter a hackneyed statement taken from an art textbook. Above it, he printed a photograph of an ordinary suburban parking lot. The uppercase, sans serif lettering style presents the clichéd message of the text with a deadpan sense of factuality. Likewise, the photograph presents the banal scene as if it were a piece of forensic evidence. Even the work’s odd dimensions reflect the circumstantial: 59” x 45” is the size of the door of the van used to transport the work.

The combination of text and image raises narrative and allusive possibilities even while cancelling them out. Are we to look at the image for evidence that the photographer has not “slavishly announced” facts, but has created a carefully considered composition? Or do the text and image simply represent a random, meaningless juxtaposition? Baldessari has distanced himself as much as possible from making artistic decisions that would elicit clearly defined meanings. As he has said, “Seeing selectively means you screen out a lot of interesting things.” His works are open, and encourage, in his own words, “conceptual leaps people can make from one bit of information to another.”

Robert Bechtle’s ’61 Pontiac depicts a familiar scene in postwar America: a family (the artist’s own, in this case) in front of its car. Bechtle was consistently attracted to such ubiquitous, workaday subjects, often set in suburban locales. The “challenge,” he claimed, was “making art from such ordinary fare.” Bechtle’s style is intentionally evenhanded; he rendered the particular features of the car with the same hyperrealistic treatment that he applied to each family member’s facial features and clothing. Bechtle habitually used photographs as source material, and at nearly five feet tall, ’61 Pontiacmakes a monument out of an amateur snapshot. Yet where a photograph can be made, seen, and forgotten in an instant, the artist’s painstaking attention to detail in this painting allowed him—and, by extension, the viewer—to more thoroughly engage with a single moment.

Vija Celmins is known for her painstakingly rendered photorealist paintings and drawings, which examine such subjects as desert and ocean surfaces and nocturnal skies. The still lifes she made in the early 1960s, however, are among the artist’s most restrained and introspective works. In a series executed in 1964, while still a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Celmins painted domestic objects from her Venice, California, studio—a lamp, a hotplate, a fan, a knife resting on a saucer—as an exercise in close looking. Situating these everyday things that relate to the basic necessities of heat, food, and light within fields of gray or brown, she created muted grounds that spurned the slick finishes and bright Pop colors favored by other Southern California artists at that time.

In Heater, a characteristic work from this series, a small space heater emits a contained orange glow while its electrical cord trails out of the picture plane, suggesting a larger space beyond the otherwise flattened composition. A tension between the illusion of warmth that radiates from luminous coils of Heater and its physical absence from the canvas adds to the painting’s unnerving impact. While the subject of this work seems innocuous, its somber, shadowy rendering suggests something more ominous. Indeed, such darker subtexts appear in other, more pointedly political and austere works from this period. Celmins had begun looking to mass media—a Timemagazine cover depicting the 1965 Watts uprising in Los Angeles, and images of fighter planes on her television—for source material that reflected the turbulence of the 1960s.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 90. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

In 1954, Jasper Johns began painting what would become one of his signature emblems: the American flag. As an iconic image—comparable to the targets, maps, and letters that he also has depicted—Johns realized that the flag was “seen and not looked at, not examined.” The execution and composition of Three Flags elicit close inspection by the viewer. The painting draws attention to the process of its making through Johns’s use of encaustic, a mixture of pigment suspended in warm wax that congeals as each stroke is applied; the resulting accumulation of discrete marks creates a sensuous, almost sculptural surface. The work’s structural arrangement adds to its complexity. The trio of flags—each successively diminished in scale by about twenty-five percent—projects outward, contradicting classical perspective, in which objects appear to recede from the viewer’s vantage point. By shifting the visual emphasis from the flag’s emblematic meaning to the geometric patterns and variegated texture of the picture surface and the canvas structure, Johns explores the boundary between abstraction and representation. As he remarked, this painting allowed him to “go beyond the limits of the flag, and to have different canvas space.”

With its depiction of large, dripping brushstrokes, Roy Lichtenstein’s Little Big Painting offers a wry commentary on the Abstract Expressionist paintings that dominated the New York art world in the 1940s and 1950s. Lichtenstein parodied his predecessors’ signature bold brushstrokes, rendering them flat and stylized, even mimicking the drips of paint that would have resulted from the artists’ sweeping, spontaneous gestures. While the Abstract Expressionists largely understood their work as standing in opposition to popular culture, Lichtenstein set his brushstrokes against a field of repeating Benday dots—a mechanical process for creating shades of color in commercial printing. Likewise, the thick black lines painted around bands of solid white, yellow, and red recall graphic devices used in comic strips. The result satirizes the supposedly improvisational and personal style of the previous generation’s “big paintings” and underscores the fact that they inevitably relied on mass media for their renown.