America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

White Target

White Target

Floor 6

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.

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.

Carmen Herrera’s Blanco y Verde is part of a long-running series of white and green paintings. In this diptych an oblique green triangle appears to punctuate an expanse of white while a thin seam between the canvases divides the arrangement into two unequal parts. The resulting composition investigates central and ongoing concerns for the artist: line, color, and the tension between the flat surface and the illusion of three-dimensional space. Herrera studied architecture in her native Havana, Cuba, but has been painting since the 1930s, although she only began to exhibit regularly in the past decade. When she completed Blanco y Verde, she was living in New York, where her austere compositions were seen as out of step with then-dominant Abstract Expressionism’s loose, gestural style. “Most people found it too little,” she has explained, “but for me it was enough.” Undeterred, she continued working in her signature style: combining simple, hard-edge forms with two or three colors.

Using a pared-down vocabulary and a deeply honed instinct for perceptual nuance, Ellsworth Kelly has continuously explored the tensions and balances he can cull from edge, shape, line, and color. He studied at the Pratt Institute in New York and, after a stint in the Army, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Kelly developed his approach to abstraction while living in Paris from 1948 to 1954. His large-scale paintings and sculptures question the boundaries between the two categories. Using flat, unmodulated expanses of solid color, black, or white, Kelly explores the taut relationships that arise among space, architecture, and form within his distilled play of edges.

Kelly’s art is almost always a retranslation of what he has found by looking carefully at the world. “All my work comes from perceiving,” he has said. He painted the monumentally scaled Atlantic in New York and derived its curving, wavelike rhythm from a sketchbook in which he traced and filled in the shadows that moved across its pages while he was seated on a bus. The facing pages of the book and its central fold are mirrored in the painting’s diptych structure, although Kelly has rendered the shadows as white forms against a black ground. Perhaps the artist’s greatest mastery lies in his ability to recognize in the seemingly slight events the world presents him a potential for shifting and refining qualities of formal weights and balances into striking and powerful abstractions.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 204. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

In her works of the late 1950s, Agnes Martin restricted her geometric vocabulary and painted with diluted, subtly variegated hues. For This Rain, Martin floated two rectangles within an off-white background and built up layers of muted color with barely visible brushstrokes. Although the title of this painting suggests a reference to the weather, Martin resisted drawing explicit connections between her abstract compositions and nature. She wanted instead to capture the immaterial in visual form. “Don’t look at the stars,” she wrote. “Look between the rain.”

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Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960–66

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Narrator: At first glance, this painting by Ad Reinhardt looks like a field of solid black. On closer inspection, you can see that there are subtle variations of tone. After 1953, Reinhardt made only black canvases. His simple, meditative works are the antithesis of the action paintings of the Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock.

Contemporary artist Byron Kim talks about Reinhardt’s work:

Byron Kim: Often I’m surprised and overwhelmed by how beautiful they are. . . And I love Reinhardt’s black paintings more probably than any other artwork that I’ve come across. I think he meant them to be contentless. So he really wanted them to be nothing. So what happens when, you know, nobody wants to accept that something is about nothing, or that art is only about art. So once you say that, then people inevitably start to relate these paintings to something, or try to make them metaphysical, try to relate them to something outside of the painting somehow. You don’t know what you’re looking at. And so they don’t look like anything.

The thing that makes Reinhardt interesting to me is that he was deadly serious and it was all a big joke at the same time. But you know, you don’t get the humor in the black paintings. But to me, they’re really funny because they’re exactly that kind of humor, that kind of deadpan humor, that’s not knee-slapping humor, but because it isn’t, it’s sort of more funny to me. I’m laughing inside my brain.

At first glance, Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting presents a matte black surface. On closer inspection, however, an underlying three-by-three grid structure and fluctuations in color value emerge from the nearly undifferentiated field. Reinhardt focused exclusively on black-square paintings like this one in the last ten years of his life, subtly varying the sheen and undertones of each blacksquare. In these works, including Abstract Painting, he aimed to achieve what he described as “a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art.”

An artwork with straight white lines on a black background.

Die Fahne hoch! belongs to a group of twenty-four black paintings that brought the young Frank Stella instant art world notoriety. What appear at first to be white lines are actually bare, narrow spaces of unprimed canvas between the standardized black bands that the artist applied with a housepainter’s brush. Spanning a deep stretcher, the painting seems to project off the wall, asserting its presence, or what Stella called its “objectness.” There was nothing to this work, the artist declared, beyond the observable—as he put it in a now-famous maxim, “what you see is what you see.” While Stella insisted on the non-referentiality of his paintings, the German title Die Fahne hoch!, which translates as “hoist the flag,” is taken from the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi Party’s marching anthem. Indeed the painting’s title, cruciform configuration, and flaglike proportions call to mind not only Nazi banners but the darkness and annihilation of the Holocaust. The phrase may also refer to raising the banner of a new aesthetic, one that marked a shift away from Abstract Expressionism and anticipated the geometry and rigor of Minimalism.

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America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

White Target

JO BAER (B. 1929), UNTITLED, 1962

CARMEN HERRERA (B. 1915), BLANCO Y VERDE, 1959

JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930), WHITE TARGET, 1957

ELLSWORTH KELLY (B. 1923), ATLANTIC, 1956

AGNES MARTIN (1912-2004), THIS RAIN, 1958

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN (1898-1976), #1, 1963, 1963

AD REINHARDT (1913-1967), ABSTRACT PAINTING, 1960-66

FRANK STELLA (B. 1936), DIE FAHNE HOCH!, 1959

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

White Target

JO BAER (B. 1929), UNTITLED, 1962

CARMEN HERRERA (B. 1915), BLANCO Y VERDE, 1959

JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930), WHITE TARGET, 1957

ELLSWORTH KELLY (B. 1923), ATLANTIC, 1956

AGNES MARTIN (1912-2004), THIS RAIN, 1958

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN (1898-1976), #1, 1963, 1963

AD REINHARDT (1913-1967), ABSTRACT PAINTING, 1960-66

FRANK STELLA (B. 1936), DIE FAHNE HOCH!, 1959

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection