Photo By Gail
In 1961, artist George Siegel began using a recently released Johnson & Johnson product – gauze bandages, pre-treated with dry plaster – to make full-body plaster casts of family and friends. He combined these unpainted, lifelike figures with found object from every day life. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: George Segal Portrait of Sidney Janis With Mondrian Painting
Photo By Gail
Speaking about Evolution (1911), Piet Mondrian wrote, “it’s not so bad, but I’m not there yet.” The three figures here represent the stages of evolution from the physical to the spiritual realm, as promoted in Theosophy. The triangular-shaped nipples and navels of the women, which point upwards and downwards, symbolize their spiritual and earthly orientation. The central figure embodies the fulfillment of the evolutionary process, to the spiritual realm. The flowers on the left panel are symbols of purity, while those on the right symbolize tragic suffering.
Photographed in the Tate Modern Museum in London.
Photo By Gail
In the early 1980s, Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) began making copies of artworks by famous men and presenting them as her own. Exhibiting in downtown commercial galleries, Levine shocked audiences with her ‘theft.’ She questioned the authenticity, originality and value of the artworks and, like her peers Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, confronted the myth of the heroic male artist. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Sherrie Levine, Large Check: 1 – 12
Photo By Gail
This painting, Expansion in Four Directions (1961 – 62), shares its lozenge shape and geometric divisions of color with many paintings by Piet Mondrian, whose work Max Bill (1908 – 1994) collected and in whom he was greatly interested. Bill trained at the Bauhaus in the 1920s under Josef Albers and was an architect and graphic designer as well as an artist. In his work, he aimed to transcend personal artistic expression to achieve universal communication, and to this end he used mathematics as a neutralizing compositional device.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Expansion in Four Directions By Max Bill
Photos By Gail
Ad Reinhardt (1913 – 1967) studied both Eastern and Western art history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He deepened his understanding of Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies by attending the lectures of Zen teacher Daisetz Suzuki at Columbia University. Number 22 (1949) shows Reinhardt fusing Eastern and Western traditions by using calligraphic brushwork inspired by Chinese and Japanese calligraphy in a gridded composition influenced by those of de Stijl cofounder Piet Mondrian.
Number 22, Detail
In classical East Asian painting, the fragility of paper wet with ink limits the artist’s ability to rework the composition. The sturdier canvas support and slower-drying oil paints used throughout much of the history of Western painting allows artists to highlight various revision and layering techniques. Although he worked in oil on canvas, Reinhardt chose to restrain himself and not rework his painting’s surface, in keeping with Asian calligraphic traditions. The result is a far more controlled manner of gestural painting than those of the Abstract Expressionists.
Photographed in the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.