Postwar American Art
A run of moves about where the work actually resides, sliding from the surface of a canvas to an idea, to the desert floor, and to the copied surface of a photograph.
Dictionary entry
- Abstract Expressionism 1940s–1950s / Style
On huge canvases, with bodily strokes, drips, stains and broad fields of color, what stays on the surface is the act of painting and strong inner feeling rather than a depicted subject.
- Conceptual Art mid-1960s–1970s / Style
Puts the idea at the center of the work and presents it through words, definitions, rules, documentation and placement, caring little for finish as an object.
- Earthwork / Land Art late 1960s–1970s / Style
Shapes the landscape itself with earth, stone, branches, terrain and machinery, folding place, time, erosion and documentation into the work.
- Photorealism 1968–1980s / Style
A movement that transfers the photograph itself onto the canvas, rebuilding by hand the quantity of information a mechanical eye records. Shop-window reflections, the warp of chrome, diner neon: the subject is fixed on the surface together with the photograph's own focus, grain and chromatic fringing. What is painted is not what was seen but the fact that a camera saw it that way.
- Neo-Dada 1953–1965 / Style
A postwar current that answered the inwardness of Abstract Expressionism by bringing household objects, printed matter and taxidermy onto the picture, working in the gap between art and life. It inherited Dada's gestures while making the materials of consumer society into structural components. The branching point immediately before Pop art.
- Funk Art 1960s–1970s / Style
A movement in ceramics and sculpture around the San Francisco Bay Area that deliberately soiled good taste and the authority of abstraction alike. Garish colour, bodily humour and the wilful misuse of craft materials laugh at the hierarchy of art itself. An early precedent for treating coarseness as a strategy.
- Action Painting late 1940s–1960s / Style
An abstract-painting style that treats the surface as a record of the body's passage rather than a container for a predetermined image. Drips, throws, scrapes, broad strokes, and repainting preserve speed, weight, pause, and sequence.
- Pictures Generation late 1970s–1980s / Style
A late-1970s and 1980s tendency that displaced already familiar advertising, film, magazine, and television images through rephotography, performance, cropping, and overlaid text, exposing systems of authorship, desire, gender, and consumption.