The Bridge into Pop Art

JASPER JOHNS

“I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.”

–  Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns began his love of art and drawing at a very young age with a vague desire to become an artist. However, he only received an official artistic education in college. Urged by his tutor at the University of South Carolina, Johns moved to New York to study at the Parsons School of Design in 1948. However, Johns didn’t feel that the school was right for him and so left in 1951. This also made Johns eligible to be drafted into the army and served in the Korean war for 2 years.

After being honourably discharged in 1953, he met Robert Rauschenberg, who introduced him to the thriving art scene of New York. The two young artists had an intense relationship – both artistic and romantic from 1954 to 1961 but they had begun to drift apart by 1959. Johns once said that he learnt what it was to be an artist by observing Rauschenberg. Their studio spaces neighboured each other and were each other’s main artistic audience. This close relationship meant that they often influenced the other’s work and they often exchanged udeas and techniques. Together they broke from Abstract Expressionism into what is now know as Pop Art. These two are often credited with being the bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

Map

Untitled #6

In the middle of the night in 1955, Johns dreamt of painting a large American flag which was his inspiration for the piece ‘Flag’. He began working on this the following day and the idea led to several pieces based on the American flag.

Three Fags

 

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made.”

– Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg began his higher education career by listening to what his parents wanted of him – to study pharmacology at the University of Texas in Austin. Unfortunately (for his parents), he was expelled in the first year as he refused to dissect a frog. Being drafted into the army isn’t usually seen as a good thing, but the draft letter that arrived in 1943 meant that he didn’t have to break the news to his parents. Rauschenberg refused to kill anyone on the battlefield and so was assigned to the Navy Hospital Corps as a medical technician and was stationed in San Diego treating survivors.

While on leave, Rauschenberg enjoyed going to see the oil paintings at the Huntington Art Gallery in California which may have inspired his actions after the war – he used the G. I. Bill to pay for art classes at the Kansas State University in 1947.

Robert Rausechenberg then travelled to Paris to study at the Academie Julian. Here he saved enough money to travel back to America and attend the prestigious Black Mountain College in North Carolina after admiring its famous director, Josef Albers. Ironically, Albers didn’t much care for Rauschenberg’s work.

Following a trip to Italy, Rauschenberg’s work began to change and incorporated various objects he found and newsprint into the work. He continued to develop this idea and used many different objects in his pieces – from parasols to parts of a man’s under-shirt. Rauschenberg called these pieces ‘combines’ as they combined both paint and found objects on the canvas.

Estate

Retroactive

Untitled #3

Rauschenberg met Jasper Johns at a party in late 1953 and after many months of a mutual friendship, their relationship grew into a romantic one. In 1955, Robert Rauschenberg moved into the same building as Jasper Johns and the two would exchange ideas and encourage each other on a daily basis.

Dorothea Lange and Helen Frankenthaler

DOROTHEA LANGE

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

– Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange showed little interest in academia and took to the arts much more readily. After high school she told her family that she intended to pursue a career in photography and so set about looking for work in the field. She eventually found employment as a receptionist for Arnold Genthe, a successful portrait photographer. Whilst working as a receptionist, Lange also learned the vital skills needed to succeed as a photographer including how to make proofs, retouch photographs and mount images. Another key part of her education was the course she took under the photographer Clarence White.

White encouraged his students to bring in their personality and individuality to the photos which helped them develop a unique point of view. Many of his tasks and assignments revolved around photographing everyday people and objects but to portray them in a different light – as if we were truly seeing them for the first time. This same technique is used by Lange later in her career when she is commissioned to photograph the effects of the Great Depression. Here she would reveal the extraordinary within the average American.

Due to connections with rich business owners and gallery patrons, Lange moved to San Francisco in 1918 to open her own portrait studio. Lange always considered what she did a trade rather than a form of art. The Great Depression saw Lange become unsatisfied with her normal portrait work and she took to the streets of San Francisco to capture the everyday American and experiment with new techniques. This led to, in 1935, Lange being recruited by Paul Taylor and the Farm Security Administration (FSA), to photograph American farm workers including tenant farmers and black migrant workers. During this period, Lange recorded the working conditions and home life of these poverty-stricken workers from the West coast, the South and the Midwest. These photos have become an iconic part of American History.

Large 9

Large 2

Large 51

Large 81

Large 161

Large 171

Lange was also the first female photographer to recieve a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1940.

 

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

“What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it’s pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is – did I make a beautiful picture?”

– Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler’s parents encouraged her artistic talent from a young age and sent her to a progressive school to help develop this. The family also took many trips during the summer which was when she developed her love for landscapes, the sea and the sky. At 15, Frankenthaler was sent to the Dalton School in order to study art under the artist Rufino Tamavo. By the following year, she had enrolled in the Bennington College in Vermont and was determined to become an artist herself. Here she studied under Paul Feeley who organised exhibitions of abstract expressionists and may have influenced her abstract expressionist style later in life.

A Greet Thought in a Green Shade

In 1952, Frankenthaler created a very important piece – Mountain and Sea. This canvas utilised a new technique which she pioneered called ‘soak staining’. This involved working on a large canvas which was placed on the floor. Turpentine thinned oil paints are used with window wipers and sponges to manipulate the pools of pigments. She also used charcoal outlines as a part of this technique.

Mountain and Sea

As well as painting and printmaking, Helen Frankenthaler has also dabbled in a variety of other media including clay and steel sculpture, set design and costume design for England’s Royal Ballet.

Helen Frankenthaler with one of her paintings

Marc Rothko

“If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom.”

– Marc Rothko

Marc Rothko

Rothko and his family immigrated to Portland, Oregon in the US in 1910. He then went on to graduate early from Lincoln High School before being awarded a scholarship to Yale University. He found Yale to be a very conservative and segregated environment and so promptly left in 1923 without graduating.

In his earlier years, Rothko seemed to show more interest in music than the visual arts. It is therefore quite strange that he would then make the leap from Portland to New York City in search of an artistic education. Rothko once said that he had made the move, “… to bum about and starve a bit.” However, he enrolled in Max Weber’s still life and figure drawing classes at the Art Students League which turned out to be a vital part of his artistic training. Rothko’s early pieces of art were very traditional and consisted mainly of portraits, figurative work, nudes and urban landscapes. Similar to Pollock, Rothko was also employed by the Federal Arts Project’s Easel Division where he met many new artists and embraced this new community.

Marc Rothko’s style of painting changed dramatically over the next decade; moving from Expressionist inspired urban scenes in the 1930s to the more Surrealist inspired abstract images created in the 1940s.

Entrance to Subway – One of his urban scenes from 1938

3 People – From Rothko’s more Surrealist period

Whilst we now tend to think of Rothko as a chief of the colour field painting technique, his work took many stylistic shifts during his life. The most prominent shift came in the late 1940s when Rothko began experimenting with what he called ‘multi-forms’. His work no longer contains figures and the canvases are dominated by large blocks of colour which seem to float in space.

Red Black White on Yellow

Severe depression was a major personal problem the Rothko had to deal with throughout his life. Many people now believe Rothko to have had an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. It is, therefore, no surprise that, at 66, Rothko committed suicide by overdosing on anti-depressants and slitting his wrists with a razor blade. His assistant Oliver Steindecker found him on the floor of the bathroom, covered in blood. In interviews since Rothko’s death, Steindecker, as well as other friends of Rothko’s, have said that they were not entirely shocked or particularly surprised that he had ended his life. They said that he had lost his passion for art and was no longer inspired by anything.

Boom, boom, boom, boom. . .

Yes that is from Blackadder. Isn’t Baldrick a wonderful poet.

Anyway, tonight was Bonfire Night and I have a special fondness for fireworks so I always enjoy this time of year. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that my birthday’s tomorrow. . . Ok, maybe just a bit. . .
Since I love Bonfire Night I thought I’d create a post with some of the photos I took tonight so here you go:

Look at the pretty fireworks

Bonfire

Mari is seriously annoying!

Ooh, sparkly

Out of focus and artistic

According to Luke these are the cauliflower fireworks

Just getting started

Big boom!

So artistic

Bigger boom!

So beautiful

Biggest boom!

Look at me, I’m a FAIRY!

I love fireworks!

They’re so bright and loud! And glittery. Don’t forget glittery.

They’re so pretty!

Feeling like a fairy

Never too old for sparklers

Sparkle!

You’re never too old for sparklers!

Day 23: Morecambe and Wise

Today I wanted to finish my large, bold piece from Monday. This included bringing the whole piece together by adding another Little Miss into the piece and adding quotes from Morecambe and Wise sketches onto the final image. I had used a Little Miss Sunshine as my soft toy for the brief which made me think of the song Bring Me Sunshine – the Morecambe and Wise theme song. This made me think of their other sketches and the possibility of adding more quotes to the piece. Whilst I was thinking of this I also began to think about adding another Little Miss character to balance the piece.

I settled on adding Little Miss Fun to the image as it’s a brightly coloured character. By then I had also settled on another quote from Morecambe and Wise.

“What do you think of it so far?” (said by Eric, who would use a prop – such as a statue or a stuffed toy)

(To which he would answer-) “Rubbish!”

I felt that this was quite an apt quote as I was using stuffed toys in my piece.

J2O and Little Miss

I quite like the end result and particularly enjoyed splashing the paint and ink over the piece.