Teaching Packet

Art since 1950

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This teaching packet discusses artistic movements of the late 20th century, including abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, process art, neo-expressionism, and postmodernism, with attention to their critical reception and theoretical bases. The packet considers works by 27 painters and sculptors including Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Martin Puryear, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Rothenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein (see full list below).

Artists included: Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Sam Gilliam, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Kiefer, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Long, Elizabeth Murray, Barnett Newman, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Jackson Pollock, Martin Puryear, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Susan Rothenberg, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Tony Smith, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol.

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Art since 1950
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We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”

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