1907. Picasso: Art doesn’t imitate life anymore

{ Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 | oil on canvas }

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) depicts five prostitutes in a brothel, in the Avignon Street of Barcelona (Spain). Picasso created over one hundred sketches and studies in preparation for this work, one of the most important in the early development of Cubism. Within the narrative of early modern art, it is a pivotal work in the development of modern art, widely held as a seminal work. Picasso called it “my first exorcism painting.” Read more { Wikipedia | On-line Picasso Project | MoMA, NY }

1914-1917. Marcel Duchamp: Art is everywhere

Marcel Duchamp, a French artist, coined the term readymade in 1915. It describes art created from the undisguised, sometimes modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art. Bottle Rack (1914), a bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp, is considered to be the first readymade. But the most famous is Foutain.

Marcel Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915 (he became an American citizen in 1955). In the winter of 1917, Duchamp—then 29, bought a Bedfordshire model urinal from the J.L. Mott Iron Works at 118 Fifth Avenue. Duchamp took the fixture to his studio at 33 West 67th Street, laid it on its back, and signed it “R. Mutt 1917.”

Duchamp was a board member of the Society of Independent Artists and submitted the piece under the name R. Mutt, presumably to hide his involvement with the piece, to their 1917 exhibition, which, it had been proclaimed, would exhibit all work submitted.

After much debate by the boardmembers, most of whom did not know Duchamp had submitted it, about whether the piece was or was not art, Fountain was hidden from view during the show.

Shortly thereafter the original Fountain was lost. Duchamp eventually authorized eight editions of it, none of which were exhibited in New York until 1950.

Duchamp adamantly asserted that he wanted to “de-deify” the artist. The readymades provide a way around inflexible either-or aesthetic propositions. They represent a Copernican shift in art.

{ Wikipedia | Village Voice }

1951. Rauschenberg: Let’s start over

{ Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [seven panel], 1951 | Oil on canvas }

Robert Rauschenberg created his revolutionary White Painting in the summer of 1951. In his radical reduction of content as well as in his conception of the works as a series of modular shaped geometric canvases, Rauschenberg can be seen as presaging Minimalism by a decade.

1953. Robert Rauschenberg: Didn’t get it?

{ Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953 ( traces of ink and crayon on paper), San Francisco MoMA }

Rauschenberg bought a pencil drawing by one of America’s leading artists, Willem de Kooning. He then erased the drawing, signed it himself and exhibited the artwork as his own. By this act of vandalism, Rauschenberg spat on the sacredness of an original artwork. Specifically, Erased De Kooning established a historical precedent that the destruction of an artwork is important aesthetically. { Art Renewal }

1913. Malevich: Wait, wait… White painting?

{ Kasimir Malevich , Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918 | oil on canvas }

Kazimir Malevich’s first white painting was made in 1913 (38 years before Rauschenberg) as part of a theatre piece called Victory of the Sun, but because it was made for a theatrical work, it is unknown and is not credited as the radical moment in art history that it was — White on White (1918) is considered his first white painting. In 1915 Malevich painted Black Square and published his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism.

1960s. Joseph Beuys: Everybody now!!

‘Every man is an artist.’ — Joseph Beuys (Actually, Novalis, not Beuys, was the first to say that ‘everyone is an artist.’)

It was during the 1960s that Beuys formulated his central theoretical concepts concerning the social, cultural and political function and potential of art. It translated into the concept of Social Sculpture, in which society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art to which each person can contribute creatively.

1960s. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol: Let’s rip off, yeah!

{ Original comic art with Roy Lichtentein rip-offs }

David Barsalou has catalogued almost every comic art swipe in the work of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein who made his name copying comic book panels and selling them as fine art. Lichtenstein paintings sell for millions, yet the original artists have received no compensation or recognition, including Russ Heath, George Tuska, and Joe Kubert. Barsalou correctly points that musicians who “sample” other artists’ music have to pay them royalties.

More { Boston Globe | David Barsalou}

Warhol created Green Car Crash using a photo of a bizarre accident published in Newsweek Magazine in 1963. To create 129 Die in Jet, Warhol used an image from the June 4, 1962 New York Mirror.

For his artwork entitled 16 Jackies, Warhol used a photograph of a veiled Jacqueline Kennedy walking with the Kennedy brothers. The photo was taken by Henri Dauman at Kennedy’s funeral and featured in the December 6, 1963 issue of Life. Dauman did not discover that Warhol used his photograph until 1995, when The New York Times published an article about the sale of 16 Jackies at Sotheby’s for $ 418,000.

Warhol created Flowers (1964) using a photograph of hibiscus flowers by Patricia Caulfield which appears in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography magazine. In 1966, Patricia Caulfield sued as permission was not requested to use her work. After a “long, costly court case”, Warhol eventually agreed to give her several paintings and a percentage of all profits from future reproductions of the painting as prints. Warhol began to take his own photographs or received permission to use publicity or media photographs for his work after this episode.

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Gene Korman (1953) and Andy Warhol’s Turquoise Marilyn (1964). All Warhol’s Marilyns were made using Korman’s photo. “With silkscreening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple — quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. … When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face — the first Marilyns.” — Andy Warhol

1974. Andy Warhol: Emptiness is art too

{ Andy Warhol with the 1985 version of the Invisible Sculpture (pedestal and wall label), on display at the New York club Area }

“Andy wanted to make the Invisible Sculpture (1974). We got out the Yellow Pages and found burglar alarms, different systems. Some with sound, some with light beams. They were all different looking and sculptural because they had different shapes and different systems. We mounted these burglar alarms on brackets all around the perimeter of a big room. And we aimed them all at the center of the room where nothing existed.

If you walked into the room and you hit this center point, all of these alarms would go off. You’d have every different kind of sound; chirping, booming, buzzing. It was like a kinetic sculpture: a sound sculpture, a light sculpture.”

Read more { WarholStars }

1978. Robert Mapplethorpe: Porn is art, porn self-portrait is art

In 1970-1974, Mapplethorpe made assemblage constructions that incorporate images of men from pornographic magazines with found objects and painting. In order to create his own images for these collages, Mapplethorpe turned to photography. Some of these photographs were shocking for their content, like his 1978 Self Portrait, in which he slyly grins at the camera with a bullwhip fondly stuck into his leather-clad anus. Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, “I don’t like that particular word ’shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before…I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.”

{ Mapplethorpe.org | Guggenheim }

A decade later, Jeff Koons came up with “Made in Heaven” (1989-1991) a series of images of Koons and his ex-wife, Ilona Staller (porn star Cicciolina) in both hard- and soft-core poses.

“It is not ironic. It is not kitsch. It’s optimistic. It exists in order to make people feel better about themselves. It - and all other objective art from Duchamp to Lichtenstein - is about ’self-acceptance’.” — Jeff Koons

{ NSw/d | The Guardian }

Related: Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), 1866, oil on canvas.

1990. Damien Hirst: Death sells.

{ Damien Hirst and his artwork A Thousand Years, 1990 | Steel, glass, flies, maggots, MDF, insect-o-cutor, cow’s head, sugar, water } Read more { Wikipedia | The Guardian }

Hirst is best known for his Natural History series, in which dead animals (such as a shark, a sheep or a cow) are preserved, sometimes cut-up, in formaldehyde. On September 10, 2002, on the eve of the first anniversary of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, Hirst said in an interview with BBC News Online: The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right … Of course, it’s visually stunning and you’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible - especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing. The following week, following public outrage at his remarks, he issued a statement through his company, Science Ltd: I apologise unreservedly for any upset I have caused, particularly to the families of the victims of the events on that terrible day. In June 2007, Hirst became the most expensive living artist with the sale of a medicine chest, Lullaby Spring, for £9.65 million ($19,27m) at Sotheby’s in London.

READ MORE >> art, flashback, hirst, warhol, koons | June 26th, 2007