Postwar American Art

Dictionary entry

1. Abstract Expressionism 1940s–1950s / Style

   Leaves the act of painting and intense inner feeling on vast canvases — bodily strokes, drips, stains, broad fields — rather than depicted subjects.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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