The earth is the canvas; environmental scale

Just as time erodes civilizations and all things, the jetty will eventually disappear

Subject is entropy and change (salt encrusted, etc.)

Drama

Energy and movement

Dynamic balance (diagonals, curves, 

countercurves, etc.)

High contrast (dark & light, etc.)

Emotion

Element of time

Viewer involvement

Naturalism of the Renaissance

Linearity 

Tight brushwork 

Even lighting 

Sculptural forms 

Classical figures, dress, and themes

Serious, moralistic subjects

Austerity

The Enlightenment: Logic and Virtue

2 types of revolutions: 

Industrial Revolution (began in Britain c. 1760), 

Political revolutions (U.S. in 1776, France in 1789)

Time of transitions:

Rule by aristocracy to democracy

Agriculture to industry

Rural life to urban life
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Key Figures of the Enlightenment

•

John Locke: human rights; we are born good

•

Isaac Newton: modern science based on observation 

(empiricism)

•

Voltaire: Doctrine of Progress: progress (through science, 

knowledge) is good

•

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: return to nature and innocence

•

Diderot: world’s first encyclopedia (categorized 

knowledge)

Ukiyo-e (Japanese prints)

flat shapes 

sharp contours

compressed space 

cropping 

angles

asymmetry
--
Realism=Real Life

• French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire argued that the arts should reflect the here-and-now

• Emphasis on ordinary, everyday, modern experience; neither idealized nor dramatized

• Championed laborers and common people

• New tin tubes of oil paint

• Started having individual art exhibits 

(independent of art academies)

Is Realism more about style or about content?

“Show me an angel and I’ll paint one.” -Gustave Courbet

social and political “truth,” the Impressionists aimed to 

achieve optical reality, that is, a visual “truth”—what the eye 

actually sees.
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Interest in capturing:
Idealized beauty

everyday subjects

on-the-spot outdoor scenes

fleeting moments, impermanence

atmosphere, light, colored shadow

modern urban life, leisure activities

upper middle class/nouveau riche

times of day/year

look of ukiyo-e (Japanese prints)
---

“When you go out to paint, try to forget what  objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a  field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little  square of blue, here is an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you,  the exact color and shape, until it gives you your  own naïve impression of the scene before you.”

Logic and reason (Enlightenment) only leads to war

In common with Dada: element of chance, randomness (not politically charged); also nonsense

aristocratic tastes

conspicuous leisure

pastel colors

subjects of love, flirtation

fantasy

private, intimate scenes

lush landscapes

The work celebrates love, with many cupids flying around the couples and pushing them closer together, as well as the statue of Venus (the goddess of sexual love). There are three pairs of lovers in the foreground. While the couple on the right by the statue are still engaged in their passionate tryst, another couple rises to follow a third pair down the hill, although the woman of the third pair glances back fondly at the goddess’s sacred grove. At the foot of the hill, several more happy couples are preparing to board the golden boat at the left. With its light and wispy brushstrokes, the hazy landscape in the background does not give to any clues about the season, or whether it is dawn or dusk.

It has often been noted that, despite the title, the people on the island seem to be leaving rather than arriving, especially since they have already paired up. Many art historians have come up with a variety of interpretations of the allegory of the voyage to the island of love. Watteau himself purposely did not give an answer.

External video
Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera, 1717, Smarthistory

In the ancient world, Cythera, one of the Greek islands, was thought to be the birthplace of Venus, goddess of love. Thus, the island became sacred to the goddess and love. However, the subject of Cythera may have been inspired by certain 17th century operas or an illustration of a minor play. In Florent Carton Dancourt's Les Trois Cousines (The Three Cousins), a girl dressed as a pilgrim steps out from the chorus line and invites the audience to join her on a voyage to the island, where everyone will meet their ideal partner.

 Unlike these earlier depictions which sought to flatter their subjects, Goya's group portrait is unflinchingly realist, sometimes grotesquely so, both in detail and tone.
--

The painting, which drew both praise and fierce denunciations from critics and the public, is an enormous work, measuring 10 by 22 feet (3.1 by 6.6 meters). According to art historian Sarah Faunce, "In Paris the Burial was judged as a work that had thrust itself into the grand tradition of history painting, like an upstart in dirty boots crashing a genteel party, and in terms of that tradition it was of course found wanting."^[4] Then too, the painting lacks the sentimental rhetoric that was expected in a genre work: Courbet's mourners make no theatrical gestures of grief, and their faces seem more caricatured than ennobled. The critics accused Courbet of a deliberate pursuit of ugliness. Eventually, the public grew more interested in the new Realist approach, and the lavish, decadent fantasy of Romanticism lost popularity. The artist well understood the importance of this painting; Courbet said: "The Burial at Ornans was in reality the burial of Romanticism.

The painting was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1850. It was destroyed during World War II, along with 154 other pictures, when a transport vehicle moving the pictures to the castle of Königstein, near Dresden, was bombed by Allied forces in February 1945.
---

According to Albert Boime, the painting should be seen as a glorification of peasant life and its ancient traditions; he places it in the context of the revolutionary year 1848, when cities were the scene of chaos and strife.
--
Rosa Bonheur made the painting by commission of the French government^[3][7] for 3000 francs;^[8] it was shown in the Salon in 1849,^[9] where it won her a First Medal.^[10] N. D'Anvers repeats an apparently well-known story, that it was inspired by the opening scene of George Sand's novel La Mare au Diable (1846), which features oxen ploughing a landscape with the author's commentary, "a noble subject for a painter".^[1][11] The comparison with Sand is amplified in an article in the July 1899 edition of The Literary Digest, which referred to the painting as a "pictorial translation of the novel".^[12] Initially intended for the museum in Lyon, it was instead exhibited in the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris^[3] and was a featured exhibit at the 1889 World Fair.^[8] The painting was moved to the Louvre and afterward to the Musée d'Orsay.^[3] She made a number of copies, one of which is in the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.^[5]
--

Eakins, a keen oarsman himself who "was especially fascinated by rowing as a strenuous image expressive of physical as well as moral discipline"^[3], painted himself as the rower in the middle distance. He signed the painting – "Eakins, 1871" – on the stern of his scull.
-- 
created more than 30 artworks with rowing as a subject

Impression, Sunrise depicts the port of Le Havre, Monet's hometown.
--
"Monet may have seen this painting of a highly commercial site as an answer to the postwar calls for patriotic action and an art that could lead. For while it is a poem of light and atmosphere, the painting can also be seen as an ode to the power and beauty of a revitalized France."^[4]

The representation of Le Havre, hometown of Monet and a center of industry and commerce, celebrates the "renewed strength and beauty of the country... Monet’s ultimate utopian statement." Art demonstrating France’s revitalization, Monet’s depiction of Le Havre’s sunrise mirrors the renewal of France.^[4]

Monet found that the thing he had set out to paint—light—was an almost impossible thing to capture because of its ever-changing nature and its extreme subtlety. He was assisted, however, by his ability to capture the essence of a scene quickly, then finish it later using a sketch combined with his memory of the scene. For these paintings, he used thick layers of richly textured paint, expressive of the intricate nature of the subject.

Secret society started by 3 students at the London 

Royal Academy: William Holman Hunt, John Everett 

Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The Awakening Conscience is one of the few Pre-Raphaelite paintings to deal with a subject from contemporary life, but it still retains the truth to nature and attention to detail common to the style. The texture of the carpet, the reflection in the mirror behind the girl and the carvings of the furniture all speak to to Hunt’s unwavering belief that the artist should recreate the scene as closely as possible, and paint from direct observation.

Whereas the Impressionists painted with thick, short brushstrokes, shimmering colours and no outlines, Cézanne used blocks of strong colour, prominently outlining forms such as the tree trunk and the fields in dark blue.

His interest in form and line is emphasised in the shape of the branches and the way in which they perfectly echo the outline of the mountain behind.

Cézanne’s simplification of the landscape could be interpreted as a return to an era of balanced, harmonious form rather than complex ornamentation, as well as a leap towards Modernism: the structured parallel brushstrokes that fragment the surface of the composition, as well as the bold colours, appealed to younger artists and paved the way towards abstraction.

The next day (September 9), he wrote Theo: "In my picture of the Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur. And all with an appearance of Japanese gaiety, and the good nature of Tartarin."^[8]

He also wrote: "It is color not locally true from the point of view of the stereoscopic realist, but color to suggest the emotion of an ardent temperament."^[7]

The violent exaggeration of the colours and the thick texture of the paint made the picture "one of the ugliest pictures I have done", Van Gogh wrote at one point.^[3] He also called it "the equivalent, though different, of The Potato Eaters", which it resembles somewhat in its use of lamplight and concerns for the condition of people in need.^[6]

In fact, the fabric appears to almost fused to the ground—conveying the conflict between the men’s desire to live and the need to save their city. Rodin included raised portions of the floor under the men’s feet which would have, ultimately, made some of the men appear higher than others, yet they are all sculpted to be around the same height, that of an adult male. The burghers were not meant to be viewed in the form of a hierarchal pyramid with Eustache de Saint-Pierre at the top, which would have been typical in a multi-figure statue, but as a group equal in status. By bringing these men down to ‘street level,’ Rodin allowed the viewer to easily look up into the men’s faces mere inches from his/her own; enhancing the personal connection between the viewer and the six men.

Aesthetic Movement

Realism vs. Naturalism

Ukiyo-e

Optical Blending

Complementary Colors

Leisure Class

Art for Art’s Sake

Communist Manifesto

Also designed pedestal, height of display (low for newborn, high for bird in space)

We don’t see a bird; Spirit of flight

Forms unreadable

Perspective skewed

No shadow or doesn’t make sense

Color--not representative

Space—impossible to read

Notions of feminine beauty

Influences? 

Manet—women look straight at us, confront viewer

Cezanne-planes, different points of view

Matisse-color

African and Iberian masks

Opened up artistic freedom: line, plane, color, mass, void all freed from representational roles and can take on a life of their own

Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass, 1912.

complicates notion of real and illusion; paper/ wallpaper/ chair caning is real and an illusion (a picture)

Woodgrain was painted by Picasso and cut out

“Instead of a window, the picture surface became a tray on which art was served.” (art is on top of the canvas, not behind)

What has the most depth? She modeled glass, which is the only thing drawn?

Instead of breaking down images, now building up

Introduced a variety of textures and colors  (in analytic Cubism they used monochromatic colors)

Used musical themes because music is abstract, like their art; also notes are abstract symbols

Play with space: guitar soundhole should be negative space, but it is a solid circle of paper

Le Jou—again, pun about Le Journal, jouer (to play)

La Bataille s’est Engage (the battle is joined): First Balkan war in Europe; also battlefield between Picasso and Braque working on a new medium

Feelings of modern society in Germany: decadent, immoral, materialistic; monstrous women

Completely non-objective; wanted to express universal spiritual forces, abstract mystical powers; 

Simple, direct, spiritual

Grid of Cubism

Colors like Matisse, Kandinsky

Directness and naivete of children’s and folk art

Luminescent colors of stained glass windows

Sense of spirituality

Symbols: Jewish star of David, Islamic crescent moon, primitive hieroglyphic suns

Tree: life (same rays as suns: earth and sky connected)

Rectangular planes: trees, ,plants, fire, sky, earth?

Understated; strips everything inessential

More than one moment at a time; impermanence;  influence of Cubism, photography

Optimism of modernity: machines, motion, etc.

Influences: Russion icons (corner of room), folk art

Trying to portray feelings through a new language, new vocabulary

Influenced by Cubism, Futurism

Machinelike: idealizes progress, motion, modernity, science’s ability to improve the world

1913 Armory show: an art critic for the New York Times wrote that the work resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory," and cartoonists satirized the piece. It spawned dozens of parodies in the years that followed.

symbolism?: circles=cycles of life

Blooming bush=birth

Farmer with scythe=death

Tree of life

Having been in Paris for just one year, Chagall painted this work from memories of his native village outside Vitebsk, Belarus. The cow and the man stare directly into one another’s eyes, suggesting the mutual dependence of peasants and animals. For orthodox Jews, animals were humanity’s link to the universe; look closely and you’ll see the sun, the earth and the moon in orbit. In reference to his very personal response to Cubism, Chagall once said "Lines, angles, triangles, squares, carry me far away to enchanting horizons.”

Chagall saw Jesus on the Cross as a universally recognizable symbol of human suffering. Chagall hoped that Jews and non-Jews alike would be able to relate to this symbol. By making Jesus unmistakably Jewish, he was highlighting the fact that the Romans crucified Jesus as a Jew. In the midst of the Holocaust, Chagall wanted to make the universality of Jesus’ crucifixion specific again, he wanted the world to look at Jewish suffering.

Classical buildings, figurative=allegiance to classical past

Movement started in Zurich (center for war protests)

Made abstract collages by dropping pieces of torn rectangular paper on the floor; where they fell determined the composition (chance=nature, truth)

Sought to capture abstract universal forces (like Kandinsky)

“DADA” applied in retrospect; similar goals

“Readymade”; entered in 1917 independent art show

Rejected (although non-juried show); Duchamp knew committee would not consider it art

Issues: What is art? Does it have to be created? (He CHOSE it); art is about ideas

Defies conventional notions of beauty

HUMOR

Mindless, lifeless dummy; mechanical, robotic, no personal identity

“The typical German has no more capabilities than those which chance has glued onto the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty.”

Images of contemporary life made by photographers for popular press; camera is another machine associated with technological advances that led to war

Manipulated images by hand; cut with kitchen knife (no machinery); humanized the mechanical; antiwar

Antiwar Kathe Kollwitz at center, antidada at sides

Didn’t use collage to make something beautiful or refined; looked crude and anti-art; message of protest about modern society and regime of Weimar Republic 

Didn’t like elitist nature of art, academies (couldn’t get in because she was a woman)

Sympathized with working class and victims of war; husband was a doctor who treated the poor; became the subjects of her art

Reminds me of Liberty Leading the People (new cause)

Wiry line, childlike drawing of Paul Klee

Biomorphic forms float on top of minimal color field (behind drawings)—oil, but thin like washes

Suggest microscopic forms, spirits, prehistoric forms; mythic images, primal state

(how many ways can we not show depth?)

"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!"[2]

Time? Rational, measured

Death, deterioration

Everything is irrational—attack on the rational

Viewers’ own unconscious

Gift for composer Erik Satie

Tacks glued onto flat side of an iron

Suggests pain, violence, uselessness?

Juxtaposition two desirable things; becomes disturbing

WRITING TOPIC: The Surrealists felt that the unconscious mind had a primary role in art. Do you agree? What relationship do you think exists between the conscious and unconscious mind in the artistic process?

With Picasso and Dora Maar

Started making mobiles in the early 1930’s; painted sheet metal, balanced so that movement in air makes them glide and turn in space

Organic shapes like Miro and Arp; suggest natural forms

Sculpture? Flat; like drawing in air; but moves in space

Simple colors: primary, secondary, black and white

Childlike, joyous

Flat space and depth combined

Also non-western art, including Pre-Columbian art

Reminiscent of a Classical reclining river-goddess; but based more directly on Pre-Columbian figures.

Interested in portraying elemental and universal

We see woman but know it is also stone; millions of years old; one with the stone

Earth goddess or fertility figure; also a landscape; mother earth

Interplay between solid and void; suggests womb or tide pools

Many interpreters liken the undulating form of his reclining figures to the landscape and hills of his birthplace, Yorkshire. His ability in later life to fulfill large-scale commissions made him exceptionally wealthy. Yet he lived frugally and most of the money he earned went towards endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.[1]

Friend and philosopher Schoenmaekers wrote that there was an underlying mathematical structure to the universe that constituted true reality;

Mondrian based art on this theory; called it Neo Plasticism

Asymmetrical but harmonious; no foreground or background; all on same plane (asserts the presence of the picture plane—going back to Manet, Cezanne, etc.)

Tries to convey complexity and simplicity of universe; everything fits together

Mondrian felt that art can be a catalyst for change; new language (like Malevich) 

Cubist influence; also stained glass

Close-ups of flowers; image so magnified it becomes abstract (influenced by close-up photography of Paul Strand)

Critics felt it had sexual references

O’Keeffe denied that they were about sexuality;  “if you see other things in the flower, it is because of the universality present in nature”

Government building campain led to mural commissions; rise in muralists such as Diego Rivera, David Siquieros, and Jose Clemente Orozco

Socialists or Communists; proclaimed murals as the true art of the people


Frida=Smarthistory: Frida and Diego, 3:48

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939: began painting while recovering from a bus accident at age 18; interested in native folk art and dress; introspective and about emotional and physical pain

Left: European Frida; pale, Victorian dress (father was Hungarian Jew); right is Mexican Frida, darker and in peasant costume (mother Indian and Creole)

European Frida cuts the blood connection to the indigenous self 

Window into Midwest world where Wood grew up and lived

Fictitious father and spinster daughter, God-fearing descendants of settlers

Religious: numerous crosses: windows, porch, overalls (repeats pitchfork pattern), church steeple, Gothic window

Neat and clean: crisp drawing, verticals and horizontals

Industrious: pitchfork, plants on porch

Frugal: old-fashioned clothes, nothing modern (time of Depression)

Wanted to tell their story and experience from their own point of view

Hard-edged, geometric, Cubist; Precisionism (not only because of precise line, but also because of precision of machines and industry; unlike Cubism, not distorted

Title: Americas pyramids; mighty

Spanish Civil War: Hitler provided military support for the Nationalists under leadership of fascist dictator Franco; Nazi pilots used saturation bombing to attack the undefended Basque town of Guernica, killing thousands of civilians.

Painted as a protest;  This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war (compare to Goya 3rd of May); crucifixion pose

Why black and white? Thought color would distract

Why lines of hatching? Newspaper look; immediacy of journalism; contemporary event

Bull=forces of brutality and darkness; horse=the people

Bird=dove of peace (annihilated)

Picasso refused to let Gernica be displayed in Spain while Franco was still alive

Last major history painting; end of belief that a painting can be a catalyst for change (we are too bombarded by images daily)

As the term suggests, their work was characterized by non-objective imagery that appeared emotionally charged with personal meaning.  The artists, however, rejected these implications of the name. 

They insisted their subjects were not “abstract,” but rather primal images, deeply rooted in society’s collective unconscious.  Their paintings did not express mere emotion.  They communicated universal truths about the human condition. 

Mystical quality: Large meditative planes of color to express universal forces; sublime (vast, large canvases)

Main color-field painters: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clifford Still; all started out by making Surrealist paintings based on mythical themes

Rothko: flat planes of color; no storytelling, no symbols; mystical, oneness with cosmic forces

Thin layers of paint; glowing,  “spiritual light”; ragged edges, cloudlike, organic; suggest infinity, spiritual aura

Said he had religious experiences while painting:

“I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else . . . I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.  And if you . . . Are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”

Paint bled into unprimed canvas; translucent like watercolor; not tactile like impasto; couldn’t see artist’s hand: post-painterly abstraction (evolved from abstract expressionism)

Fragments of civilization, of one’s life, of the cosmos

Nevelson wanted her black works to be illuminated by a blue light, suggesting twilight, when things begin to look different and to change into something else—moment of transformation

Combines: works that combined painting, sculpture, collage, found objects

Odalisk: lamp (electric light inside); magazines, newspapers, thrift shops, garbage—mass production, throwaway

Title: pun on odalisque and obelisk; sexual allusions but no explanation; this is life

Chose everyday, familiar forms

Takes readymades and paints over them

Paintings about painting: non-illusionistic, no specific meaning or emotion (can you remove emotion from flag?)

Wax-based encaustic; painterly

3 canvases stacked: 3-D from canvases, not from illusionistic painting; an image is a sign or symbol of something else, not the thing itself (this is a painting of a flag, not a flag—Magritte: This is not a Pipe)

Predecessor to Pop Art

Interested in Rauschenberg, Nevelson using objects from everyday life

Allover look of Jackson Pollock (wrote that the next step after Pollock was to make environmental art)

Not permanent

Walk through it, experience

No meaning attached; left to viewer

Performance Art, Happenings

Simultaneous actions: painting, juicing oranges, speaking fragments of sentences: human participation, element of change

Like a combine in time and space

Reminds me of switching channels on tv or radio

Lots of performance art followed

George Brecht: Motor Vehicle Sunset Event: people drew cards with instructions: at a parking lot revved engines, honked horns, rolled down windows, slammed doors shut, opened and closed hoods and trunks

Finding beauty in everyday ordinariness?

How different from theater? Takes place in an art context

All 32 types of Campbell’s soups at the time; monotonous, repetitive (indifferent vs. emotionalism of abstract expressionism)

Called studio the Factory; used silkscreen process; removes artists’ hand, individualism

Workaholic, highly involved in process; but gave illusion of barely touching work

Art is a commodity; name brand product, not necessarily about technique or craftsmanship (you want to buy a Warhol)

Pervasiveness of advertising, mass production, uniformity, consumerism: a portrait of America

Reduced painting to a barebones simplicity: Hard-Edge Abstraction; machine precision

Geometric shapes in solid primary and secondary colors; no figure and ground; all on same plane

Only about color and movement; no reference to artist; no reference to  subject or meaning; strips everything else away

Left side fixed, right side has movement?

Figure/ground relationships change?

Canvas now has a life of its own—not rectangular; sculptural (blurs distiction between painting and sculptures)

No push-pull of space

“What you see is what you see.” No hidden meanings, symbols, references: stripped down vocabulary=Minimal Art

(so why title? - strange title)

Geometrical precision

Lacks artists’ hand; not personal; no sign of artist except in concept

Non-art materials: plexiglass, fluorescent tubes, galvanized steel

Wanted to make art that did not look like art—nothing but what you see; no references

Not lasting museum pieces: felt that the creative process was more important than the finished work:

  the recording of the work by the media (let the media work for you—like Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol)

  working with farmers to get their permission to use their land

  getting local people to help with the construction

  beauty of finished project: Jars us into seeing the environment in a new way; natural element of wind

Local people skeptical at first, but many were proud of it at the end; hard-hat workers moved by the experience; also by his total belief in what he was doing; charismatic, converted people to his art (story about one rancher who had fought it slept next the the fence one night with his son and had a transformative experience

Not elitist—brought art experience to normal people; link between fine art and real world

Cost 3 million dollars; Christo funded himself through drawings, but hundreds of thousands saw it vs. painting sold to private collector and never seen

Background as a minimalist (one of the boys); not included in reviews of shows

Cutting edge group of artists still very traditional in one way: domination by males

Decided to pay homage to important women throughout history, many ignored in history books

Extensive research

39 place settings, 13 at each side (symbolism?)

919 other women’s names inscribed in tiles

Hand-painted ceramic plates in period style, embroidered runner also in period style: mediums associated with women: needlework, painted china, ceramics

Sense of community and ritual (Last Supper now spiritual communion of women)

Monitors behind each state with different imagery

Prevalence of tv in America, rapidly changing

Most Americans experience the world through tv screens; tv=real life

America’s first major art movement, Abstract Expressionism; evolved from Surrealism; influence of many European artists in NY during wars

Like Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky—breaking new rules (how many?)

Story: Asked his wife Lee Krasner “Is this a painting?”

Gesture paintings: about process; Allover paintings: no focal point; culmination of trend of the emergence of the picture plane as an independent entity (since Cezanne—even Manet)

Existentialism reaction to destruction of world wars: no absolute truths

“The one thing that could be trusted and believed in was the self, and that became the sole subject of Abstract Expressionist painting”—individualism; no mistaking one artist for another (story about art teacher; students all did Pollock style);

Precedent to performance art; canvas totally gone, spontaneous, end product unknown

"It is impossible to make a forgery of Jackson Pollock's work," Time magazine critic Robert Hughes claimed in 1982. "It is what his imitators could never do, and why there are no successful Pollock forgeries: they always end up looking like...spaghetti, whereas Pollock--in his best work--had an almost preternatural control over the total effect of those skeins and receding depths of paint. In them, the light is always right. Nor are they absolutely spontaneous; he would often retouch the drip with a brush." 
 from Cody, Wyoming

Was making art based on comic books at exactly the same time as Lichtenstein; turned to commercial design

Began as illustrator of women’s shoes; fascinated by manipulative role of advertising and product packaging; also by impact of mass media on public opinion

“I want to be a machine.” opposite Pollock (wanted to be one with nature)