50 Years Ago This Week: The New American Art

In the year 1967, the styles and statements of America’s brash, brilliant and often infuriating contemporary artists have not only become available to the man in the street, but are virtually unavoidable. And with proliferation comes confusion. Whole new schools of painting seem to charge through the art scene with the speed of an express train, causing Pop Artist Andy Warhol to predict the day “when everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

…Tony Smith, who was thought of as primarily an architect at the time, witnessed the coming of age of the U.S. as a world art power in the 1950s. Many of the abstract expressionists who were responsible for that triumph were his friends, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Smith designed the Long Island homes of Painter Theodores Stamos and Gallery Owner Betty Parsons. Not the least important aspect of the abstract expressionists was the size of their paintings. To force the spectator to become a part of their huge gesture paintings, leaders of the movement expanded their canvases to the size of whole walls.

The pop artists who came after behaved like delighted, bright-eyed children let loose in a supermarket. They too liked their objects big. Andy Warhol enlarged a Campbell soup can and made it an object of veneration; Tom Wesselman celebrated bathrooms and kitchens; Robert Rauschenberg painted his own bed, made a sacred relic out of a stuffed goat with a tire round his middle and walked off with first honors at the 1964 Venice Biennale. Onetime Sign Painter James Rosenquist composed his images of the modern U.S.A. —from hair dryers to atomic bombs—on a canvas titled F-lll, which measures 13 ft. longer than the 85-ft. jet fighter-bomber itself. The painting was bought in 1965 for $60,000 by Manhattan Collector Robert Scull, and is currently one of the hits of the U.S. pop art exhibition in Sao Paulo.

Meanwhile, sculptors, using materials untried in art, began building complex works that physically re-created the frenetic pace and brilliance of modern urban life. To Chryssa, all of Times Square’s jangle of signs is one total work of art, and she has set out with neon tube and stainless steel to rival its garish, flickering magic. Kinetic Sculptor George Rickey equates movement with life itself; his own tall blades and semaphores sway in the wind above treetop level and are capable of almost infinite extension.