Spencer Alley: Sixties Screenprints (Tate Gallery)

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Sixties Screenprints (Tate Gallery)

Roy Lichtenstein
Moonscape
1965
screenprint on plastic
Tate Gallery

Peter Sedgley
Looking Glass No. 3
1966
screenprint
Tate Gallery

Michael Rothenstein
Green Pagoda
1969-70
screenprint
Tate Gallery

Robert Motherwell
Untitled
1964
screenprint
Tate Gallery

from What Abstract Art Means to Me

"I think that abstract art is uniquely modern – not in the sense that word is sometimes used, to mean that our art has "progressed" over the art of the past – though abstract art may indeed represent the particular acceptances and rejections of men living under the conditions of modern times. If I were asked to generalize about this condition as it has been manifest in poets, painters, and composers during the last century and a half, I should say that it is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life – rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable. I should say that this attitude arose from a feeling of being ill at ease in the universe, so to speak – the collapse of religion, of the old close-knit community and family may have something to do with the origins of the feeling. I do not know. But whatever the source of this sense of being unwedded to the universe, I think that one's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union. . . . If this suggestion is true, then modern art has a different face from the art of the past because it has a somewhat different function for the artist in our time. I suppose that the art of far more ancient and "simple" artists expressed something quite different, a feeling of already being at one with the world . . . "

– Robert Motherwell, published in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Spring 1951

Gordon House
Blue
1961
screenprint
Tate Gallery

Ellsworth Kelly
Red/Blue (Untitled)
1964
screenprint
Tate Gallery

from ABC Art

"The concept of "Minimal Art," which is surely applicable to the empty, repetitious, uninflected art of many young painters, sculptors, dancers, and composers working now, was recently discussed as an aesthetic problem by Richard Wollheim (Arts, January, 1965). It is Professor Wollheim's contention that the art content of such works as Duchamp's found-objects (that is, the "unassisted readymades" to which nothing is done) or Ad Reinhardt's nearly invisible "black" paintings is intentionally low, and that resistance to this kind of art comes mainly from the spectator's sense that the artist has not worked hard enough or put enough effort into his art. But, as Professor Wollheim points out, a decision can represent work. Considering as "Minimal Art" either art made from common objects that are not unique but mass-produced or art that is not much differentiated from ordinary things, he says that Western artist have aided us to focus on specific objects by setting them apart as the "unique possessors of certain general characteristics." Although they are increasingly being abandoned, working it a lot, making it hard to do, and differentiating it as much as possible from the world of common objects, formerly were ways of insuring the uniqueness and identity of an art object."

"Similarly, critic John Ashbery has asked if art can be excellent if anybody can do it. He concludes that "what matters is the artist's will to discover, rather than the manual skills he may share with hundreds of other artists. Anybody could have discovered America, but only Columbus did." Such a downgrading of talent, facility, virtuosity, and technique, with its concomitant elevation of conceptual power, coincides precisely with the attitude of the artists I am discussing (although it could also apply to the "conceptual" paintings of Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, and others)."

– Barbara Rose, published in Art in America, October 1965