History of Art Literature Anthologies
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Dore Ashton
Twentieth-Century Artists on Art
New York, Pantheon Books, 1985, 302 pages
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part Three
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| Fig. 48) Dore Ashton's essay on Richard Lindner, published in 1963 by the New York publisher Harry N. Abrams |
Figurative artists
Among the US artists quoted by Dore
Ashton (1928-2017) in her anthology Twentieth-Century
Artists on Art, I am including in this category of ‘Figurative artists’ (which
I have here deliberately defined in very broad and perhaps imprecise terms)
representatives of styles (New Objectivity, Precisionism, Surrealism, Social
Realism) which have all entrusted a central role to the representation of the
human figure, and, in this way, are also linked to antecedent pictorial
movements preceding abstraction. All in all, these are artists who have been
forgotten today and would deserve to be fully rediscovered: their reference to
figurative art was perhaps interpreted in the last century as a formal element
that made them less actual and convincing. In chronological order of birth, I
would like to mention Richard Lindner (1901-1978), Peter Blume (1906 -1992),
Romare Bearden (1911-1988), David Hare (1917-1992) and Leon Golub (1922-2004).
Richard Lindner represented the
conjunction between the German New
Objectivity and the American art. The German painter escaped from Germany
when the Nazis took power, moving first to France in 1933 and then to the
United States in 1941. Although he was active in the academic world after the
war for many years, I was not able to find any publications of his (nor any foundation
curating his memory). The interview cited by Ms Ashton (who dedicated a
monograph to the painter in 1969) was dated 1978. Speaking to the art historian
John Gruen (1926 - 2016) in 1978, Lindner stated: “But, you know, my work is
really a reflection of Germany of the twenties. It was the only time the
Germans were any good. On the other hand, my creative nourishment comes from
New York, and from pictures I see in American magazines or on television.
America is really a fantastic place!” [78]. Among the Internet
sources, I would also like to mention the recordings of his autobiographical
interviews at the Smithsonian Institution [79]; possibly, for him the oral
transmission of ideas was more important than the written one.
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| Fig. 49) The catalogue of the exhibition 'Peter Blume. Nature and Metamorphosis', held at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2005 by Robert Cozzolino and Samantha Baskind. It also contains a selection of writings by the painter. |
Peter Blume was another little known
artist in galleries and museums, perhaps also because he was very atypical in
his time. He still belonged, in many respects, to the world of American
Precisionism and to the ‘return to order’,
the approach that was spread throughout Europe between the two wars (his love
for Renaissance art had clear parallels in the Italian De Chirico and the
German New Objectivity). Blume's
artistic activity began in the thirties, to be honest without much success. His
most famous work was The Eternal City,
realized in manifest opposition to Fascism; in the painting, Mussolini was
portrayed as a spring toy with a deformed head emerging from the Colosseum. As
imaginable, the caricature was very successful in America during the World War II
years. As a painter he achieved the notoriety only much later, in particular in
the Seventies. The text chosen by Ashton, from 1963, was also published that
year by Eric Protter in the anthology Painters on Painting. “Since I am concerned
with the communication of ideas, I am not at all ashamed of ‘telling stories’
in my paintings, because I consider this to be one of the primary functions of
the plastic arts” [80]. In
the text Blume also talked about his passion for Caravaggio, the return to a
literary style and the need to restore the centrality of the art gesture. Some
writings of the artist have been published in a recent catalogue of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in
2005. There is no foundation dedicated to him.
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| Fig. 50) Three works by Romare Bearden, respectively published in 1972, 1969 and 1993 |
Romare Bearden was an artist, critic
and historian of art. He produced - in cooperation with different authors -
numerous studies, most of which about the role of African-American artists in
the history of art. However, none of his essays has crossed the English
language barrier. The Romare Bearden
Foundation is offering the complete list of the artist's writings, which
cover a fifty-year long period [81]. His socially-motivated art, based on the
use of collage, also reflected his experience as African-American in the South
of the USA. In an article [82] published in the journal Leonardo, which the MIT produced since 1968 as a tool for dialogue
between art and science, Bearden told of his transition from mathematics to
painting, which took place thanks to George Grosz. He described his love for Brueghel
and the Dutch masters, for Byzantine mosaics and African sculpture. The quote
that Ashton drew from it indeed relativized the political nature of his art and
referred to Brueghel as a reference point: “In spite of this, it is not my
aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is precisely
my awareness of the distortions required of the polemicist that has caused me
to paint the life of my people as I know it – as passionately and
dispassionately as Brueghel painted the life of the Flemish people of his day.
One can draw many social analogies from the great works of Brueghel – as I have
no doubt one can draw from mine – my intention, however, is to reveal through
pictorial complexities the richness of a life I know” [83].
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| Fig. 51) The exhibition catalogue on Fourteen American Artists, published by the MoMA in New York in 1946 by Dorothy C. Miller, with statements by the artists. Source: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3196_300062046.pdf |
David Hare was a surrealism-inspired
sculptor (and cartoonist), yet in permanent contact with the artists of
abstract New York expressionism. “I believe – it can be read in the
catalogue of the exhibit 'Fourteen Americans' of 1946 – that in order to avoid copying nature and at
the same time keep the strongest connection with reality it is necessary to
break up reality and recombine it, creating different relations which will take
the place of relations destroyed. These should be relations of memory and
association” [84].
A collection of his writings has not yet been published. The heirs’ web page displays
the originals of a (quite limited) series of articles signed by him, without
however indicating their precise origin and date [85].
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| Fig. 52) The collection of texts Leon Golub: Do Paintings Bite?, curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and published by Hatje Cantz in 1997. |
Leon Golub (1922-2004) was a painter
and political activist. Hans-Ulrich Obrist published in 1997 a series of
writings entitled "Leon Golub: Do
Paintings Bite?" In the declarations of 1959, taken from a MoMa
catalogue curated by Peter Selz, the artist explained the meaning of the
representation of the body in his painting: The way a painter looks at a body
can vary. It was, for example, completely
different before and after the Second World War. “Man is seen as having undergone a holocaust or facing annihilation or
mutation. The ambiguities of these huge forms [in my painting] indicate the stress of their vulnerability
versus their capacities for endurance” [86]. The human body, also depicted
in a fragmentary form, remains however a symbol of heroic and sensual beauty: “Man is seen in an heroic gesture of the very
beauty and sensuous organic vitality of even fragmented forms. The enlarged
carnal beauty of the fragment is contrasted to its pathos and monumentality”
[87]. This duplicity allowed the painter to make an implacable gesture, when he
represented the bodies, while still embodying the sense of monumentality
typical of classical art. The foundation jointly dedicated to Golub and his
wife Nancy Spero (1926-2009) does not seem to be active on the net [88].
Minimalisms
In this category, I am associating
minimalists, post-minimalists and conceptual artists. We are returning here to
artists who, having gained a lot of attention in the last century, did not
hesitate to make constant use of writing as a communication tool: indeed, the
conceptual element of their art (which linked them ideally with the
constructivists of the early twentieth century) often led these artists to
search for the theoretical coordinates that would offer elements of
understanding to the public. In chronological order of birth, I would like to
mention here Josef Albers (1888-1976), Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), Tony Smith
(1912-1980), Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967), Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), Sol LeWitt
( 1928-2007), Dan Flavin (1933-1996), Carl Andre (1935-), Eva Hesse
(1936-1970), Hans Haacke (1936-), Frank Stella (1939-) and Robert Smithson
(1938-1972).
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| Fig. 53) Above: The original edition of Interaction of Colour (1971) and four subsequent reprints, all published by Yale University Press. Below: Translations into German (1972), Japanese (1972), Spanish (1979), Italian (2013), French (2008) and Chinese (2011) |
Josef Albers moved to the United
States in 1933 when the Nazis took over the power; he brought to the US the
strong vocation to theorization typical of German artistic culture. His manual
on "The Interaction of Color",
first published in a limited edition in 1963 and then reprinted in numerous
editions by the Yale University Press since 1971, was translated into twelve
languages. The text became one of the reference points of Optical art. Albers was the heir not only of the Bauhaus training (where
he himself had been teaching since 1925), but of a tradition that was going
back to Goethe's Farbenlehre, the Theory of colors of 1810. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation holds a very large archive and
offers many resources to scholars [89].
In her introductory notes, Dore Ashton
cited the manual of Albers, but chose an excerpt from a 1962 catalogue. Albers
explained there how colours, when coming near, would influence each other. “Such action, reaction, interaction – or interdependence - is sought in
order to make obvious how colors influence and change each other: that the same
color, for instance – with different ground or neighbors – looks different. But
also, that different colors can be made to look alike. It is to show that three
colors can be read as four, and similarly three colors as two, and also four as
two. Such color deceptions prove that we see colors almost never unrelated to
each other and therefore unchanged; that color is changing continually: with
changing light, with changing shape and placement, and with quantity which
denotes either amount (a real extension) or number (recurrence). And just as
influential are changes in perception depending on changes of mood, and
consequently of receptiveness. All this will make aware of an exciting
discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect of color” [90].
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| Fig. 54) On the left: The essay by Dore Ashton on Noguchi. East and West of 1992. On the right: The collection of essays and conversations by the sculptor, published by Abrams publishers in 1994. |
Dore Ashton dedicated an essay to
the sculptor Isamu Noguchi in 1992. Today a collection of his writings and
conversations is available: it was published by Harry N Abrams and curated by
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Bruce Altshulera, with the support of the Isamu
Noguchi Foundation in Tokyo. Although not formally a minimalist, his interest was
all centred on abstract and self-representative forms in stone or metal. The
passage quoted by Dore Ashton was taken from the catalogue of the
aforementioned Fourteen Americans exhibition of 1946. “The essence
of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence.
All dimensions are but measures of it, as in the relative perspective of our
vision lie volume, line, point, giving shape, distance, proportion. Movement,
light, and time itself are also qualities of space. Space is otherwise
inconceivable. These are the essences of sculpture and as our concept of them
change so must our sculpture change” [91]. The Noguchi Museum in New
York is preserving the archives of the sculptor [92]. There is also a Noguchi
Museum in Tokyo, which does not seem however to offer primary sources on its website
[93].
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| Fig. 55) Tony Smith's interview with Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. on the 1966 Artforum |
The sculptor Tony Smith is
considered one of the artists who marked the passage from an expressionist type
of art to a (mainly sculptural) production of a minimalist type. In an
interview with the curator Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. (1921 - 1987), published on
Artforum in 1966, Smith explained the creative mechanism that led him to a
reduction of forms: “I’m interested in the inscrutability and the
mysteriousness of the thing. (…) When I start to design, it’s almost corny and
then naturally moves towards economy. I’m not aware of how light and shadow
fall on my pieces. I’m just aware of basic form. I’m interested in the thing,
not in the effects-pyramids are only geometry, not an effect” [94].
No collection of writings has yet been published, nor are there any texts of
the artist put online by the foundation, although there is a list of interviews
and statements between 1966 and 1978 [95].
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| Fig. 56) On the left: The catalogue of the exhibition The new decade. 35 American painters and sculptors, held at the MoMA in New York in 1955. At the centre: The collection of writings by Ad Reinhardt, here in the 1991 edition of the University of California Press. On the right: The edition of writings and conversations published in German in 1994. |
Ad Reinhardt was a point of contact
between expressionist abstraction and minimalism, to the point that different
critics have placed him alternatively in one or in the other domain. And yet,
in his writings, he had very harsh judgments against the New York school. The
text quoted by Ashton denied value to action painting as a phenomenon of
physical action. “Painting is special, separate, a matter of
meditation and contemplation, for me, no physical action or social sport. As
much consciousness as possible” [96]. These words were taken from
the catalogue of the exhibition ‘The new
decade. 35 American painters and sculptors’, curated by the art critic and
historian John I.H. Baur (1909-1987) at the MoMA in New York in 1955. A collection of writings by Ad Reinhardt
was published by Viking Press in 1975 by Barbara Rose, and republished by the
University of California Press in 1991 and 2008. The title (Art as Art) clearly referred to the
concept of art for art. A selection of writings and conversations with the
artist was published in German in 1994 and reprinted in 1998.
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| Fig. 57) The interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist to Ellsworth Kelly, entitled Thumbing through the Folder: A Dialogue on Art and Architecture, published in 2010 |
The minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly was
associated with the contrasts of the colors of the so-called hard-edge painting (painting with sharp
contrasts), i.e. the Californian reaction to abstract New York expressionism.
The Kelly Foundation page is offering a very extensive list of the artist's
statements from the late forties; however, there is no printed collection of
this material [97]. Also noteworthy is a full interview-book with Hans Ulrich Obrist released in 2009. The passage
quoted by Dore Ashton was taken from an interview of Kelly with one of the most
famous art historians and curators of the last century, namely Henry Geldzahler
(1935 - 1994), published in 1964.
“I am not interested in edges. I’m
interested in the mass and color, the black and white. The edges happen because
the forms get as quite as they can be. I want the masses to perform. When I
work with forms and colors, I get the edge. … in my work, it is impossible to
separate the edges from the mass and color” [98].
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| Fig. 58) The volume of art criticism by Sol Lewitt, edited by Adachiara Zeri, published by Editrice Inonia in 1994 |
The name of Sol LeWitt is
inextricably linked to the birth of conceptualism and minimalism. His short Paragraphs on Conceptual Art [99],
published in the magazine Artforum of
June 1967, are still considered as one of the main texts of this orientation.
To these Ms Adhton added a limited number of other writings, published in
catalogues since the late seventies [100]. The critical essays by Sol Lewitt
were collected in English and Italian by Adachiara Zevi in 1994 (publisher Editrice
Inonia in the series "Libri di A.E.I.U.O.: Incontri Internazionali
d'Arte"). Dore Ashton published some excerpts from the Paragraphs: “I will refer to
the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the
idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a
conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning or decisions are made
beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a
machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or
illustrative; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental
processes, and it is purposeless” [101].
Dan Flavin is now very well known
for his fluorescent light compositions, which the authoress of the anthology also
associated with early 20th century constructivism. His text was taken from the
article "An Autobiographical Sketch
... in daylight or cool white" published in the Artforum of 1965, a very short text in which the artist - whom started
to be known in those years - reflected on the Kantian concept of the sublime.
Ashton chose a passage from the article which illustrated the aesthetic reasons
for choosing the vehicle (the illuminated neon light that divides the space),
avoiding the more theoretical parts. “In time, I came to these conclusions
about what I had found in fluorescent light, and about what might be done with
it plastically: Now the entire interior spacial container and its parts-wall,
floor, and ceiling, could support this strip of light but would not restrict
its act of light except to enfold it. Realizing this, I knew that the actual
space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of
real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition”
[102]. This is still today the most important text of Flavin.
Furthermore, there is no collection of his writings, neither does the Dan Flavin Art Institute offer
electronic resources on primary sources [103].
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| Fig. 59) The collection of writings 'Carl Andre. Cuts. Texts 1959-2004', editer by James Meyer (MIT Press, 2005) |
A collection of writings by the
minimalist poet and sculptor Carl Andre, covering the years 1959-2006, has
existed since 2005 (edited by MIT Press). In addition, Tate Publishing in London and The Carl Andre and Melissa L. Kretschmer
Foundation are working on the creation of an electronic catalogue of his
lyrics, which includes about 1500 poems [104]. For her anthology Ms Ashton used
the text of a conference held in 1968. The excerpt reflected - in a style very
close to the aphorism - the conceptual nature of Andre's art: “There
is no symbolic content to my work. It is not like a chemical formula but like a
chemical reaction. A good work of art, once it is offered in display and shown
to other people, is a social fact. (…) The art of association is when the image
is associated with things other than what the artwork itself is. Art of
isolation has its own focus with a minimum association with things not itself.
The idea is the exact opposite of multimedia communication. My work is the
exact opposite of the art of association. I try to reduce the image-making
function of my work to the least degree” [105].
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| Fig. 60) Eva Hesse's diary, published in 2016 |
Eva Hesse was a young
post-minimalist sculptor who lived between the United States and Germany and
died very young due to a tragic illness. Her Diaries were published in 2016 by Barry Rosen and Tamara Bloomberg,
confirming the myth of an as intense as unhappy artist's existence. As with
most of the Diaries, the passage
quoted by Dore Ashton, dating back to 1969 and quoted in the catalogue of a New
York exhibition, is also in verse:
“I wanted to get to non art, non
connotive,
non anthropomorphic, non
geometric, non, nothing,
everything, but of another kind,
vision, sort,
from a total other reference
point…
that vision or concept will come
through total risk,
freedom, discipline.
I will do it”
[106].
The artist's archives are available
at the Smithsonian Institution [107].
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| Fig. 61) Writings by Hans Haacke: the essay Framing and Being Framed from 1975, the conversation with Pierre Bordieu Free Exchange (1995) and the collection of writings Working Conditions edited by Alexander Alberro and published by MIT (2016). |
Hans Haacke is a conceptual sculptor
who has written much about his art, starting with the text Framing and Being Framed of 1975, in which he dealt with
sociologists and political scientists. In 1995, together with the French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), he published the conversation ‘Free Exchange’. A collection of his
writings was edited by Alexander Alberro and published by MIT Press in 2016 (Working Conditions. The Writings of Hans
Haacke). The passage quoted by Ashton is instead taken from an interview in
1978, and explains that there is no art without a more hidden political
meaning. “Any product or activity designed to communicate feelings
and ideas - and artworks certainly belong to that category – performs a social
function and is therefore implicitly, if not explicitly, also of political
import. What I am saying here is obviously not new. I believe it is generally
accepted in the social sciences. The theorizing about culture among critics and
producers, more so in Europe than here, seems to be moving in that direction,
too … […] There is no structural element absolutely immune to signification and
history. The meanings, no matter if they are acknowledged or not, have had
ideological import. The denial of their existence does not obliterate them and
the denial by itself is ideologically quite significant” [108].
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| Fig. 62) Writings by Frank Stella. Top, from left to right: The essay Working Space in the American (1986), French (1987) and Japanese (1989) editions. Below, from left to right: the collection of writings (2001), in English and German edition, edited by Franz-Joachim Verspohl (2001), and finally the text in Italian on Caravaggio (2010) |
Frank Stella is not only one of the
artists of reference of the twentieth century, but one of those who certainly has
dedicated himself with greatest efforts to artistic literature. His essay Working Space - in which he first
confronted himself with the history of Renaissance and Baroque art and then
with the avant-garde of the early twentieth century - was published by Harvard
University Press in 1986, and appeared in French in 1987 and Japanese in 1989.
The section of the essay on Caravaggio was released separately in Italian in
2010 (Abscondita editor). A collection of his writings was edited in English
and German by Franz-Joachim Verspohl in 2001. His correspondence and
manuscripts are available today at the Smithsonian Institute [109]. Perhaps Ms Ashton assigned him less importance than is universally attributed to him
today. The short quote was taken from a lecture given in Brooklyn in 1959, in
which the artist explained the use of technique in his art. “There
were two problems which had to be faced. One was spatial and the other
methodological. In the first case I had to do something about relational
painting, i. e. the balancing of the various parts of the painting with and
against each other. The obvious answer was symmetry – make it the same all
over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A
symmetrical image or configuration symmetrically placed on a open ground is not
balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I arrived at - and there
are probably quite a few, although I only know of one other, color density -
forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a
regulated pattern. The remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application
which followed and complemented the design solution. This was done by using the
house painters technique and tools” [110].
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| Fig. 63) On the left: The article by Robert Smithson on Entropy, published in Artforum in 1966. At the centre: The collection of his writings edited by Nancy Holt in 1979. Right: The collection edited by Jack Flam in 1998. |
Robert Smithson is one of the
youngest artists included in the anthology by Dore Ashton. The collection of
his writings (The Writings of Robert Smithson)
was published in 1979 by Nancy Holt, a few years after his death in a tragic
plane crash; a second collection (Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings) was edited by Jack Flam in 1998. The text
quoted by Ashton, dedicated to the application of the concept of entropy to
art, was taken from Artforum of 1966.
It offered the reader a theoretical reading of minimalism: “Instead
of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments
seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural
materials, such as marble, granite, or other kinds of rock, the new monuments
are made of artificial materials, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are
not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a
systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in
representing the long spaces of centuries” [111].
Pop Art
It has already been said in the
first part of this post that the anthologist did not include any excerpt from
Andy Warhol (1928-1987). This absence cannot be an oversight and must be a sign of a marked
dislike for the most iconic artist of his time. Pop art was instead present in Twentieth-Century Artists on Art with
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Robert Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008), George Segal
(1924-2000), Claes Oldenburg (1929-), Jasper Johns (1930-), James Rosenquist
(1933- 2017) and Jim Dine (1935-). Of their texts it must be said that many of
them seemed to question (probably also in sarcastic tones) the same basic principles of
Pop art, and in any case were not particularly convincing. The fact that Ashton
was not in unison with this school is confirmed by a 2013 interview with the
American art critic James Panero: “I was never interested in Pop art. The
only artist who’s been associated with them that I admired is Claes Oldenburg,
but I wouldn’t say he’s exactly a Pop artist either. So I just followed him and
I wrote about him, but the others not so much. There were one or two that I was
friendly to, but I never wrote about them” [112].
The Lichtenstein Foundation is offering a complete catalogue [113] of
all the writings by the artist or about him. Lichtenstein is universally known
for his comic-style inspired prints, produced starting from 1957. In the few
introductory words, Ashton remembered him instead (and perhaps above all) for
his expressionist works of the early fifties. The quote in the anthology is
taken from an interview with Gene R. Swenson (1934-2016) of 1963 [114]. At the
time, Swenson was a young art critic who interviewed the major pop artists of
those years ("What is Pop Art?
Answers from Eight Painters") in the ARTNews magazine. Swenson (who,
after being a promising young art critic, was a victim of serious mental
problems and basically abandoned his profession) asked indeed the painter: “What is Pop Art?”. Lichtenstein answered: “I don't know—the use of commercial art as subject matter in painting, I
suppose. It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no
one would hang it—everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to
hang a dripping paint rag, everybody was accustomed to this. The one thing
everybody hated was commercial art; apparently they didn't hate that enough
either” [115]. Later
criticism interpreted Lichtenstein's words as a sarcastic attempt to avoid any
discussion on the issue [116].
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| Fig. 64) The collection of writings and interviews by Robert Rauschenberg, published in several languages by the Polígrafa publishing house and edited by Sam Hunter in 2007. Here the cover of the American edition. |
A collection of writings and
interviews by Robert Rauschenberg was published by the Polígrafa publishing
house simultaneously in French, Spanish and English in 2007. The quotation
mentioned by Dore Ashton was extraordinarily short and dated back to 1959 (it
was taken from the catalogue of the Sixteen
Americans exhibition at the MoMA of New York). The style was that of an
aphorism: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to
act in that gap between the two” [117]. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is offering a very wide range of
digitized materials (including correspondence, interviews and articles) [118].
George Segal is famous for his
sculptures based on plaster casts. Indeed, he marked a return to realism, as he
wrote in 1978 in an exhibition catalogue held in Minneapolis. “I introduced a lot of realism into my work as a correction to certain
excesses I noticed in abstract painting of the fifties. I considered it a
healthy restorative to references that had become increasingly pale and tenuous
– divorced from life experiences” [119]. The quote continued with
almost Leonardesque accents on the need to always observe people and their
movements, for example by capturing their expressions also while driving the
car during the deep night, while persons stand out against the lights of New
York. A collection of writings by the sculptor has not been published. The archive
of manuscripts is now kept by the Princeton University [120].
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| Fig. 65) The collection of writings by Claes Oldenburg published by the MoMA in New York in 2013 |
Claes Oldenburg, it has been said, was perhaps the only pop artist whom Ms Ashton really appreciated. A collection of his writings between 1956 and 1969 was published under the title Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side in 2013: it was published by the MoMA of New York, with the curatorship entrusted to Achim Hochdörfer, Maartje Oldenburg and Barbara Schröder. In addition to articles and essays, they also included extensive quotations from his diaries. The Foundation dedicated to Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen is presenting a list of his writings [121]. The citations in the anthology were taken from an article published in the American monthly magazine Artforum in 1966. Oldenburg explained his creative mechanisms, based on the imitation of everyday objects: “I use naive imitation. This is not because I have no imagination or because I wish to say something about the everyday world. I imitate 1. objects and 2. created objects, for example signs. Objects made without the intention of making ‘art’ and which naïvely contain a functional contemporary magic. I try to carry these even further through my own naïvité, which is not artificial” [122].
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| Fig. 66) The collection of writings by Jasper Johns published by the MoMA in New York in 1997 |
The MoMa in New York dedicated to Jasper
Johns a collection of Writings,
Sketchbook Notes, Interviews in 1997, curated by Kirk Varnedoe and Christel
Hollevoet. The short text quoted by Dore Ashton, taken from a catalogue of the
MoMA of 1959, referred to Cézanne, Duchamp and Leonardo. From them he drew
different inspirations, which helped him to deal with a multitude of impulses
coming from nature. “Generally, I am opposed to panting
which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks very busy
to me” [123]. Johns was one of the founders of the New York
Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 1963.
The rich collection of writings of
James Rosenquist is documented by the website dedicated to the artist [124].
The quotation in the anthology was taken from a monograph by the artist Michael
Compton (1947-) on pop art. Rosenquist reflected in 1964 on the commercial
nature of his creation. “I think we have a free society, and
the action that goes on this free society allows enchroachments, as a
commercial society. So I geared myself, like an advertiser or a large company,
to this visual inflation – in commercial advertising which is one of the
foundations of our society” [125].
 |
| Fig. 67) Collections of poems by Jim Dine |
In some excerpts from different
interviews, Jim Dine, the father of the Neo-Dada American movement, expressed
doubts and uncertainties on the Pop art itself, considered too superficial. “I don't feel very pure in that respect. I don't deal exclusively with
the popular image. I'm more concerned with it as part of my landscape. I'm sure
everyone has always been aware of that landscape, the artistic landscape, the
artist's vocabulary, the artist's dictionary” [126]. Surprisingly, there
was no reference to his verses, since Dine, in addition to painting, was also a
poet. His collections of lyrics are Diary
of a Non-Deflector: Selected Poems (1987) and This Goofy Life of Constant Mourning (2004). In 2015 a volume was
released that presented all his poems with the title Poems to work on.
Immaterial art, installations and
performances
Ashton wanted also to document the
reasons of the artists belonging to the movements of dematerialization of art (which
obviously took on very different forms in the seventies and eighties). In
chronological order of birth I would like to mention here Allen Kaprow
(1927-2006), Robert Irwin (1928-), Öyvind Fahlström (1928-1976), Donal Judd
(1928-1994), Robert Morris (1931-2018) and Christo (1935-).
 |
| Fig. 68) Essays by Allen Caprow on Happening art and the interrelation between Happening and life. On the left: Some Recent Happenings, originally published in 1966 and here in a 2007 edition. At the centre and on the right: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, in a 1993 and 2003 edition. |
Allen Kaprow - one of the inventors
of the happening in the 1950s – wrote about art from the end of that decade,
both with critical texts - for example on the legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958)
- and on philosophical themes - such as the essay The Meaning of Life (1990). Dore Ashton cited an excerpt from his
pamphlet Some Recent Happenings of
1966, reprinted in 2007: “A Happening is an assemblage of events
performed or perceived in more than one time and place. Its material
environments may be constructed, taken or directed directly from what is
available, or altered slightly; just as its activities may be invented or
commonplace. A Happening unlike a stage play, may occur at a supermarket,
driving along a highway, under a pile of rags, and in a friend’s kitchen,
either at once or sequentially. If sequentially, time may extend to more than a
year. The Happening is performed accordingly to plan but without rehearsal,
audience, or repetition. It is art but seems closer to life” [127].
It should be remembered that, in 1993, a collection of writings by the artist
was published, entitled Essays on the
Blurring of Art and Life (University of California Press), curated by Jeff
Kelley, then republished in an expanded version in 2003 by the same publisher.
The Allen Kaprow archive is kept at the Getty Foundation [128].
 |
| Fig. 69) Robert Irwin, Notes Toward a Conditional Art, Getty Publications, 2011 |
A selection of writings by Robert
Irwin was edited in 2011 by Matthew Sims. The artist has always written a lot
(his rich archive is kept at the Getty Foundation [129]). Minimalist light
experiments were described in 1976 in an excerpt that Dore Ashton drew from a
MoMA catalogue: Every element has its imagery; it also has its
physicality. It can be dealt with on both levels. I took the history of modern
art a step further away from imagery and tried to deal with it solely in terms
of its physicality. When you consider that we have very image-focused eyes, this
is very difficult. (Intellect is a system of focus.) So I got into what some
referred to as a ‘less is more’ thing, which is not really true at all; I was
just trying to eliminate imagery in favor of physicality. The thing was to maximize the physicality while minimizing
the imagery” [130].
 |
| Fig. 70) Collections of writings by Öyvind Fahlström in English (2008) and French (1982) |
The poet and writer Öyvind Fahlström
is today considered a forerunner of multimedia art, for having integrated
drawing, poetry, painting and theatrical texts in neo-Dadaist installations
with strong social features. Born and raised in Sweden, he moved first to Paris
and then to New York. (His production included theatrical pieces, films, texts
for installations and aesthetic writings in Swedish, for example the Manifesto for a concrete poetry of
1953), studied by Antonio Sergio Bessa in a 2008 essay entitled Oyvind Fahlstrom: The Art of Writing. Previously, one of his writings had
been published in French in 2002 (Essais
choisis) by Vincent Pécoil. As for the excerpt quoted by Ashton, we are
presented with some thoughts from 1966 collected in the catalogue of an
exhibition held at the MoMA of 1982, which was focused on the interaction
between art and social reform. Art merges fun and understanding of reality
('pleasure' and 'insight') [131]. The artist's task is to create art according
to procedures that must allow even those who do not have the financial means to
both have fun and understand reality; therefore the transformation of art from
a consumer good (a painting) to a random form (a happening) actually has a meaning of democratization of art. “Painting, sculpture, etc. today represent the most archaic art medium,
depending on feudal patrons who pay exorbitantly for uniqueness and fetish
magic. (…) It is time to incorporate advances in technology to create
mass-produced works of art, obtainable by rich and not rich. Works where the
artist puts as much quality into the conception and the manufacturer as much
quality into the production, as found in the best handmade works of art. The
value of variable form: you will never have exactly the same piece as your
neighbour” [132].
 |
| Fig. 71) From right to left: the collection of Complete Writings by Donald Judd from 1959 to 1975, published in 1975 by New York University Press; the collection of writings between 1963 and 1990, published in French by Galerie Lelong in 2003; the collection of writings from 1958 to 1993, curated by Caitlin Murray and published in 2016 by the Judd Foundation and by David Zwirner Books; finally, the collection of interviews by Donald Judd, edited by his son Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray, also published by the Judd Foundation and by David Zwirner Books in 2019. |
Donald Judd has written a lot since
the end of the fifties. A very limited selection of texts is offered on the
website of the Judd Foundation [133]. Judd's first collection of writings
appeared in 1975, thanks to the New York University Press. A new (and
substantial) anthology (over a thousand pages) was published in 2016 by the Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books;
it was followed by the very recent collection of interviews by the same publisher
(2019). The statement chosen by Dore Ashton, taken from an article by the
artist in 1965, dealt with the theme of complexity in art, which had remained
unchanged, but was expressed in different forms. The art of previous eras was based
on the perspective representation of spaces and contents; abstract art on size
and features; the one implemented by Judd on the idea of formal unity. “In the three-dimensional work the whole thing is made according to
complex purposes, and these are not scattered but asserted by one form. It
isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to
analyse one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a
whole, is what is interesting” [134].
 |
| Fig. 72) The collection of writings of Robert Morris, published in 1994 by MIT press |
The writings of the sculptor Robert
Morris were collected by MIT Press on the occasion of an exhibition at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994. Ms Ashton presented him as one of the
most prepared artists in theoretical terms, also thanks to his formulation of a
theory of perception based on the concept of Gestalt (Gestalt is originally a German term meaning form. It is a
technical concept linked to the identity between form and perception, widely
used in psychology, including art psychology). “Characteristic of a
gestalt is that once it is established all the information about it, qua
gestalt, is exhausted. (One does not, for example, seek the gestalt of a
gestalt.) Furthermore, once it is established it does not disintegrate. One is
then both free of the shape and bound to it. Free or released because of the
exhaustion of information about it, as shape, and bound to it because it
remains constant and indivisible” [135].
We do not have a collection of Christo’s
writings (nor does the site https://christojeanneclaude.net indicate a list of them). In the excerpt
chosen by Dore Ashton for the anthology, the artist explained that he would
have liked to go back to the time of the tenth century after Christ, when art
was monumental and therefore it was not a material good to possess, but “a much more fluid communication (…) much more democratic than it is
today. In that time nobody was involved with owning art because the people
owned the kings and the gods, and there was a complete link, like for them the
kings and gods were the same thing, and they were the direct link with art that
was real, existing” [136]. The text was taken from an interview in
1979.
NOTES
[79] See: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-richard-lindner-10612.
[80] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.193.
[81] See: https://beardenfoundation.org/bibliograpgy/.
[82] The article, entitled Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings, is available at the web address https://www.jstor.org/stable/1571921?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.
[83] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.192.
[84] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.215.
[85] See: http://www.davidhareart.com/DH/ARTICLES_by_D.H._4.html.
[86] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.206.
[87] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.206.
[88] See: https://fconline.foundationcenter.org/fdo-grantmaker-profile/?key=NANC043#contact.
[89] See: https://albersfoundation.org/resources/archives/overview/.
[90] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), pp.188-189.
[91] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.240.
[92] See: https://www.noguchi.org/isamu-noguchi/archives/.
[93] See: http://www.isamunoguchi.or.jp/isamunoguchi/isamunoguchi_e.htm.
[94] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.253.
[95] See: http://www.tonysmithestate.com/about/bibliography.
[96] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.244.
[97] See: https://ellsworthkelly.org/select-bibliography/.
[98] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.222.
[99] See: http://radicalart.info/concept/LeWitt/paragraphs.html.
[100] See: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1971_300297572.pdf.
[101] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.228.
[102] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.204.
[103] See: https://diaart.org/visit/visit/the-dan-flavin-art-institute-bridgehampton-united-states.
[104] See: https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/carl-andre-complete-poems.
[105] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.189.
[106] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), pp.216-217.
[107] See: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/eva-hesse-papers-7755.
[108] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.213.
[109] See: https://sova.si.edu//record/AAA.stelfran.
[110] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.256.
[111] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.255.
[112] See: https://hyperallergic.com/65051/renowned-art-historian-dore-ashton-talks-art-criticism-the-art-bubble-and-the-dedalus-foundation/.
[113] See: https://lichtensteinfoundation.org/bibliography/.
[114] The complete interview is available at the web address:
https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/book_report/roy-lichtenstein-what-is-pop-art-55006 .
[115] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.229.
[116] See: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/book_report/roy-lichtenstein-what-is-pop-art-55006.
[117] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.243.
[118] See: https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/sites/default/files/RRFA_01_FindingAid-September2019.pdf.
[119] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.248.
[120] See: https://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/C1303.
[121] See: http://oldenburgvanbruggen.com/bibliography/publications.htm#III.
[122] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.241.
[123] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.220.
[124] See: http://www.jamesrosenquiststudio.com/.
[125] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.246.
[126] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.201.
[127] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.221.
[128] See: http://www.allankaprow.com/getty.html.
[129] See: http://archives2.getty.edu:8082/xtf/view?docId=ead/940081/940081.xml;query=;brand=default.
[130] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.218.
[131] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.203.
[132] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.204.
[133] See: https://juddfoundation.org/artist/writing/.
[134] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.221.
[135] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.233.
[136] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-Century Artists on Art (quoted), p.196
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