Optical Noise by Amy Huang

Optical Noise American & British Prints/Films from the 1960s-1970s

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Optical Noise, January 25-February 21, 2012, at the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University. Front cover: Detail of Richard H by Harold Cohen; photo by Sarah Rovang Back cover: Detail of Richard V by Harold Cohen; photo by Sarah Rovang Photo credits: Andy Romer and David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University Catalog design: Amy S. Huang

Optical Noise American & British Prints/Films from the 1960s-1970s

David Winton Bell Gallery/Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Brown University

Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction John Christie Chuck Close Harold Cohen Bruce Conner Robert Cottingham Allan D’Arcangelo Richard Estes Jasper Johns Alan Jones Roy Lichtenstein Eduardo Paolozzi

Peter Philips Mel Ramos Robert Rauschenberg James Rosenquist Nancy Spero & Leon Golub Ronald Stein Andy Warhol

Glossary Further Reading

Cage/Lorca, 1977 Worksheet, 1979 Keith IV, 1975 Richard I, II, III,V, H, 1967 CROSSROADS, 1976 Carl’s, 1978 Watertower, 1973 Qualicraft Shoes, 1974 Cup 2 Picasso, 1973 Pour les Lèvres (For the Lips), 1965 Seascape (I), 1964 Landscape #7, 1967 Erni and T.T. at St. Louis Airport, 1967 Untitled, 1967 Donald Duck Meets Mondrian, 1967 The Silken World of Michelangelo, 1967 6 × 8, Dreaming, 1974 Tobacco Rose, 1965 Jewish Museum poster, 1963 Campaign, 1965 They Will Torture You, My Friend, 1971 Lessons of the Camp, 1967 Jacqueline Kennedy II, 1965 Screen Tests, 1966 Untitled 12, 1974

1 2 6 8 10 12 15 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32

36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 54 57

Acknowledgements The Optical Noise exhibition and catalog are the result of many discussions, various inspirations, and the invaluable advice and assistance of several individuals. We wish to thank the faculty and staff of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, especially Professors K. Dian Kriz for her support, and Evelyn Lincoln who revised all printmaking-related entries in the glossary. The staff of the David Winton Bell Gallery patiently and thoughtfully offered input at every stage of this project. We particularly wish to extend our gratitude to Director Jo-Ann Conklin and Curator Ian Alden Russell. Andy Romer, a student at Rhode Island School of Design, photographed the works drawn for the exhibition from the Bell Gallery collection for our catalog. Michelle Silva at the Bruce Conner Foundation shepherded us through the loan process with great attention and understanding. Curator Geralyn Huxley of the Warhol Foundation likewise graciously approved the loan of Warholâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Screen Tests. Jan Howard, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, generously shared her extensive knowledge with us in the print room. Finally, we are each indebted to our respective advisors, friends, family, and other supporters.

Introduction “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” John Cage, The Credo of Music (1937)

ptical Noise is the latest in a long and distinguished series of exhibitions and cataloguing projects prepared by first- and second-year graduate students in the history of art and architecture at Brown University. It is the first to be based almost entirely on works in the collection of the David Winton Bell Gallery. This collection began nearly fifty years ago. It was inaugurated with gifts of works of art from friends and former students of the Programs (now Departments) of the History of Art and Architecture and Visual Art. Over the years, the collection has grown thanks to donations of works for the purpose that they be studied by undergraduates and used for teaching by the faculty. The collection—from its early days in the 1960s and 1970s when young collectors were attracted by the renaissance of printmaking in contemporary American and British art and wanted future students to share their enthusiasms—has remained particularly strong in works on paper, especially prints. Some of these prints (and two films which have been kindly lent to this exhibition) are the subject of Optical Noise, a title derived from Leo Steinberg’s characterization of Robert Rauschenberg’s images.1 The works on view in this exhibition can be seen as representative of one or another art movement of the later twentieth century: Andy Warhol’s Jacqueline Kennedy II is a certified piece of Pop Art and Richard Estes’s Qualicraft Shoes is a wonderful specimen of Photorealist aesthetics. However, the object of this exhibition is neither to challenge nor to replace such well-worn labels, which remain useful for various purposes. Nor do we wish to deny differences between American and British print production in these years. As useful as these distinctions may be, our purpose here is to draw attention to the specific qualities shared by these works. A noise is generally an unwanted and undesirable signal (aural or visual), one that has been sent by mistake (a smudge of ink on the newspaper page) or one that is received Leo Steinberg, “Reflections on the State of Criticism,” in Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Branden W. Joseph (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 29. 1

as interference (a car honking, a baby crying). Steinberg coined the astute phrase “optical noise” to describe the effect of overlapping images interfering with each other in some of Rauschenberg’s works using photographic transfer.The resulting “noise” was fully intended, but its emergence nonetheless depended on a carefully controlled accidental process. The noise is thus paradoxically expected, welcomed, and appreciated. This exhibition retains Steinberg’s understanding of optical noise and extends its meaning not only to include the exploitation of techniques of mechanical reproduction but also to echo the attitude of the artists toward their contemporary culture. Most of the works exhibited draw upon established topoi of popular culture, with a marked preference for familiar images from contemporary advertising, images that were already invested with cultural significance: a pin-up girl, a Kleenex box, a can of soup, an urban storefront. Even today, the visual material of such art may appear to be trivial, vulgar, and rather inconsequential: “I go to the gallery to get away from the supermarket, not to repeat the experience,”2 wrote the art critic Barbara Rose in response to Pop Art. Problematically, the artworks under consideration had absorbed elements of the critic’s contemporary visual culture that she would rather (quite literally) have disregarded. Such elements generated optical noise, i.e. a type of visual data that one would rather not “see” (or regard) as a significant component of culture but rather consign among the “detritus of communication” (to use Steinberg’s words). Visual artists needed to cross a threshold of resistance to promote their new attitude toward mass culture. Asked to provide a definition of Pop Art in 1963, Roy Lichtenstein defined it as “an involvement with … things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on us.”3 “I love it and I hate it,” later said the Photorealist painter Robert Bechtle referring to the extreme banality of his subject matter.4 Relaxing value judgment without necessarily giving up their critical distance, the artists shown here were at the forefront of a way of perceiving the world that is more attuned to the increasing speed, pervasiveness, and overall influence of mass culture. Appropriating the iconography and/ or the techniques of the mass media, applying them to different subject matter or electing to paint places that they would rather tear down compel both artists and viewers to confront noise beyond discrimination, whether one likes it or not.5 Fine art printmaking might appear to have given artists the means to compete with the mass manufactured and mass distributed products of our contemporary society. NevBarbara Rose, “Pop Art at the Guggenheim,” Art International 7, no. 5 (May 25, 1963): 20-22. Roy Lichtenstein in “What is Pop Art, Part I,” interviews with G.R. Swenson (November 1963), reprinted in Steven H. Madoff (ed.), Pop Art: A Critical History, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 107. 4 Robert Bechtle in “The Photo-Realists: 12 Interviews,” Art in America 60, no. 6 (November-December 1972): 74. 5 See Richard Estes, ibid., 80. 2 3

ertheless, as the artist Richard Hamilton suggested already in 1957, the standards of mass culture are not so easily fulfilled. Art would have to be at once “Popular (designed for a mass audience) / Transient (short-term solution) / Expendable (easily-forgotten) / Low cost / Mass produced / Young (aimed at youth) / Witty / Sexy / Gimmicky / Glamorous / Big business.”6 The images included in Optical Noise may certainly display one or several of those values, if not all at the same time. They also question them. Despite many attempts to make artworks more “accessible,”7 the gap between art and commodity is not easily bridged. Yet, the prints and two films included in this exhibition share a simple and powerful characteristic: they are “machine-made images in a machine-made world.”8 As many artists of this generation favored the medium of print (and played along with its specificity) they clearly emphasized, along with the critic Lawrence Alloway, that a “rejection of the mass produced arts is not … a defense of culture but an attack on it.”9 The artistic stance that arose simultaneously in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s pursued a radical questioning of distinctions between “high” and “low” culture initiated by earlier generations of artists (Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists…). Reusing bits and pieces of existing cultural artifacts to create new images of contemporary life was new at this scale, although it had roots in the work of Marcel Duchamp who inspired many of the artists included here. Strikingly, these pieces are seldom offered whole. A recognizable image like Donald Duck retains some of its original associations when recontextualized within a print. But when it appears together with thematically incongruous images (like a reference to Mondrian), new significance is implied even though what this significance might be remains unclear and unstable. As artists fragmented, selected and recombined pieces of contemporary culture into new expressive “subjects,” they also transformed their visual material: breaking up conventional representation by subjecting the viewed space and its contents to intrusive manipulation. Using mechanical techniques adapted from photography and industrial and other kinds of non-art production like newspapers and billboards, images were converted into systems of dots, overlaid, oddly cropped, their colors and contours changed so that original references were disrupted although they remained allusively present in the final work. Richard Hamilton, “Letter to Peter and Alison Smithson,” January 16, 1957, in Collected Words 1953-1982 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 28. 7 See Constance W. Glenn ed., The Great America Pop Art Store: Multiples of the Sixties (Santa Monica California: Smart Art Press, 1997). 8 Ellen H. Johnson, “The Image Duplicators—Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Warhol,” Canadian Art 23 (January 1966): 15. 9 Lawrence Alloway, “The Arts and The Mass Media,” Architectural Design & Construction (February 1958): 85. 6

Such prints and films drew upon a new kind of attention, which Walter Benjamin had described as “distracted viewing” when speaking of the urban environment—as opposed to focused contemplation.10 In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan argued that our modern environment—saturated with information—could not be processed from a visual standpoint anymore (i.e. focused) but rather aurally (i.e. at once). Relying on a powerful metaphor to further this perceptive shift, he explained: “We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from ‘above,’ from ‘below,’ from in ‘front’ of us, from ‘behind’ us, from our ‘right,’ from our ‘left.’ We can’t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids.”11 Like noise, which hovers on the periphery of sensory perception, visual dissonance paradoxically de-contextualizes and so makes familiar images new and richly allusive.These allusions, like the images themselves, which attract and repel our attention as they blend with the visual cacophony of our contemporary experience, must be reconstituted by ourselves, as viewers. In many ways, the installation of this exhibition was arranged to highlight this process and pay homage to the first exhibition to display this type of art by the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in the Autumn of 1953. “The ear world,” wrote McLuhan, “is a world of simultaneous relationships.” Let’s see what it sounds like.

This exhibition was curated by Monica Bravo, Alexandra K. Collins, Sara Hayat, Amy S. Huang, Sarah Rovang, and Rebecca A. Szantyr, PhD students in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, under the guidance of Professors Hervé Vanel and Catherine W. Zerner. January 2012

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.,1968), 217-252. 11 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Message (New York, Toronto: Bantam Books, 1967), n.p. 10

John Christie (British, b. 1945) Cage/Lorca, 1977 Lithograph 6¼ × 5 inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Saul P. Steinberg 1980.1589

ohn Christie presents two graphically-simplified images derived from widely-circulated photographs depicting John Cage (1912-1992), the twentieth-century American composer, and Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), the Spanish poet and dramatist. Cage’s laughing expression and his snapshot’s vibrant red tone overshadows Lorca’s smaller, introspective portrait. Although the print establishes a visual contrast between the two individuals, accentuated by the large tear in the middle register, there are important conceptual confluences in the avant-garde artists’ careers. Below the headshots, a page apparently casually torn from a metal-pronged memo pad cleverly renders Cage’s name in musical notation (C-A-G-E), although fully two-thirds of the score depicted is crossed out. With this, Christie alludes to Cage’s pioneering use of chance and indeterminacy in his compositions in favor of music’s traditional reliance on arrangement and harmony. As Cage quipped: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.”1 Cage’s reference to his sound pieces as a form of poetry is comparable to 1

John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 109.

Lorca’s application of musical terminology to his literary work. The quote at the bottom of the print—Aire, tierra y soledad (air, earth, and solitude)—is a line from Lorca’s short poem Nocturno esquemático (Schematic Nocturne), published in the collection Canciones (Songs). The quotation and Lorca’s name are printed over the colors of the Spanish flag, alluding to the widespread belief that Lorca was killed by Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Both the memo and the colors of the Spanish flag are rotated from their usual vertical orientations, perhaps referring to the artists’ shared homosexuality or, more suggestively, to Cage and Lorca’s productive reorientations of their media—music and poetry. Christie’s visual homage to these masters of essentially auditory media continued in his later artist’s books, the medium with which he is most associated. Monica Bravo

Bibliography Berger, John, and John Christie. I Send You This Cadmium Red…. Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000. Cage, John. The Anarchy of Silence. John Cage and Experimental Art. Barcelona: ACTAR, 2009. Exhibition catalog. ———. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Courtney, Cathy. The Looking Book: A Pocket History of Circle Press, 1967-96. London: Circle Press, 1996. Duran, Manuel, ed. Lorca: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Foster, David W. “Towards an Analysis of Poetic Structure in García Lorca.” Hispanic Review 43, no. 1 (Winter 1975): 49-78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/472511. Jones, Caroline A. “Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 628-65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343900. Joseph, Branden W. “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence.” October 81 (Summer 1997): 80-104. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/779020. Kahn, Douglas. “John Cage: Silence and Silencing.” The Musical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 556-598. Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. John Cage. London: Penguin Press, 1971. Taylor, Simon. “John Christie.” In Portfolios: Artists’ Series from the Collection of the University of Maryland, edited by Vicki C. Wright, 16-17. College Park, MD: The Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 1986. Exhibition catalog.

John Christie (British, b. 1945) Worksheet, 1979 Letterpress and screenprint 8½ × 11 inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Saul P. Steinberg 1980.1587

his silkscreen print pictures a contact sheet, a tool used by photographers working with film in order to see a roll of negatives in their positive form. Photographers often mark these sheets to signal to themselves or their printers which negatives are worthy of being printed as enlargements. John Christie replicates the illusion of waxy yellow lines produced by a China marker, as well as red tape used to mask out undesirable images. Several of the images that Christie has “selected” here reappear as larger collage elements throughout Red Bird, a contemporaneous artist’s book that he created to accompany love poems by Christopher Logue (British, b. 1926) based on those by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). The tiny pictures floating in an inky darkness focus almost obsessively on a woman’s lips, eyes, and fingers—features we might expect in a book dedicated to themes of love and eroticism. Red Bird was one of a series of nine artist’s books commissioned by an American businessman, and published by Circle Press in 1978. Christie temporarily left his filmmaking career with the BBC to work on the series with the small British publisher.1 In this Worksheet, Christie simultaneously demonstrates his artistic process and reminds the viewer that photography is simply another, albeit frequently privileged, form of printmaking. Monica Bravo

Bibliography Berger, John, and John Christie. I Send You This Cadmium Red…. Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000. Courtney, Cathy. The Looking Book: A Pocket History of Circle Press, 1967-96. London: Circle Press, 1996. Taylor, Simon. “John Christie.” In Portfolios: Artists’ Series from the Collection of the University of Maryland, edited by Vicki C.Wright, 16-17. College Park, MD:The Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 1986. Exhibition catalog.

Cathy Courtney, The Looking Book: A Pocket History of Circle Press, 1967-96 (London: Circle Press, 1996), 132.

Chuck Close (American, b. 1940) Keith IV, 1975 Lithograph 20½ × 16 inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Kenneth Blackman 2006.2

eith IV is the final and largest image in Chuck Close’s series Keith Four Times, the artist’s first experiment with lithography. Collaborating with Landfall Press, Inc., Close encountered difficulties with the lithographic method. Lithography “is all chemistry,” explains Close, “one chemical reaction can change everything.”1 An artist who often uses his own fingerprints in lieu of brushes, Close’s process is intensely tactile and consequently, his final pieces evoke a haptic mode of viewership.2 Here, the lithography process creates a more mechanical, optical effect than is familiar in Close’s work. However, removing the work from the context of Keith Four Times (a series primarily focused on scale), Keith IV allows some of Close’s characteristic hapticity to return, revealing textural qualities of ink imprinted on paper. Unlike many of the Photorealists, Close is more interested in iterative experiments with medium and Richard Shiff, Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration (Princeton, NJ; Houston, TX: Princeton University Press; Blaffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston, 2003), 11. 2 The distinction between haptic and optic visuality comes from historian Alois Riegl. Haptic looking involves the sense of touch in addition to sight. In the case of Close, the artist’s facture using his own fingers in lieu of brushes allows the viewer to sympathetically relate to the mode of production, placing themselves in the role of the artist touching the canvas to create images. 1

scale than exploring innovative subject matter: “I don’t want to paint camper trailers one year and pickup trucks the next…I wanted to alter all the other variables—scale, material, technique, or whatever—in order to change my experience.”3 For Close, the human head is a universally accessible subject—viewers are already trained to look at human features. Close’s experiments with facture are contingent on the specific subject of the face, designed to overthrow the thoroughly engrained and instantaneous act of facial recognition. What usually gets classed as “optical noise” in recognizing faces (skin, hair, ears, etc.) receives the same level of detail and attention in Close’s portraits as “key areas of the face which control likeness.”4 The intensity of this exploration is largely enabled by the artist’s reuse of the same photographic subject; between 1968 when Keith Hollingworth gave his photo to Close and 1975, Keith had already been depicted many times, most notably in Close’s first large printmaking venture, Keith Mezzotint (1972). In this way, Close achieves a deep intimacy with his subjects that gives his formal and methodological experiments an undeniably humanizing foundation. Sarah Rovang

Bibliography Arthur, John. Realists at Work. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1983. Close, Chuck, and Joanne Kesten. The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of His Subjects. New York: A.R.T. Press, 1997. Close, Chuck, and Kim Levin. Chuck Close: Recent Work. New York: Pace Publications, 1979. Exhibition catalog. Finch, Christopher. Chuck Close:Work. Munich: Prestel, 2007. Meisel, Susan Pear. The Complete Guide to Photo-Realist Printmaking. New York: Louis K. Meisel Gallery, 1978. Storr, Robert, Chuck Close, Kirk Varnedoe, and Deborah Wye. Chuck Close. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998. Sultan, Terrie, Chuck Close, and Richard Shiff. Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration. Princeton, NJ; Houston, TX: Princeton University Press; Blaffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston, 2003.

3 4

Arthur, John, Realists at Work (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1983), 49. Ibid., 43.

Harold Cohen (British, b. 1928) Richard I, II, III,V, H, 1967 Screenprints 25½ × 28½ inches each David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Howard A. Karshan 1981.1681.A-F Left: Richard H

n this set of six prints, a photograph of artist Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) is manipulated to create a series of different optical perceptions. Five prints in this series are shown here, including two examples of Richard I. In Richard H, the original photograph is screened with silver ink.This color was perhaps chosen to evoke a connection with the key role played by silver salt in black and white silver halide photography. Cohen then rearranged the dot structure of the newsprint grid. By changing the size, color, shape, and position of the dots, Hamilton’s photographic image took on different types of distortion and degrees of clarity and abstraction. Richard I, II, III, and V give a general impression of variations of Richard H in different colors, size of dots, and overexposed—details are lost and only the silhouette remains. However, upon closer observation one will find that the image is far more complex than it seems. Richard I appears like a dark silhouette of Richard against a yellow background. In fact, the silhouette is made up by overlapping magenta and green dots. When viewed from a distance the two bright colors are blended together by optical illusion to look like dark brown. Richard II is composed of two layers of images. The bottom layer shows Richard’s silhouette in fine dots similar to those in Richard H, only in black and olive instead of silver and white. It is then screened over by a layer of green with bigger round holes which allow us to see parts of the olive-colored layer underneath it. Richard III and V may seem like two similar images only with the proportion of magenta and green reversed. Actually, the two images are very different. Richard III comprises a complicated pattern of olive, cyan, magenta and green dots, almost resembling a thermal image. On the other hand, the dot pattern of Richard V can be described as a magenta layer with uneven holes revealing the cyan color underneath it.The magenta layer here appears to have thickness since the holes are surrounded by green area with fine dark dots to suggest depth. 12

Above: Detail of Richard V Below: Detail of Richard II

Top: Detail of Richard I Middle: Detail of Richard III Below: Richard V

The intervention of the camera between the artist and printer is a significant feature of modern methods of printmaking. Photography has given the printmaker a new range of found and accidental effects. The half-tone screenprinting method makes it possible to break down a photographic image into small dots that allow gradations of tone and color.1 Such a printing process is crucial to the visual effect of this series. Here, Cohen takes a photographic image as a starting point and then obliterates the image to the extent that the patterns and textures created by the printmaking technique which is used to reproduce photographs, rather than the subject of the original photograph, are central to the print.2 Hamilton was a key member of the Independent Group, a group of artists and critics active in London in the 1950s. Their main interest was reconsidering modernism and the role of popular culture in the modern world. Hamilton’s work Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956), produced for the show This Is Tomorrow by the Independent Group, is considered one of the first works of Pop Art. Around the time Cohen created this set of Richard prints, Hamilton himself made a series entitled Swingeing London 67 (1968-1969). He took a photograph as source material and recreated the image multiple times in different media while also changing the color, form, and texture.Through this project, Hamilton challenged the conventional idea that “a painting is to be experienced as a totality seen and understood all at once before its components are examined.”3 While the way Hamilton manipulated the original images was different from what Cohen did in this series, both artists were interested in opening up the possibility for multiple interpretations of art. Cohen started his artistic career as a painter and printmaker in London. He became interested in creating art with artificial intelligence after moving to the United States in 1968. This series was made one year before he left London. Although Cohen was not directly connected to the Independent Group, he collaborated with Hamilton on several projects, most notably the Institute of Contemporary Arts Print Portfolio in 1964. Amy S. Huang

Bibliography Cohen, Harold. Harold Cohen. Millbank, London: Tate Gallery, 1983. Hamilton, Richard, and Richard Morphet. Richard Hamilton: The Tate Gallery, 12 March-19 April 1970. London: Tate Gallery, 1970. Hamilton, Richard, and John Russell. Richard Hamilton. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1973. Newton, Charles. Photography in Printmaking. London:Victoria and Albert Museum, 1979. Spencer, Charles. A Decade of Printmaking. London: Academy Editions, 1973.

Charles Spencer, A Decade of Printmaking (London: Academy Editions, 1973), 27. Charles Newton et al., Photography in Printmaking (London:V & A, 1979), 29. 3 Richard Hamilton, and John Russell, Richard Hamilton (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1973), 72. 1 2

Bruce Conner (American, 1933-2008) CROSSROADS, 1976 35mm transferred to digital files Black and white, sound, 36 minutes Courtesy the Conner Family Trust, ÂŠ Conner Family Trust 15

Stills from CROSSROADS

his film shows the same event—an underwater atomic bomb test—from multiple camera angles. Exploring the radioactive effects a nuclear weapon would have on naval warships, the United States Government undertook a series of tests in the Pacific Ocean nearly a year after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Five hundred cameras positioned at various vantage points documented this single explosion on July 25, 1946. Bruce Conner edited together over twenty shots from the Defense Department’s recently declassified footage of the historic event. Conner chose not to alter the footage, some of which preserves traces of radiation and shock waves, except for the addition of fades between shots. The film shifts from documentary to aesthetic object as longer, distant shots give way to explosions orchestrated in quick succession. This transition is dramatized by sound: Patrick Gleeson synthesized the diegetic sounds of birds, airplane engines, and explosions accompanying the first thirteen minutes of the film, and Terry Riley composed the meditative organ music for the remainder. Conner arrived in San Francisco in the late 1950s and became an active participant in the city’s counterculture. Conner was already receiving institutional recognition for his assemblages sculpted from found objects when he began experimenting with film assembled from found footage.1 His work in both media evokes the past tense, estranging the viewer from images, objects, and sounds derived from pre-existing sounds.2 Unlike the slick finishes produced by many contemporary Pop artists, however, Conner utilized a “poverty” aesthetic, here with an overtly political message.3 The U.S. Government named its experiments at Bikini Atoll “Operation Crossroads,” but in titling this film CROSSROADS, Conner suggests that humanity stands at a metaphorical crossroads on the brink of the Atomic Age. Monica Bravo

Bibliography Bass, Warren. “The Past Restructured: Bruce Conner and Others.” Journal of the University Film Association 33, no. 2 (“Avant-Garde Film/Video,” Spring 1981): 15-22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687561. Blickle Stiftung, Ursula, Gerald Matt, and Barbara Steffen, eds. Bruce Conner: The 70s. Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2010. Exhibition catalog. Callenbach, Ernest. “Crossroads Review.” Film Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 57-58. http://www.jstor. org/stable/1211621. Conner, Bruce, dir. Two Films by Bruce Conner: CROSSROADS and LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, DVD. 1976, 1959-1965; Los Angeles, Michael Kohn Gallery, 2003. Moritz, William, and Beverly O’Neill. “Fallout: Some Notes on the Films of Bruce Conner.” Film Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 36-42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1211806.

Barbara Steffen, “Bruce Conner, the Nonconformist,” in Bruce Conner:The 70s, eds. Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Gerald Matt, and Barbara Steffen (Nürnberg:Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2010), 48-49. Exhibition catalog. 2 Malcolm Turvey, “Bruce Conner and the Power of Repetition,” in ibid., 64. 3 Jean Conner and Gerald Matt, “Jean Conner in Conversation with Gerald Matt,” in ibid., 152-153. 1

Robert Cottingham (American, b. 1935) Carl’s, 1978 Etching and aquatint 10 × 10¼ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Richard M. Rieser, Jr., ’65 1981.1687.2

hrough use of various media, scales, and compositional techniques, Robert Cottingham prompts his viewers to reexamine a ubiquitous, American consumer landscape. Carl’s specifically demonstrates Cottingham’s mastery of cropping and perspective, techniques he perfected working in advertising art. By focusing on fragments of lettered signs at skewed angles, Cottingham engages in sophisticated visual wordplay. For example, where a complete word is truncated, a new word is often formed; in Carl’s the elimination of “P” reveals “Ants.” Believing that words and letters add significant meaning to his work, Cottingham freely alters the wording on the signs he photographs.1 With its exacting assemblage of sign fragments and rich monochromatic tonalities, Carl’s hardly resembles a “canonical” Photorealist work. Indeed, though self-taught painter and printmaker Robert Cottingham has been dubbed the “most formal, abstract, and expressive” of the Photorealists, the artist identifies strongly with Pop Art, maintaining that Pop (not Photorealism) revivified the American realist tradition after Edward Hopper.2 Cottingham’s neon signs and billboards provoke a distracted mode of looking more akin to the graphic soup cans of Andy Warhol than the glossy reflections of Richard Estes. After his first printmaking experiences in 1972 as part of Documenta 5, Cottingham explored numerous printmaking techniques, often producing several prints of the same subject using various methods.3 Carl’s is part of the Cottingham Suite, a group published by Landfall Press comprised of two color lithographs and two aquatints. Before the aquatint was prepared in 1977, Carl’s already existed as a small acrylic and a larger oil painting. The aquatint renders tonal depth and soft lines, diverging from the slicker, polished look of the paintings.4 “Everytime I make a print,” Cottingham reports, “I come back to painting in a fresh way.”5 Sarah Rovang

Bibliography Arthur, John. Realists at Work. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1983. Bowman, Russell. “Words and Images: A Persistent Paradox.” Art Journal 45, no. 4 (1985): 335-343. Cottingham, Robert, William C. Landwehr, and John Arthur. Robert Cottingham: A Print Retrospective, 19721986. Springfield, MO: Springfield Art Museum, 1986. Meisel, Louis K. Photorealism since 1980. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993. Meisel, Susan P. The Complete Guide to Photo-Realist Printmaking. New York: Louis K. Meisel Gallery, 1978. Serwer, Jacquelyn Days. “Heroic Relics: The Art of Robert Cottingham.” American Art 12, no. 2 (1998): 6-25.

Jacquelyn Days Serwer, “Heroic Relics: The Art of Robert Cottingham.” American Art 12, no. 2 (1998): 8. John Arthur, Robert Cottingham: A Print Retrospective, 1972-1986 (Springfield, MO: Springfield Art Museum, 1986), 27. Classified by several scholars as a Photorealist during the 1970s and 1980s, Cottingham is less interested in using photographic techniques to accurately capture the textural qualities of his environment than in the graphic forms and compositional possibilities the signage presents. Louis K. Meisel included Cottingham in his first two volumes of photorealist work, though Cottingham sees his work as more of a Pop Art development in the same genealogy as Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, and Charles Demuth. For more on Cottingham’s views on realism versus Pop Art, refer to John Arthur, Realists at Work (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1983). 3 Serwer, “Heroic Relics,” 11. Documenta 5 was one of a series of ongoing modern and contemporary art exhibitions routinely held in Kassel, Germany. 4 Arthur, Robert Cottingham, 28. 5 John Arthur, Realists at Work (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1983), 66. 1 2

Allan D’Arcangelo (American, 1930-1998) Watertower, 1973 Screenprints 28 × 22 inches each David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Saul P. Steinberg 1980.1443-7

onsisting of five prints set in motion through sequential order, Allan D’Arcangelo’s Watertower series contains multiple temporal shifts that lend it an almost cinematographic quality. The water tower is more or less indecipherable in each isolated print, but as we connect the images in retrospect, the structure gradually emerges in our minds. D’Arcangelo slowly guides us on a route between the right and left leg of the tower while in the midst of this trajectory shifting our views towards its dizzying heights. In the last print he offers us a more distant view, completing our image of the structure. Although D’Arcangelo renders the water tower in remarkably precise perspective in this series, the prints’ hard edged character, the elimination of detail in favor of flat patches of color, as well as the abstract geometric division of the picture plane in each print by means of an intricate web of cables and trusses, lends the images a highly artificial, almost mechanical character. The vibrant red and white stripes of the tower set against the solid blue of the sky in the background, together with the intersecting cables that recall the contours of stars, evoke the colors and patterns found in the American flag, pointing to the mechanization of the American landscape via a pervasive and pragmatic network of highways. As ubiquitous roadside structures, water towers represent the bland visual culture of America’s roadsides, which is constantly fragmented and recombined when it is seen from a speeding car on a highway. The commonplace yet confusing and unstable imagery of roadside perception preoccupied D’Arcangelo throughout his career. Sara Hayat

Bibliography Ashton, Dore. The American Landscape: Paintings by D’Arcangelo. Buffalo: Burchfield Center, 1979. Ferrari, Silvia, Walter Guadagnini, and Allan D’Archangelo. D’Arcangelo: Retrospective. Milan: Silvana, 2005.

Richard Estes (American, b. 1932) Qualicraft Shoes, 1974 Screenprint 32¼ × 44¼ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Mr. Edwin S. Marks 1979.1203

ninhabited, spotlessly clean, and incisively crisp, the storefront of Qualicraft Shoes illustrates Richard Estes’s developing understanding of reflected light and his newfound passion for screenprinting during the early 1970s. An influential Photorealist based in Manhattan, Estes favors frank engagement with his urban subject matter, citing the inspiration of Canaletto, Vermeer, and Hopper.1 In 1967 he began to photograph reflective surfaces, translating these into immaculately detailed paintings that bring the same sharp focus to the entire picture plane.2 By the early 1970s, Estes was photographing storefronts head-on, using these glazed commercial exteriors to explore qualities of symmetry and the interplay of translucent surfaces. A rich palimpsest of reflections, Qualicraft Shoes exemplifies Estes’s intensifying fascination with the behavior of light, which during this period superseded any significant engagement with illusionistic space, perspective, or architectural features. Best known as a painter, Estes has been described as a “dexterous printmaker.”3 Looking to imitate his own painting style, Estes chose silkscreen for his first print commission (an eight print series entitled Urban Landscapes for Parasol Press, Ltd.) in 1971.4 Following Urban Landscapes, Qualicraft Shoes was the artist’s first larger individual print. Using acrylic and gouache on illustration board, Estes fabricated a maquette for the silkscreen shop Domberger KB in Filderstadt, Germany. Composed of more than a hundred colors, the final print closely follows the inspiration of the maquette, translating Estes’s sharp detail, multivalent reflections, and sharp lines. Particularly in the distilled medium of screenprint, Estes’s work provokes a mode of viewership characterized by political and emotional disengagement from the subject matter—the unfurling layers of reflections require an aesthetic concentration that distracts the viewer from the social or historical information contained therein. Sarah Rovang

Bibliography Arthur, John. Realists at Work. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1983. Battcock, Gregory. Super Realism: A Critical Anthology. New York: Dutton, 1975. Estes, Richard, and John Wilmerding. Richard Estes. New York: Rizzoli, 2006. Lucie-Smith, Edward. Super Realism. Oxford: Phaidon, 1979. Meisel, Louis K. Photorealism since 1980. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993. Meisel, Louis K., and Linda Chase. Photorealism at the Millennium. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Meisel, Louis K., and John Perreault. Richard Estes: The Complete Paintings, 1966-1985. New York: Abrams, 1986. Meisel, Susan P. The Complete Guide to Photo-Realist Printmaking. New York: Louis K. Meisel Gallery, 1978. Parmiggiani, Sandro, Guillermo Solana, and Palazzo Magnani (Reggio Emilia). Richard Estes. Madrid: Fundacíon Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2007.

John Perrault, “Richard Estes” in Richard Estes:The Complete Paintings, 1966-1985 (New York: Abrams, 1986), 11. Louis K. Meisel, Richard Estes:The Complete Paintings, 1966-1985 (New York: Abrams, 1986), 38. 3 John Wilmerding, Richard Estes (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 9. 4 John Arthur in ibid., 108. 1 2

Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930) Cup 2 Picasso, 1973 Color lithograph 9 Ă&#x2014; 12 inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Jack L. Solomon 1986.32

hough now regarded as a modern master himself, Jasper Johns has engaged in dialogue with other towering figures of twentieth-century art throughout his long career. Cup 2 Picasso, along with a related print Cups 4 Picasso (1972), were inspired by Johns’s contribution to a portfolio commemorating the ninetieth birthday of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).1 Borrowing the trope of figure/ground reversal from images used in psychological perspective testing, Johns’s optical illusion challenges the viewer’s sense of spatial differentiation, much like Picasso’s Cubist compositions stretched audiences’ understanding of pictorial plane with their faceting and collapsed depth. In titling this print, Johns moves beyond visual trickery and into the realm of language: Cup 2 Picasso is both an invitation to raise a glass in tribute to Picasso, who had just died prior to the release of this print, but it is also a pun that literally describes the content of the image. Johns considered Picasso a central figure in the shaping of his own artistic production, but only in the 1970s did Johns openly acknowledge the Spanish artist’s influence. The print also pays homage to another artist Johns counted as influential, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), whose collage Self-Portrait in Profile (1958) Johns appropriates.2 Johns first attempted lithography through the encouragement of Tatyana Grosman of United Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in 1960; he was quickly at ease with the intricacies and experimentation of printed production.The artist eventually persuaded Grosman to let him work on metal photoplates instead of lithographic stones, enabling him to work in his studio, but Johns journeyed to ULAE’s Long Island print shop to execute this print in January 1973.3 Cup 2 Picasso was printed in two editions; the Bell Gallery’s version was published by ULAE for XXe Siècle, appearing in the French magazine’s June 1973 issue on American art. Rebecca A. Szantyr

Bibliography Castleman, Riva. Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1986. Field, Richard S. Jasper Johns: Prints, 1970-1977. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 1978. Rosenthal, Mark. Artist at Gemini G.E.L.: Celebrating the 25th Year. New York and Los Angeles: Harry N. Abrams in association with Gemini G.E.L., 1993. Sparks, Esther. Universal Limited Art Editions: A History and Catalogue: The First Twenty-Five Years. Chicago and New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Harry N. Abrams, 1989. Varnedoe, Kirk. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006. Reprint of 1996 first edition.

Roberta Bernstein, “Seeing a Thing Can Sometimes Trigger the Mind to Make Another Thing,” in Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 49. 2 Esther Sparks, Universal Limited Art Editions: A History and Catalogue:The First Twenty-Five Years (Chicago and New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 141. 3 Sparks, Universal Limited Art Editions, 140. 1

Allen Jones (British, b. 1937) Pour les Lèvres (For the Lips), 1965 Screenprint 30 × 24 inches David Winton Bell Gallery 1966.988

n Pour les Lèvres Allen Jones combines hand drawn elements with photographic transfers of a woman’s face to “contrast differing modes of representation.”1 Jones also juxtaposes erotic elements, such as the corset and the spread-legged female nude, with a highly stylized representation of the artist himself in the upper left corner, drawn from his earlier Abstract Expressionist style, the result of which is a mixture of high and low visual forms of representation. Jones had included self-portrait heads, which were distorted and brightly colored, from the beginning of his career, as a reminder of the artist’s role in the creative process. The placement of the head over a corset, furthermore, suggests a hermaphroditic hybrid. Jones included hermaphrodite imagery in his works as a metaphor for Carl Jung’s (1875-1961) and Friedrich Nietzche’s (18441900) ideas of the creative act as a merging of the male and female components of the psyche.2 Although ostensibly an image of female sexuality, the work also includes several phallic references that are common to Jones’s oeuvre, including the stiletto heels, the solitary stiletto boot, and the cigarette held suggestively in a pair of disembodied lips. Jones is best known for his use of such erotic and fetishistic subject matter. Part of the second wave of British Pop Art at the Royal College of Art, Jones moved to the U.S. between 1964 and 1965, where he developed his mature style of bold colors and blatantly sexual themes drawn from the popular erotica he discovered in New York City bookstores, such as Playboy and mail order catalogs for intimate apparel.3 With reference to the imagery in these catalogs, Jones said, “I appreciate the vitality of this kind of drawing of the human figure, which had been produced outside the fine art medium.”4 Pour les Lèvres was one of the earliest examples of this type. The screenprint was one of three contributions that Jones made to each of publisher Rosa Esman’s three 11 Pop Artists portfolios. The portfolios were created to introduce eleven of the most prominent Pop artists working in the 1960s to a wider American audience. Alexandra K. Collins

Bibliography Jones, Allen, and Marco Livingstone. Allen Jones, 1957-1978: Retrospective of Paintings: An Exhibition. Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery, 1979. Lambirth, Andrew. Allen Jones:Works. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005. Livingstone, Marco. Allen Jones: Sheer Magic. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. ———. Pop Art: A Continuing History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. ———. Pop Art: An International Perspective. New York: Rizzoli, 1992. Weitman, Wendy. Pop Impressions: Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999.

Wendy Weitman, Pop Impressions: Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999), 109. 2 Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 173. 3 For examples of the kind of erotic imagery he admired, see Andrew Lambirth, Allen Jones:Works (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), 14-19. 4 Allen Jones, quoted in Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: An International Perspective (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 200. 1

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997) Seascape (I), 1964 Screenprint on translucent Rowlux 16¾ × 21¾ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of David Tunick 1967.981

oy Lichtenstein is mostly known for his iconic comic strip imagery, which he produced through the careful layering of meticulously painted Ben-Day dots. The incorporation of industrial materials into prints, however, is not typical of Lichtenstein’s work. Between 1964 and 1966, he produced a number of landscapes in which he used a highly reflective plastic called Rowlux in both translucent and opaque formats to pick up ambient light in order to mimic the movement of sea ripples and sunset glow.1 Part of the NY/10 portfolio, Seascape (I) is the earliest of these landscapes and the first instance in which Lichtenstein implemented Rowlux in a print.2 Lichtenstein selected Rowlux as a material for this print not merely because of its synthetic and mass produced nature, but also for its particularly lustrous quality that aided a kinetic appearance. The juxtaposition of this shiny plastic and a contrasting matte surface of prominently large Ben-Day dots results in an optical illusion of movement. As is typical of his landscapes, Lichtenstein here reduces the elements of a landscape to its absolute basics. A difference of density between air and water is suggested by means of the layering of Rowlux and Ben-Day dots, lending the flat print a curious appearance of three dimensionality. Incessantly shifting in the viewer’s imagination, Seascape (I) does not grant enough time for contemplation. Although primarily moving by means of a trompe l’oeil effect, Seascape (I) was part of a number of landscapes that, in some instances, literally moved. According to art historian Diane Waldman, Lichtenstein occasionally intensified the kinetic effect of his landscapes by including a motor behind the works that made the Rowlux section move up and down.3 Lichtenstein’s moving landscapes were instrumental in the production of Lichtenstein’s untitled film from 1970, which was commissioned by Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of their Art and Technology Project (1967-1971).4 Sara Hayat

Bibliography Alloway, Lawrence. Roy Lichtenstein. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983. Bianchini, Paul. Roy Lichtenstein: Drawings and Prints. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971. Cowart, Jack. Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End. Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2007. Fine, Ruth E. The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné 1948-1997. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2002. Waldman, Diane. Roy Lichtenstein. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.

Lawrence Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), 109. Ruth. E Fine, The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné 1848-1997 (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2002), 77. 3 Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 139. 4 Jack Cowart, Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End (Madrid: Fundacion Juan March, 2007), 42-43. 1 2

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997) Landscape #7, 1967 Screenprint with iridescent silver Mylar collage 10¾ × 18¼ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of George Downing 1981.1661.1

andscape #7 is part of Roy Lichtenstein’s first solo print portfolio titled Ten Landscapes (1967), which, as the title suggests, consists of ten landscape collages. Lichtenstein had produced a number of landscape prints between 1964 and 1966 in which he had started to experiment with an exceptionally lustrous plastic called Rowlux. In his later landscape collages, Lichtenstein added a wider selection of industrial materials such as iridescent Mylar, as well as photographic images, resulting in a rather “complex spatial and textural interplay” among layers.1 The horizontal format of this print refers to a romantic tradition of landscape painting, while the large iridescent rainbow-like arch spans across the picture plane and with its large scale almost suggests the sublime. Yet, unlike traditional landscape painters, who aimed for the viewer to contemplate their works, Lichtenstein makes it difficult for us to focus, as the print incessantly transforms the image with its highly reflective strip of silver Mylar constantly shifting in accordance to the smallest of changes in its surrounding environment. Lichtenstein reduces a landscape to its bare minimums. Differences of density in sea and sky are conveyed by the contrast of unusually large Ben-Day dots and a solid patch of yellow color, separated by a thick, black horizon and connected by means of the artificial and kitschy rainbow of shiny Mylar. Despite its references to elements of nature and landscape painting, the radical geometric simplification and crude artificiality of this print suggests that it is not referring to nature at all, but to the newly industrialized, inorganic environment of the 1960s. Sara Hayat

Bibliography Alloway, Lawrence. Roy Lichtenstein. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983. Bianchini, Paul. Roy Lichtenstein: Drawings and Prints. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971. Fine, Ruth E. The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné 1948-1997. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2002. Waldman, Diane. Roy Lichtenstein. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.

Ruth E. Fine, The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné 1948-1997 (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2002), 77.

Eduardo Paolozzi (British, 1924-2005) Erni and T.T. at St. Louis Airport, 1967 Screenprint 14 Ă&#x2014; 9 inches David Winton Bell Gallery 1985.1897

Detail of Erni and T.T. at St. Louis Airport

hese four prints are from Eduardo Paolozzi’s print series Moonstrips Empire News, which consists of 100 screenprints in a plastic box. The prints here show Paolozzi’s interplay of a great variety of imagery, including sources from fine art, popular culture, and technological commodities. Such imagery is interspersed with blocks of pattern and text. In Erni and T.T. at St. Louis Airport, we are presented with the perils and merits of technology at the same time. While the scene of an aircraft and the Hertz rental car counter in the airport terminal celebrate the convenience of modern means of transportation, a devastating fire in a skyscraper seems to suggest the danger of high-density urban life. Untitled emulates film stills or parts of a photographic contact sheet. The images show scenes of everyday life, aerial photography, a monster chasing a child, and operation of machinery. However, the dark and blurred close-ups create uneasiness and tension rather than a celebratory atmosphere. Paolozzi once said that he didn’t want to be known as a Pop artist, as he saw them as accepting modern life basically as it was.1 Thus, we may see these images as depictions of modern life and critiques of reality at the same time. 1

Fiona Pearson, Paolozzi (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1999), 44.

Detail of image to the right

Eduardo Paolozzi (British, 1924-2005) Untitled, 1967 Screenprint 14¼ × 9¼ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Dr. Jack Solomon 1988.22 33

Eduardo Paolozzi (British, 1924-2005) Donald Duck Meets Mondrian, 1967 Screenprint 14 × 9 inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Dr. Jack Solomon 1986.31

Eduardo Paolozzi (British, 1924-2005) The Silken World of Michelangelo, 1967 Screenprint 14¾ × 10 inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Dr. Jack Solomon 1986.29

Donald Duck Meets Mondrian shows a little girl playing with toys, which may be an image from an advertisement. Below that, Piet Mondrian’s (1872-1944) abstract painting lies side by side with Donald Duck. The former image evokes Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow (1930), but both the color and composition are altered. In Paolozzi’s reinterpretation of Mondrian’s work, the lower two-thirds resembles the square layout of Composition II, but he shifted the proportions and extended the composition vertically. Furthermore, Paolozzi uses four non-primary colors instead of the three primary colors used by Mondrian. While Mondrian reduced his image plane to horizontal and vertical lines, here Paolozzi simplifies Donald Duck into a combination of dots. In The Silken World of Michelangelo, the title text is presented on the print. A negative photographic image of Michelangelo’s David (1501-1504) and a dotted Mickey Mouse turn their heads away from each other. Both prints are Paolozzi’s collages that re-evaluate the line between high art and popular culture. Not only did Paolozzi rearrange the elements of Moonstrips Empire News at his own will; this box of loose-leaf sheets allows the viewer to arrange the prints in any order, which eliminates the conventional idea of binding and editing in art and in literature all at once.2 The format of this print series was likely inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Green box (1934), a collection of notes on The Large Glass (1915-1923),3 which reflects the influence of Dadaist collage practice on Paolozzi. However, different from Dadaist collages, in which the found elements remain what they are, Paolozzi transforms all of the original objects by recreating them through a print technique.4 Paolozzi emerged in London in the early 1950s as a founding member of the Independent Group, a group of artists, writers, and architects who explored the impact of popular culture, technology, and science on modern art and society. Paolozzi’s collages emphasize the complexity of contemporary imagery and the growing presence of technology in modern society. Paolozzi was also one of the first artists to collaborate with printmaker Christopher Prater of the Kelpra Studio to explore the full potential of screenprinting as an artistic medium in the early 1960s.5 Moonstrips Empire News was the third major print series he did with Prater exploring the effect of color, shape, texture, and accidents of juxtaposition on perception through screenprinting. Amy S. Huang Bibliography Miles, Rosemary, and Eduardo Paolozzi. The Complete Prints of Eduardo Paolozzi: Prints, Drawings, Collages 194477. London:Victoria & Albert Museum, 1977. Pearson, Fiona. Paolozzi. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1999. Weitman,Wendy, and Jasmine Moorhead. Pop Impressions: Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999. Wye, Deborah, and Wendy Weitman. Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples: 1960 to Now. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006. Rosemary Miles, Eduardo Paolozzi, The Complete Prints of Eduardo Paolozzi: Prints, Drawings, Collages 1944-77 (London:Victoria & Albert Museum, 1977), 26, and Deborah Wye and Wendy Weitman, Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples: 1960 to Now (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 39-41. 3 Wendy Weitman and Jasmine Moorhead, Pop Impressions: Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 50. 4 Eduardo Paolozzi and Uwe M. Schneede, Eduardo Paolozzi (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), 9. 5 Charles Spencer, A Decade of Printmaking (London: Academy Editions, 1973), 26-27. 2

Peter Phillips (British, b. 1939) 6 × 8, Dreaming, 1974 Lithograph 23¾ × 31½ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Saul P. Steinberg 1980.1366

× 8, Dreaming was part of a series made by Peter Phillips in the 1970s that attempted to engage the viewer’s imagination. In these works, which included both paintings and prints, Phillips combined disparate popular imagery in an interpenetrating grid format. 6 × 8, Dreaming brings together a racing motorcyclist, kittens, a seductive partially clad young woman, and a handsome man holding an ambiguous metal implement—images seemingly drawn from magazines and advertisements. In their combination, Phillips suggests but does not define a particular narrative for the viewer. He himself said of this body of work, “a painting must be complicated” so “each individual can interpret it in his own way.”1 The combination of the seductive figures and the popular euphemism for female genitalia referenced by the kittens indicates that the narrative evoked in 6 × 8, Dreaming is an erotic one—whether it is romantic or sinister depends on the viewer’s inclination. The range of possible stories is perhaps underscored by the spectrum of colors used for the grid. Phillips was a pioneering member of the second wave of the British Pop artists trained at the Royal Academy of Art in the early 1960s. His early work, which combined images of curvaceous pin-ups with hardedged machinery, was inspired by the billboards that he discovered in New York during his two-year stay there in 1964-65. As Phillips commented at the time, “My awareness of machines, advertising, and mass communication is not probably in the same sense as an older generation… I’ve been conditioned by them and grew up with it all and use it without a second thought.”2 His interest in the combination of popular erotica and motor vehicles continued into the 1970s, as is demonstrated by 6 × 8, Dreaming. Like many of his Pop colleagues, Phillips was committed to raising popular materials to the level of high art through stylistic handling and thematic references. In 6 × 8, Dreaming, the placement of the popular materials in a grid transforms easily readable advertisements into enigmatic symbols. Furthermore, in the 1970s, the grid format was identified with the transcendent aesthetic of the Minimalists from the preceding decade. The print also references high art by the inclusion of the kittens, a clear allusion to Edouard Manet’s (1832-1883) modernist masterpiece, Olympia (1863). Alexandra K. Collins

Bibliography Livingstone, Marco. Pop Art: A Continuing History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. ———. Pop Art: An International Perspective. New York: Rizzoli, 1992. ———. retroVISION: Peter Phillips’ Paintings, 1960-1982: An Exhibition. Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery, 1982.

1 2

Peter Phillips, quoted in Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 10. Peter Phillips, quoted in Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: An International Perspective (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 160.

Mel Ramos (American, b. 1935) Tobacco Rose, 1965 Screenprint 28 Ă&#x2014; 22 inches David Winton Bell Gallery 1966.993

s an art student in Sacramento, Mel Ramos anticipated a career in the commercial field before devoting himself to the pursuit of fine arts under his mentor Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920). Despite this reorientation, Ramos continued to locate both inspiration and subject matter in popular printed ephemera; Tobacco Rose is an iteration of the mid-1960s tobacco advertisement topos of an attractive woman situated with an oversized commodity against a blank background. The nude model attaches this print to another of Ramos’ primary influences, the tradition of pin-ups and girlie magazines. While the sexual nature of Tobacco Rose cannot be overlooked, with the print seemingly offering either an example or critique of female objectification, Ramos’s image ultimately deflects an erotic charge.1 Ramos identified humor as central feature in his compositions, seen here in the absurdity of scale and juxtaposition of the print’s main elements. Radiating a Californian warmth through saturated hues, Ramos’s woman is welcoming, with her casual slouch and quotidian coffee drinking; her sense of informal relaxation and pleasure is matched in the occasion of a cigarette break. Tobacco Rose further resists a carnal description due to its sense of familiarity, which is gained in part from the ubiquity of the sources it quotes from, but also from an intimacy emitted in this print by the artist’s employment of his most frequent (and favorite) model, his wife, Leta.2 Although Ramos was primarily known as a painter, Tobacco Rose was featured in Original Editions’s 1965 publication 11 Pop Artists,Volume II portfolio. This print is nearly identical to two additional compositions by Ramos: Micronite Mary (1965) and Vantage (1971). Rebecca A. Szantyr

Bibliography Levy, Thomas, ed. Mel Ramos: Heroines, Goddesses, Beauty Queen. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2002. Honner, Klaus. “Girls, Candies and Art:The World of Mel Ramos.” In Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Pop Art, edited by Otto Letze, 54-71. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. Kuspit, Donald, with Louis K. Meisel. Mel Ramos: Pop Art Fantasies. New York: Watson-Guptill, 2004. Mulvey, Laura. “Fear, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious or ‘You Don’t Know What is Happening, Do You, Mr. Jones?’” In Visual and Other Pleasures, edited by Laura Mulvey, 6-13. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Rosenblum, Robert. “How Venus Came to California.” In On American Art: Selected Essays, edited by Robert Rosenblum, 238-246. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

Laura Mulvey, “Fear, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious or ‘You Don’t Know What is Happening, Do You, Mr. Jones?’” in Visual and Other Pleasures, ed. Laura Mulvey (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 8. Originally published in Spare Rib, 1973. 2 Belinda Grace Gardner, “Heroines, Goddesses, and Beauty Queens: Mel Ramos’ Erotic Pop Power Princesses,” in Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Pop Art, ed. Thomas Levy (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2002), 18-20. 1

Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925-2008) Jewish Museum poster, 1963 Offset lithograph 32 × 22 inches David Winton Bell Gallery 0.938

obert Rauschenberg created this poster on the occasion of his first retrospective exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. The juxtapositions of textual information and discrete images require temporal, part-by-part perception.1 Certain pictures—for example, the caged bird—recur in other, contemporaneous two-dimensional works. Rauschenberg was one of the first American artists to revive the medium of lithography (literally, “stone writing”) in the early 1960s, at the urging of Tatyana Grosman of Universal Limited Art Editions. He recalls: “I began lithography reluctantly, thinking that the second half of the 20th century was no time to start writing on rocks.”2 Here, Rauschenberg transferred images from commercial plates onto “rocks,” and then wrote and drew directly on the offset poster plates.3 Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 187. See also Rosalind Krauss, “Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image,” in Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Branden W. Joseph (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 39-55. 2 Robert Rauschenberg, “Work Notes–1962,” typescript, Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York; quoted in Edward A. Foster, introduction to Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Rauschenberg: Prints 1948/1970 (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1970), n.p. Exhibition catalog. 3 Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Rauschenberg: Prints 1948/1970 (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1970), n.p. Exhibition catalog. 1

Rauschenberg is best known for his Combines, a term he coined to describe works composed of disparate elements, often including Duchampian readymade objects, photographic transfers, and/or painted elements. The Combines, as well as his later prints, refuse to cohere into a unified image or object, and further resist logical interpretation.The influential art critic Leo Steinberg (American, 1920-2011) characterized Rauschenberg’s approach to art-making as follows: “When in the early 1960s he worked with photographic transfers, the images—each in itself illusionistic—kept interfering with one another, intimations of spatial meaning forever canceling out to subside in a kind of optical noise.”4 Given the pervasiveness and depth of Rauschenberg’s influence on the Pop generation of artists and beyond—many of whose works are featured here—it is fitting that this exhibition’s title should derive from an analysis of his images. Monica Bravo

Bibliography Castleman, Riva. Printed Art: A View of Two Decades. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980. Danto, Arthur C. “Robert Rauschenberg.” In The Madonna of the Future, 273-280. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Davis, Douglas. “Robert Rauschenberg: Technology as Nature.” In Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science,Technology, and Art, 141-145. New York: Praeger, 1973. Joseph, Branden W. Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ———, ed. Robert Rauschenberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Rauschenberg, Robert. Robert Rauschenberg: Prints 1948/1970. Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1970. Exhibition catalog. Saltzman, Lisa.“Readymade Redux: Once More the Jewish Museum.” Grey Room, no. 9 (Autumn 2002): 90-104. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262603. Solomon, Alan. Robert Rauschenberg. New York: Jewish Museum, 1963. Exhibition catalog.

Leo Steinberg, “Reflections on the State of Criticism,” in Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Branden W. Joseph (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 29. 4

James Rosenquist (American, b.1933) Campaign, 1965 Color lithograph 29¼ × 22½ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Rigelhaupt 1965.399

ames Rosenquist began his artistic career in the mid-1950s as a painter of large billboard signs in Minneapolis. He quit this job in 1960, yet remained deeply influenced by this experience. Commercial imagery became the main subject of Rosenquist’s oeuvre, gaining additional layers of meaning through the unexpected juxtapositions of his kaleidoscopic collages, of which Campaign is a good example. Used to painting on billboards, Rosenquist was initially drawn to large-scale oil painting. Nevertheless, encouraged by publisher Tatyana Grosman during the early years of the 1960s, Rosenquist began to produce lithographs through her newly established Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) and continued to do so for more than forty years. Campaign is significantly one of the earliest of Rosenquist’s lithographs in which he experimented with color and airbrushes.1 The title of this print indicates a twenty-one day stay at ULAE to complete this print as well as the strong anti-war sentiments that Rosenquist intended to convey in this work. 2 Three Kleenex boxes rendered in primary colors and a tall blue saltshaker that is suspended from the disembodied hand of a young woman, form two strong intersecting diagonals, which immediately draw the viewer’s eye. Surrounded by wallpaper, this commercial image of domesticity seems at first glance to be taken out of the pages of a women’s magazine. Upon a closer look, however, one notices that the young woman is sprinkling salt over a heavily decorated lapel of a headless American soldier who mysteriously emerges beneath the red Kleenex box. In the presence of the soldier, the domestic objects begin to appear more ominous, lending the print a political layer of meaning.The cloud of artificial flowers of the wallpaper, for instance, becomes reminiscent of nuclear fallout and the Kleenex tissue, which blends into the soldier’s lapel, indicates his dispensability. Campaigning for a “peace mentality,” the gesture of sprinkling salt was a metaphoric reference to the children’s story of peacefully capturing a bird by sprinkling salt over its tail.3 Sara Hayat

Bibliography Glenn, Constance W. Time Dust: James Rosenquist, Complete Graphics 1962-1992. New York: Rizzoli, 1993. Wye, Deborah, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004. Bancroft, Sarah, and Walter Hopps. James Rosenquist: A Retrospective. New York: The Guggenheim Museum, 2003.

Constance W. Glenn, Time Dust: James Rosenquist, Complete Graphics 1962-1992 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 12. Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004),167. 3 Ibid. 1 2

Nancy Spero (American, 1926-2009) Leon Golub (American, 1922-2004) They Will Torture You, My Friend, 1971 Screenprint 17½ × 23¾ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Dr. Jack Solomon 1988.29

hey Will Torture You, My Friend is a rare collaboration by the married painters Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, who each contributed a panel to this diptych print. Returning from living abroad, the artists were responding to the Vietnam War in their respective bodies of work. The politically active couple contributed this composition to the portfolio Conspiracy: The Artist as Witness, a project used to raise funds for the legal defense of the Chicago Eight. Spero became influenced by the writings of French writer and theoretician Antonin Artaud (1896-1944) in the late 1960s. Having just completed her War Series, Spero viewed Artaud’s violence of the exposed self as the next logical progression in expressing the brutality of world. Recognizing the silence inherent in her experience as a woman artist, Spero adopted Artaud’s voice as a means to give presence to her own.1 By alienating her own voice, Spero performs the artistic doubling that was the central tenet to Artaud’s work on the Theatre of Cruelty. In experimenting with male identity, the recumbent figures drawn by Spero echoes the victims of Golub’s paintings; here the red line encircling the body doubles as a ring of blood and a target. While Spero’s composition is similar in style to her work in the Artaud Paintings and Codex Artaud, Golub’s portion, on the left side, is unlike the figural works that dominated his career. Primarily known for heroic-scale paintings that address the history of violence man enacts on his fellow man, Golub experiments with proportion, medium and subject in this work. Instead of human-driven atrocities, Golub’s contribution to this print features a close-up of a piece of machinery, possibly used in war. The Conspiracy portfolio was published by the Center for Constitutional Rights and David Godine and printed at Chiron Screen Print, New York. Rebecca A. Szantyr

Bibliography Bird, Jon. Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Kline, Katy and Helaine Posner. Leon Golub and Nancy Spero:War and Memory. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology/List Visual Arts Center, 1994. Kuspit, Donald. The Existential/Activist Painter: The Example of Leon Golub. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Lyon, Christopher. Nancy Spero:The Work. Munich: Prestel, 2010.

Christopher Lyon, Nancy Spero:The Work (Munich: Prestel, 2010), 109-110.

Ronald Stein (British, 1930-1988) Lessons of the Camp, 1967 Screenprint 36¾ × 26¼ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Saul P. Steinberg 1980.1620.A

lthough referring to a single date—January 30, 1967—in the header of this screenprint, Ronald Stein enfolds several centuries of British imperialism into Lessons of the Camp. The most salient feature of the print is the repetition of feathered headdresses on disparate faces. Upon closer inspection, the central, bespectacled visage is revealed to be rather crudely collaged over the repeated face of the figure on the right: the white man has literally replaced the Native American, representing the legacy of English colonization of the “New World.” One of the background texts refers to Anglo-Maltese relations, alluding to Malta’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1964. Another article mentions the Gipsy Moth IV, a yawl commissioned by Sir Francis Chichester in 1966 to sail solo around the globe. In January 1967 he made port in Sydney, Australia, another former British colony, having already failed at his goal to outrace the speeds set by nineteenth-century clipper ships, as, for example, those used for international trade by the notorious East India Company.1 Two graphs make reference to the practice of anthropometry: “the measurement of the living human body with a view to determining its average dimensions at different ages and in different races or classes.”2 It is notable that the smallest child in the chart at the bottom of the print is either fleeing or being forced into position. This vignette can be taken as a metaphor for the whole of the screenprint: indicating the forceful internment of Native Americans on reservations in the United States, for example, and more generally the power of imperialists over the colonized. “Camp,” then as now, had multiple associations. Camps provide only temporary shelter, and connote childhood summer arrangements as much as army regiments. In the aftermath of World War II, and given the emaciation of the figures depicted in the center image, “camp” is also redolent of Nazi interment facilities. Finally, “camp” also alludes to theatrical humor, effeminacy, and/or queer culture. The ultimate “lesson of the camp” depicted here seems to participate in several if not all of these connotations. Monica Bravo

Bibliography Chichester, Francis. “My sleep disturbed by a wind machine.” The Times (London). March 8, 1967. Ryan, James R. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

1 2

Francis Chichester, “My sleep disturbed by a wind machine,” The Times (London), March 8, 1967. James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 149.

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Jacqueline Kennedy II, 1965 Screenprint 23¾ × 29¾ inches David Winton Bell Gallery 1966.984

acqueline Kennedy II was included in the second of three volumes of 11 Pop Artists commissioned by the Philip Morris Tobacco Company and organized by Rosa Esman. Esman, who operated the Tanglewood Press, wanted to make the works of these British and American Pop artists better known and available to a wider public. Warhol contributed three works to the volumes, each featuring an image of Jackie Kennedy (1929-1994) based on the silkscreen paintings that he did of her in 1963-64. Shortly after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, Jr. (1917-1963), in November 1963, Warhol decided to produce an ambitious project on the national tragedy. Rather than use images of Kennedy or the assassination itself, however, Warhol chose eight close-ups of Jackie taken from several printed sources, including the New York Daily News and Life magazine. The paintings and prints of the widow are part of Warhol’s larger Death and Disaster series, begun in 1962, which included, most notably, car crashes, suicides, and electric chairs. Jacqueline Kennedy II features an image of Jackie at her husband’s funeral, one of the most famous and most reproduced in newspapers after the tragedy. Jackie is caught in an introspective moment of quiet, dignified grief. The ghostly outlines of her face and hair combined with the grayish-purple tone of the paper on which the image is printed underscores the sobriety of her expression. Warhol repeats the image, a device for which he became famous. Unlike the multiple repetitions in his other works, however, which tend to undermine the power of a single image and thereby anaesthetize emotion, the duplication in this print heightens our sense of Jackie’s ongoing grief. The doubling and distortion of the image also draws attention to the reproductive process by which these photographs were popularly consumed. Because Warhol used the same image in Jackie Triptych (1964), the religious connotations of that work—which identifies Jackie with the grieving Virgin Mary—may apply here as well. The national tragedy, Warhol suggests, transcends mere politics. Alexandra K. Collins

Bibliography Castleman, Riva. The Prints of Andy Warhol. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. Crow, Thomas. “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol.” Art in America 75 (May 1987): 128136. Feldman, Frayda, and Jörg Schellmann, eds. Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: R. Feldman Fine Arts, 1989. Lubin, David M. “Andy Warhol’s Jackie II (1966).” Colby Quarterly 4, no. 39 (2003): 375-382. Weitman, Wendy. Pop Impressions: Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999. Whiting, Cécile. A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 1964-66 16mm film transferred to digital files Black and white, silent, 4 minutes each at 16 frames per second Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ©2012 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

This program contains the following Screen Test: Ann Buchanan Screen Test: Paul America Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick Screen Test: Billy Name Screen Test: Susan Bottomly Screen Test: Dennis Hopper Screen Test: Mary Woronov Screen Test: Freddy Herko Screen Test: Nico Screen Test: Richard Rheem Screen Test: Ingrid Superstar Screen Test: Lou Reed (Coke) Screen Test: Jane Holzer (Toothbrush)

Andy Warhol Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick, 1965 16mm, black and white, silent, 4 minutes at 16 frames per second ©2012 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

nlike the purpose suggested by their name, Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests were not audition tapes, but were originally called “stillies” or “film portraits,” marking that they are an extension of Andy Warhol’s practice of incorporating mug shots, photo-booth, and publicity images in his artwork during this period. They indicate the artist’s growing experimentation with moving images.1 However, the Screen Tests also radically depart from Warhol’s two-dimensional appropriation-based oeuvre from the mid-1960s; more than just a change in medium, these film experiments introduce a temporal dimension to Warhol’s art production, in addition to anticipating the participation of a viewing audience. Despite this misnomer, the Screen Tests do subject Warhol’s sitters to a dual-metric examination. The sitters—an assortment of rising stars, Factory habitués, and figures from New York’s art and intellectual circles—undergo trials that challenge their ability to endure the conditions of filmic occasion: holding a stationCallie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests:The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (New York: H. N. Abrams with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), 1: 13. 1

ary pose, exposure to harsh lighting, and maintaining contact with the lens. At the same time, the Screen Tests take on an approach similar to a stress test or psychological evaluation. Without any direction from Warhol, the sitters face down the camera for an interminably long three minutes devoid of human engagement. Left to occupy their own thoughts, the sitters ultimately question the image they are sustaining to project. The caesuras between subject, apparatus/camera, and audience gives rise to a tension that is only amplified in the experience of the Screen Tests viewers. Not only is the viewer unable to hold the film subject’s outward gaze, but Warhol’s manipulation of film speed, slowed from recorded rate of 24 frames per second to a screened rate of 16 frames per second, causes the filmed subject’s eventual discomposure or apprehension to elicit a reaction of distress or anxiety in the viewer.2 Warhol shot all 472 Screen Tests on his 16mm Bolex camera, most by the beginning of 1966. Warhol’s first envisioned project for the Screen Tests, The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, was inspired by the New York City’s Police Department’s 1962 pamphlet The Thirteen Most Wanted, which Warhol would also use for his short-lived 1963 World’s Fair mural of the same name.3 Other compilations of Screen Tests footage assembled for public viewing included The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women, Fifty Fantastics and Fifty Personalities. The film featured in this exhibition, The Thirteen Most Beautiful…is a present-day compilation (2009) from the trove of Screen Tests, produced by The Andy Warhol Museum with soundtrack scored by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips. Rebecca A. Szantyr

Bibliography Angell, Callie. Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol: A Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1. New York: H. N. Abrams and the Whitney Museum of Art, 2006. Foster, Hal. The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein,Warhol and Richter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Malanga, Gerard. Screen Tests, Portraits, Nudes, 1964-1996. Göttingen: Steidl, 2000. McShine, Kynaston. Andy Warhol, A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989.

Hal Foster, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein,Warhol and Richter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 164-169. 3 Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests:The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (New York: H. N. Abrams with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), 1: 13-15, 1: 244. 2

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Untitled 12, 1974 Screenprint 15¾ × 18¾ inches David Winton Bell Gallery Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Rosenthal 1983.1817.12

ntitled 12 was included in a portfolio of prints published to raise funds to endow a chair at Columbia University in honor of Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996), the famous art historian who had been deeply involved in avant-garde art circles in New York City since the late 1930s. Among the eleven artists who also donated works were Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein. That Untitled 12 was intended to raise funds for an endowment and not his own personal profit may explain the unique, experimental quality of this piece among Warhol’s later prints. Warhol may also have meant to address a more sophisticated audience than the one to whom his commercial prints of the 1970s and ‘80s were marketed. The screenprint was produced by layering six different images drawn from some of Warhol’s bestknown works of the 1960s. The images include a Campbell’s soup can, a cow, flowers, Brillo boxes, the Mona Lisa, and an electric chair. Warhol established his Pop career by recycling popular imagery. In Untitled 12, he is recycling his own work, as he often did. On the subject of recycling, Warhol had earlier commented that it was “a very economical operating procedure.”1

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 93.

Because each image is printed in subtle variations of black and grey, deciphering the individual elements is difficult. The layering of these subjects, which is unique to this print, makes them virtually unreadable, a triple violation of Warhol’s Pop aesthetic—simplicity, readability, and flatness. The illegibility is compounded by framing glass, which is transformed into a mirror by the darkness of the print. The viewer’s reflection becomes the seventh and most easily readable image in the work. The phenomenological tension between the print’s mirror-like flatness and layering of the imagery suggests that Warhol may have meant to address the most common critical complaint against his work, that it was superficial, without depth. Warhol himself contributed to this view when he said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films... and there I am.There’s nothing behind it.”2 Despite these words, much of Warhol’s oeuvre deals with substantive themes. The somber black tones of Untitled 12 combined with the electric chair buried within remind the viewer how many of Warhol’s works, from the Death and Disaster series to his 1980s variations of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (c. 1495), deal with the theme of death. Alexandra K. Collins

Bibliography Berg, Gretchen. “Nothing to Lose: Interview with Andy Warhol.” Cahiers du Cinema in English 10 (May 1967): 38-43. Castleman, Riva. The Prints of Andy Warhol. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. Feldman, Frayda, and Jörg Schellmann, eds. Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: R. Feldman Fine Arts, 1989. Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Weitman, Wendy. Pop Impressions: Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999. Whiting, Cécile. A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Gretchen Berg, “Nothing to Lose: Interview with Andy Warhol,” Cahiers du Cinema in English 10 (May 1967): 40.

Glossary Aquatint In this etching technique (see entry below), a granular acid-resistant ground is applied to a metal plate before an image is incised there. The acid “bites” in and around the granules, leaving textured areas that will produce relatively smooth expanses of varying tones without the labor or facture of extensive crosshatching. “Aquatint” reflects the technique’s resemblance to watercolor washes. Ben-Day Dots Named after their inventor, the American printer and illustrator, Benjamin Day, Ben-Day dots are similar to the halftone printing technique (see entry below) in that screenprints are produced using a series of small dots. However, Ben-Day dots are always the same size and evenly distributed in certain areas. Comic books from the 1950s and 1960s commonly employed Ben-Day dots in the four process hues (cyan, yellow, magenta, and black) for color and shade effects. The American Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein achieved a Ben-Day dot appearance in his paintings through the careful dot-shaped application of these colors onto canvases. Etching An intaglio (“incising”) process developed during the Renaissance to achieve visual results similar to drawing. Etching covers a variety of techniques—including aquatint, hard-ground, and soft-ground—that all refer to “biting” an image into a metal plate with acid, where the negative parts of the image are preserved through the application of a wax resist. In hard-ground etching a stylus (etching needle) is used to create a network of lines of varying density (hatching) onto a metal plate through a waxy, acid-resistant ground. Softer grounds allow an artist to transfer the textures of paper, fabric, or a drawing crayon onto a plate to achieve smoother inked areas. The plate is then submerged into an acid bath which bites or incises only the exposed metal, producing etchings’ characteristic fuzzy lines. The wax ground is then removed and the plate is inked: only the incised lines hold ink. Finally, in a step that can be repeated to produce multiple prints, the plate is covered with a damp sheet of paper and run through a printing press. Halftone Printing To be able to screenprint photographic or grayscale images, an image must be converted into what is known as “halftones.” A halftone image consists of many small dots that make up the shaded portion of that image. Halftone printing simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying in size, shape, or spacing. This printing method relies on a simple optical illusion: the tiny halftone dots comprising the print are smoothed into tones and gradients when viewed from a certain distance. Halftone printing is commonly used to print photographs in newspapers. 54

Independent Group The Independent Group (IG) is a group of artists, architects, and critics who met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London between 1952 and 1955. Two groundbreaking exhibitions—Parallel of Art and Life at the ICA in 1953 and This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1956—expressed the IG’s pioneering interest in popular and commercial culture. Its priorities were in reconsidering modernism and exploring the impact of popular culture, technology, and science on modern art and society. Leading members included artists Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull; critics Lawrence Alloway and Rayner Banham; and architects Colin St. John Wilson and Alison and Peter Smithson. These individuals were responsible for the formulation, discussion, and dissemination of many of the basic ideas of British Pop art and of much other new British art in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Lithograph Literally “stone writing.” Lithography is a relatively new medium (invented in 1798) which relies on water and oil’s mutual repulsion. Images are executed using a greasy crayon and/or liquid tusche on a limestone slab (or surrogate, usually a zinc or aluminum plate) that has been prepared to produce a smooth surface receptive to grease. The stone is then etched with nitric acid in a solution of gum arabic, which desensitizes the non-image areas. The stone, kept constantly damp during printing, is inked with an oily ink applied with a roller that will adhere only to the positive parts of the image from which the water layer recedes.The image is then printed on a handpress, using a scraper bar instead of the roller used in intaglio printing, onto paper or another surface. The medium was popularized by French artists in the late 1800s and revived as a fine art medium by Pop artists in the 1960s through the advocacy of a group of pioneering women: Tatyana Grosman at Universal Limited Art Editions in Long Island and June Wayne at Tamarind Press in New Mexico were prominent in this effort. Offset Lithograph The process used in most commercial high-volume printing and therefore (unsurprisingly) adopted by Pop artists in the 1960s. The automated printing press transfers the image twice—first onto a rubber blanket cylinder, then onto paper—so that it does not appear reversed as it is in all previous printing processes, making the technique ideal for reproducing text.The mechanical offset press runs far quicker than traditional hand presses and uses thinner inks.The image, being transferred from a rubber roller instead of from a stone or plate, is also more even and thus tends to eliminate traces of the artist’s hand.This technique often utilizes photomechanical processes (see entry below). Photomechanical Processes Adaptations of photographic technology, reliant on chemical properties of light sensitivity, to any of the various printmaking processes—especially screenprinting or lithography, although photogravure and other heliographic techniques were experimented with from the early twentieth century to the present. Photographs may be transferred to a matrix by way of a dot screen, usually using either black and white for monotones or the four process hues (cyan, yellow, magenta, and black) for color reproduction. In silkscreen and lithography, drawings made on mylar can be transferred to surfaces coated with photosensitive gels or emulsions. 55

Readymade A term coined by the avant-garde French artist Marcel Duchamp in the early twentieth century to designate a “found object” which is transformed into art simply through the artist’s selection (and sometimes modification) of the object. Screenprint In this process, a stencil is adhered to a fine mesh screen. Using a squeegee, ink is forced through exposed areas of the screen onto the print surface (usually paper or fabric, but also walls and signs). A separate screen is required for each color so that the same surface is printed consecutively with each color’s screen. The resulting image is usually bold and graphic. Also known as silkscreen or serigraphy.

Bibliography Figura, Starr. What Is a Print? New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001. http://www.moma.org. Mayor, A. Hyatt. Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971. The International Fine Print Dealers Association. “Glossary.” New York: International Fine Print Dealers Association, 2009. http://www.ifpda.org.

Further Reading Alloway, Lawrence. American Pop Art. New York: Collier Books, 1974. ———. Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic. Edited by Richard Kalina. London: Routledge, 2006. Amaya, Mario. Pop Art…and After. New York:Viking Press, 1972. Arthur, John. Realists at Work. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1983. Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” In Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 33-37. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Benjamin,Walter.“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217-252. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968. Brauer, David. U.S./U.K. Connections, 1956-1966. Houston: Menil Foundation, 2001. Castleman, Riva. Printed Art: A View of Two Decades. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980. Collins, Bradford. Pop Art: The Independent Group to Neo-Pop, 1947-1990. London: Phaidon Press, forthcoming. Leffingwell, Edward, and Karen Marta, eds. Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Lippard, Lucy. Pop Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1967. Livingstone, Marco. Pop Art: A Continuing History. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1990. ———. Pop Art: An International Perspective. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. Massey,Anne. The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945-59. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Meisel, Susan P. The Complete Guide to Photo-Realist Printmaking. New York: Louis K. Meisel Gallery, 1978. Russell, John, and Suzi Gablik. pop art redefined. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969. Sparks, Esther. Universal Limited Art Editions: A History and Catalogue: The First Twenty-Five Years. Chicago and New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Harry N. Abrams, 1989. Spencer, Charles. A Decade of Printmaking. London: Academy Editions, 1973. Steinberg, Leo. Encounters with Rauschenberg. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Weitman, Wendy. Pop Impressions: Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999. Whiting, Cécile. A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Wye, Deborah, and Wendy Weitman. Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples: 1960 to Now. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006. 57