Tuesday, September 13, 2016

American Painting (1960-1980) in Madrid

Roy Lichtenstein
Woman in Bath
1963
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

"I remember how startled I was when, early in 1962, I realized that I was becoming obsessed with color as having meaning not only in counterpoint to the structures of fences and the bulks of weights  which were, I had thought, my primary concern  but also in itself, as holding meaning all on its own. As I worked along, making the sculptures as they appeared in my mind's eye, I slowly came to realize that what I was actually trying to do was to take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake. This was analogous to my feeling for the freedom of my own body and my own being, as if in some mysterious way I felt myself to be color. The feeling grew steadily stronger until the setback of my experience in Japan when in despair that my work no longer materialized somewhere in my head, I began to concentrate on the construction of aspects of form, for me a kind of intellectual exercise. When we came back to America in 1967, I returned home to myself as well as to my country, abandoned all play with form for the austerity of the columnar structure, and let the color, which must have been gathering force within me somewhere, stream down over the columns on its own terms."

 from Daybook : the journal of an artist by Anne Truitt (New York : Pantheon, 1982)

Richard Estes
Telephone Booths
1967
acrylic on masonite
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Richard Estes
Nedick's
1970
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid

Richard Estes
People's Flowers
1971
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid 

Richard Lindner
Moon over Alabama
1963
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Richard Lindner
Thank You
1971
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

James Rosenquist
Smoked Glass
1962
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Rom Wesselmann
Nude No. 1
1970
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
 
"At the level of serially produced objects, by contrast, bright color is always apprehended as a sign of emancipation  in fact it often compensates for the absence of more fundamental qualities (particularly a lack of space). The discrimination here is obvious: associated with primary values, with functional objects and synthetic materials, bright, 'vulgar' colors always tend to predominate in the serial interior. They thus partake of the same anonymity as the functional object: having once represented something approaching a liberation, both have now become signs that are merely traps, raising the banner of freedom but delivering none to direct experience."

 Jean Baudrillard, from The System of Objects (1968) translated by James Benedict

Frank Stella
Untitled
1966
acrylic on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid

Frank Stella
Double Scramble
1978
oil on canvas
private collection

Mark Rothko
Untitled (Green on Maroon)
1961
mixed media on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

"As in written poetry, it is not the aggregation of words that counts, but the mystery of creation which yields or does not yield feeling. As in poetry, so with colors. It is the mystery of interior life which liberates, radiates and communicates. Beginning there, a new language can be freely created."

 Sonia Delaunay, On Color, 1966, translated by David Shapiro and Arthur C. Cohen

Mark Tobey
Earth Rhythm
1961
gouache on cardboard
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Willem de Kooning
Red Man with Mustache
1971
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Robert Rauschenberg
Express
1963
oil, silkscreen, collage on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

I am grateful for the excellent reproductions from Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.