seurat?

art is storytelling

Why should anyone want to buy a Cezanne for $800,000? What's a little Cezanne house in the middle of a landscape? Why should it have value? Because it's a myth. We make myths about politics, we make myths about everything. I have to deal with myths from 10 AM to 6 PM every day. And it becomes harder and harder. We live in an age of such rapid obsolescence.... My responsibility is the myth-making of myth material—which handled properly and imaginatively, is the job of a dealer—and I have to go at it completely. One just can't prudently build up a myth.

- Leo Casteli

change to pop art

Arriving in the art world at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the dominant paradigm, Johns and Rauschenberg reacted against what they considered the exaggerated emotional and philosophical claims of the older painters for their art. Rauschenberg later recalled that "The kind of talk you heard then in the art world was so hard to take. It was all about suffering and self-expression and the State of Things. I just wasn't interested in that, and I certainly didn't have any interest in trying to improve the world through painting." Similarly, Johns explained that "I'm neither a teacher nor an author of manifestos. I don't think along the same lines as the Abstract Expressionists, who took those sorts of things all too seriously." Instead of self-expression, the two young artists wanted to find new ways to use art to reflect everyday life. Rauschenberg famously declared that "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)" Johns echoed the same idea: "I'm interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality. I'm interested in things which suggest things which are, rather than in judgments."

The brash and iconoclastic Rauschenberg made a number of symbolic attacks on Abstract Expressionism. In 1953, he literally erased an Abstract Expressionist work. After obtaining a drawing from Willem de Kooning for the purpose, Rauschenberg carefully rubbed out the image, then framed the smudged sheet and hand-lettered a label, "Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg. "In 1957, Rauschenberg mocked the supposed spontaneity and uniqueness of the Abstract Expressionists' work by making two collage paintings, Factum I and Factum II, that appeared identical, even to the drips and splashes around several large brush strokes. Most damaging, however, was Rauschenberg's innovation of a new form of art. In 1954 he began to attach real things to his canvases, in order to make his paintings independent objects rather than illusionistic representations of them: "I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is. And I think a picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world." Rauschenberg named these three-dimensional works "combines," and they became so influential for successive generations of younger artists, many of whom were eager to break away from the traditional two-dimensional picture and the sanctity of traditional art materials.

- David Galenson

Robert Rauschenberg - Factum 1 and Factum 11 (1957)

Single Most Important Work by Each Artist

Experimental (age):

Brancusi 52, Bird in Space

Kandinsky 46, Der Blaue Reiter

De Kooning 46, Excavation

Mondrian 71, Broadway Boogie-Woogie

Pollock 38, Autumn Rhythm

Rothko 54, Red, White and Brown

Conceptual (age):

Braque 26, Houses at L’ Estaque

Braque 29, The Portuguese

Duchamp 30, Fountain

Johns 28, Three Flags

Malevich 40, Suprematist Composition: White on White

Matisse 37, Joy of Life

Oldenburg 32, The Store

Picasso 26, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Rauschenberg 34, Monogram

Warhol 34, Marilyn Monroe Diptych

most important works of 20th century

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International (1919)

Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937)

Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956)

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

best artists

Old Masters:

Experimental: Jan van Eyck, Masaccio, Giorgione, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Vermeer.

Conceptual: Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Titian, Hals, Velazquez, Rembrandt.

19th Century:

Experimental: Degas, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir.

Conceptual: Courbet, Manet, Gauguin, Van Gogh.

Modern:

Experimental: Pollack, De Kooning, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Rothko, Mondrian

Conceptual: Johns, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Matisse, Malevich

Post 1975:

Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Ansejm Kiefer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Richard Serra, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Wall.

experimental vs conceptual

Robert Frost was an experimental artist who believed in following the traditional rules of his art strictly. He famously denounced a deviation from those rules that was becoming increasingly popular among modern poets by declaring, "I had as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down." When another poet objected that you could play a better game with the net down, Frost replied that that might be so, "but it ain't tennis." For Frost, the essence of poetry lay in the craftsmanship that allowed the poet to express himself within the constraints created by traditional meters, and he worked within their discipline throughout his life; as Robert Lowell observed, "He became the best strictly metered poet in our history.

Ezra Pound was Frost's antithesis, a conceptual artist who had no qualms about breaking traditional rules. In a characteristically brash and definite early statement of his credo, Pound declared, "I believe . . . in the trampling down of every convention that impedes or obscures ... the precise rendering of the impulse. One such convention was traditional meter. Many years later he looked back with satisfaction on the revolution he had promoted in modern poetry in his youth, and marked, "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave." Pound understood the problem of communication that existed when the brilliant young conceptual artist faced the older and wiser experimentalist: "A very young man can be quite 'right' without carrying conviction to an older man who is wrong and who may quite well be wrong and still know a good deal that the younger man doesn't know.

Frost and Pound highlight the contrasting attitudes of the experimental and conceptual artist. To the experimentalist, a conceptual innovation may simply be perceived as cheating; so for Frost free verse was illegitimate, and could have no possible justification. In contrast, to the conceptual innovator, breaking the rules of an art may have a positive value if it achieves a desired end; so for Pound discarding the convention of traditional meter was to be looked on with approval, as the creation of a new and better form. A basic difference underlying this disagreement involves whether the artist believes in the existence of a definite goal that can actually be achieved. For a conceptual artist there is a specific goal that is within reach, and the end of achieving it can justify the means used to do o. In contrast, for the experimentalist the goal is imprecise and probably unachievable, and since the end cannot be reached there can be no justification for attempting to do so with illegitimate means.

- David Galenson