"Each of On Kawara's Date Paintings is individualized to some degree. Typefaces vary, as do the colors. They are always horizontal in format but each one corresponds to one of eight predetermined sizes." (Caption, p.178); "Much as...
Sculpture; Mixed media; Women; Women's rights; Feminism; Feminists; Sexism; Stereotyping; Discrimination; Sex; Genitals; Body parts; Human body; Biology; History; Arts & crafts; Dinner parties; Celebrations; Parties; Guests; Dining tables;...
"Each of the ceramic plates adorning the table in this installation was individualized. In this photograph, the Georgia O'Keeffe plate on the right owed something of its original design to her Black Iris paintings of the mid-1920s. The plate...
Paintings; Acrylic paintings; Abstract paintings; Abstract works
"In Louis's enormous 'veils' of the 1950s the physical operations of pouring paint or tilting a canvas so that the paint floods down it are powerfully implied." (Caption, p.28); "[Clement] Greenberg's conception of 'Modernism' as...
"Johns used letters or numbers as a means of reintroducing the signifiers of a collective sign system into a Modernist 'field' previously answerable to subjective judgments of taste. The textures in his drawings in particular are subtly...
"Judd's industrially manufactured, modular pieces, developed from 1966 onwards, were stubbornly empirical investigations of specific materials and visual effects. He shunned mystification and openly declared the nature of his structures. The...
Paintings; Abstract works; Abstract paintings; Portrait paintings; Portraits; Heads (Anatomy); Faces; Men; Politicians; Government officials; People associated with politics & government; Activists; Revolutionaries; Beards
"Look closely at the image […]. It appears to be an icon of postwar experimental art - an early 1950s abstraction by the American painter Jackson Pollock. However, read the caption and it is revealed to be a pastiche by Art & Language, a...
"Such barely recognizable human images were the outcome of a dialogue with materials. Layers of thick paste were applied to an absorbent sheet of rag paper laid on a canvas, with a layer of colored paste and varnish finally added to the...
Sculpture; Allusions; Chemistry; Science; Interpersonal relations; Social science; Sociology; Utopias
"The work consisted of a triangular gauze filter stretched across a corner into which lumps of fat had been packed. Apart from alluding to physical metamorphoses brought about via osmosis, processes of refinement and purification were evoked....
"There was a lyrical quality to Hirst's use of butterflies' lifecycles, both in the 1991 installation In and Out of Love, and the related 1994-5 series of paintings, of which I Love You forms part." (Caption, p.231); "By contrast to...
Paintings; Allusions; Anti-Americanism; Politics & government; Political issues; Capitalism; Imperialism; Wealth; Corruption; Poverty; Emigration & immigration; Social classes; Economic & social conditions; Domestic life; Child labor;...
"This enormous, collage-like painting is crammed with anti-American allusions. An electric chair sits on the plinth at the top center (the Rosenbergs were electrocuted as Russian spies in 1953). A GI nonchalantly reads a pornographic magazine....
"This is an early example of Buren's use of stripe motifs in a public context. He has continued the practice to the present. For instance, in 1997 in Munster, Germany, his contribution to a festival of site-specific sculpture consisted of...
"This is an early example of Buren's use of stripe motifs in a public context. He has continued the practice to the present. For instance, in 1997 in Munster, Germany, his contribution to a festival of site-specific sculpture consisted of...
"This painting deliberately combines a host of allusions to Spanish culture such as the stark black/white contrasts of Goya, Velasquez, and Picasso, the Spanish poet Lorca's lament to a dead bullfighter, 'Llanto por Ignacio Jánchez mejías',...
"Vassily Kandinsky was a prominent member of the Bauhaus faculty from 1922, and he remained until 1933, when it was closed by the Nazis. His paintings of that period reflect the geometric angularity he espoused as part of the Russian...
Sculpture; Jetties; Industrialization; Industry; Petroleum industry; Land use; Ecology; Nature; Bodies of water; Lakes & ponds; Aerial views; Bird's-eye views; Film stills; Motion pictures; Maps; Dirt roads; Roads; Streets; Books
Documentation of film stills from Spiral Jetty, 1970. "These are frames from Smithson's half-hour-long film based on his Spiral Jetty. Shots taken of the dusty road on the way to the site of the work were intercut with images of the blazing...
Five white canvases with pupae, steel shelves with potted flowers, bowls of sugar-water solution, table, radiators, humidifiers, and live butterflies; "There was a lyrical quality to Hirst's use of butterflies' lifecycles, both in the 1991...
Schiller, Friedrich, 1759-1805. Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen; Schiller, Friedrich, 1759-1805--Philosophy; Play (Philosophy)
Friedrich Schiller's psychological theory of play, his hypothesis about human nature, is embedded in the Aesthetic Letters . Its trans-historical value owes much to the committed interest in life in the late Enlightenment, and the theory itself is...
Galvanized steel and concrete. "Deacon's organically related forms often derive from sources in the Bible, poetry, fairy stories, and figures of speech. In the two versions of the laminated wood sculpture For Those Who Have Ears (1982-3), for...
Gary Snyder's poetry conveys Zen states of consciousness through unconventional grammar and syntax. From his first book Riprap in 1959 to his last collection of poems, Mountains and Rivers Without End in 1996, he has confronted the challenge of...
Installation, L'Attico Gallery, Rome. Detail of wall drawing in pencil. Draughtsmen: Climbo, Piccari, Battista, Pranovi. "In the early 1960s LeWitt had largely devoted himself to producing modular open cube structures made from wood. His 'wall...
