In art, postmodernism refers to a reaction against modernism. It is less a cohesive movement than an approach and attitude toward art, culture, and society. Forming in the middle of the 20th century, Postmodern art was said to burst onto the artistic scene sometime between the 1960s and 1970s.
This movement replaced Modernism as the primary artistic style at the time, and was viewed as a form of art with no standard guidelines that dictated the practice. Postmodern art stretched over two decades, coming to an end in around the 1990s when other artistic styles that had borrowed characteristics from Postmodernism began to develop.
Its main characteristics include anti-authoritarianism, or refusal to recognize the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be; and the collapsing of the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture, and between art and everyday life. Postmodern art can be also characterized by a deliberate use of earlier styles and conventions, and an eclectic mixing of different artistic and popular styles and mediums.
A distinction existed between what was perceived to be high and low art, as the Modernism and Postmodernism movements made use of each style respectively. High art was a term used to identify fine art that was traditional in terms of the medium, technique, and style that was used, such as paintings and sculpture. This title was used to describe all art that supposedly held a class status, as it separated itself from art that was deemed tasteless and therefore unworthy of attention.
In response to this, Postmodernism adopted characteristics of low art within their work, such as the use of pop culture, mass-produced goods, and elements from magazines and television. Postmodern artists embraced the “popular” within society and eagerly added this feature to their works, leaving their artworks to come across as kitsch to art critics. Instead of creating art that was seen as traditional, Postmodernism artists experimented with mundane objects humorously and ironically by transforming them into gigantic sculptures and cultural icons.
The attention placed on low culture within art expanded the definition of what art encompassed and could be, which provided an important social critique at the time. Through embracing the popular culture at the time, the Postmodern movement was able to create art that deviated from traditional norms in such a way as to allow a new artistic medium to develop.
Andy warhol
August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987
Pop Art was the last prominent modern art movement. Its artists used recognizable imagery from popular culture like advertisements, celebrities and comic book characters.
Born Andrew Warhola, Andy Warhol was the best known and most influential artist of the Pop Art movement to the extent that he is known as the “Pope of Pop”. The non-painterly style and the commercial aspects of his paintings initially caused offense as it affronted the technique and philosophy of Abstract Expressionism, the then dominant style in the United States. His works created an uproar in the American art world and the resulting controversy made Warhol a household name.
Warhol was a prolific artist and he explored a wide variety of media including painting, silkscreening, photography, film and sculpture. His paintings are among the most expensive ever sold. Though many still doubt the merit of his work, Andy Warhol is without doubt the most famous American artist and a leading figure of 20th century modern art.
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)
Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s, he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention.
Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City, the first of two children born to Milton and Beatrice Werner Lichtenstein. Milton Lichtenstein (1893–1946) was a successful real estate broker, and Beatrice Lichtenstein (1896–1991), a homemaker, had trained as a pianist, and she exposed Roy and his sister Rénee to museums, concerts and other aspects of New York culture. Roy showed artistic and musical ability early on: he drew, painted and sculpted as a teenager, and spent many hours in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art. He played piano and clarinet, and developed an enduring love of jazz, frequenting the nightspots in Midtown to hear it.
Lichtenstein attended the Franklin School for Boys, a private junior high and high school, and was graduated in 1940. That summer he studied painting and drawing from the model at the Art Students League of New York with Reginald Marsh. In September he entered Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus in the College of Education. His early artistic idols were Rembrandt, Daumier and Picasso, and he often said that Guernica (1937; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid), then on long-term loan to the Museum of Modern Art, was his favorite painting. Even as an undergraduate, Lichtenstein objected to the notion that one set of lines (one person’s drawings) “was considered brilliant, and somebody’s else’s, that may have looked better to you, was considered nothing by almost everyone.”i Lichtenstein’s questioning of accepted canons of taste was encouraged by Hoyt L. Sherman, a teacher whom he maintained was the person who showed him how to see and whose perception-based approach to art shaped his own.
In February 1943, Lichtenstein was drafted, and he was sent to Europe in 1945. As part of the infantry, he saw action in France, Belgium and Germany. He made sketches throughout his time in Europe and, after peace was declared there, he intended to study at the Sorbonne. Lichtenstein arrived in Paris in October 1945 and enrolled in classes in French language and civilization, but soon learned that his father was gravely ill. He returned to New York in January 1946, a few weeks before Milton Lichtenstein died. In the spring of that year, Lichtenstein went back to OSU to complete his BFA and in the fall he was invited to join the faculty as an instructor. In June 1949, he married Isabel Wilson Sarisky (1921–80), who worked in a cooperative art gallery in Cleveland where Lichtenstein had exhibited his work. While he was teaching, Lichtenstein worked on his master’s degree, which he received in 1949. During his second stint at OSU, Lichtenstein became closer to Sherman, and began teaching his method on how to organize and unify a composition. Lichtenstein remained appreciative of Sherman’s impact on him. He gave his first son the middle name of “Hoyt,” and in 1994 he donated funds to endow the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center at OSU.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lichtenstein began working in series and his iconography was drawn from printed images. His first sustained theme, intimate paintings and prints in the vein of Paul Klee that poked lyrical fun at medieval knights, castles and maidens, may well have been inspired by a book about the Bayeux Tapestry. Lichtenstein then took an ironic look at nineteenth-century American genre paintings he saw in history books, creating Cubist interpretations of cowboys and Indians spiked with a faux-primitive whimsy.
As with his most celebrated Pop paintings of the 1960s, Lichtenstein gravitated toward what he would characterize as the “dumbest” or “worst” visual item he could find and then went on to alter or improve it. In the 1960s, commercial art was considered beneath contempt by the art world; in the early 1950s, with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, nineteenth-century American narrative and genre paintings were at the nadir of their reputation among critics and collectors. Paraphrasing, particularly the paraphrasing of despised images, became a paramount feature of Lichtenstein’s art. Well before finding his signature mode of expression in 1961, Lichtenstein called attention to the artifice of conventions and taste that permeated art and society. What others dismissed as trivial fascinated him as classic and idealized—in his words, “a purely American mythological subject matter.”ii
Lichtenstein’s teaching contract at OSU was not renewed for the 1951–52 academic year, and in the autumn of 1951 he and Isabel moved to Cleveland. Isabel Lichtenstein became an interior decorator specializing in modern design, with a clientele drawn from wealthy Cleveland families. Whereas her career blossomed, Lichtenstein did not continue to teach at the university level. He had a series of part-time jobs, including industrial draftsman, furniture designer, window dresser and rendering mechanical dials for an electrical instrument company. In response to these experiences, he introduced quirkily rendered motors, valves and other mechanical elements into his paintings and prints. In 1954, the Lichtensteins’ first son, David, was born; two years later, their second child, Mitchell, followed. Despite the relative lack of interest in his work in Cleveland, Lichtenstein did place his work with New York dealers, which always mattered immensely to him. He had his first solo show at the Carlebach Gallery in New York in 1951, followed by representation with the John Heller Gallery from 1952 to 1957.
To reclaim his academic career and get closer to New York, Lichtenstein accepted a position as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, in the northern reaches of the state. He was hired to teach industrial design, beginning in September 1957. Oswego turned out to be more geographically and aesthetically isolated than Cleveland ever was, but the move was propitious, for both his art and his career. Lichtenstein broke away from representation to a fully abstract style, applying broad swaths of pigment to the canvas by dragging the paint across its surface with a rag wrapped around his arm. At the same time, Lichtenstein was embedding comic-book characters figures such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in brushy, expressionistic backgrounds. None of the proto-cartoon paintings from this period survive, but several pencil and pastel studies from that time, which he kept, document his intentions. Finally, when he was in Oswego, Lichtenstein met Reginald Neal, the new head of the art department at Douglass College, the women’s college of Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The school was strengthening and expanding its studio art program, and when Neal needed to add a faculty member to his department, Lichtenstein was invited to apply for the job. Lichtenstein was offered the position of assistant professor, and he began teaching at Douglass in September 1960.
At Douglass, Lichtenstein was thrown into a maelstrom of artistic ferment. With New York museums and galleries an hour away, and colleagues Geoffrey Hendricks and Robert Watts at Douglass and Allan Kaprow and George Segal at Rutgers, the environment could not help but galvanize him. In June 1961, Lichtenstein returned to the idea he had fooled around with in Oswego, which was to combine cartoon characters from comic books with abstract backgrounds. But, as Lichtenstein said, “[I]t occurred to me to do it by mimicking the cartoon style without the paint texture, calligraphic line, modulation—all the things involved in expressionism.”iii Most famously, Lichtenstein appropriated the Benday dots, the minute mechanical patterning used in commercial engraving, to convey texture and gradations of color—a stylistic language synonymous with his subject matter. The dots became a trademark device forever identified with Lichtenstein and Pop Art. Lichtenstein may not have calibrated the depth of his breakthrough immediately but he did realize that the flat affect and deadpan presentation of the comic-strip panel blown up and reorganized in the Sherman-inflected way “was just so much more compelling”iv than the gestural abstraction he had been practicing.
Among the first extant paintings in this new mode—based on comic strips and illustrations from advertisements—were Popeye and Look Mickey, which were swiftly followed by The Engagement Ring, Girl with Ball and Step-on Can with Leg. Kaprow recognized the energy and radicalism of these canvases and arranged for Lichtenstein to show them to Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Castelli was New York’s leading dealer in contemporary art, and he had staged landmark exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in 1958 and Frank Stella in 1960. Karp was immediately attracted to Lichtenstein’s paintings, but Castelli was slower to make a decision, partly on account of the paintings’ plebeian roots in commercial art, but also because, unknown to Lichtenstein, two other artists had recently come to his attention—Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist—and Castelli was only ready for one of them. After some deliberation, Castelli chose to represent Lichtenstein, and the first exhibition of the comic-book paintings was held at the gallery from February 10 to March 3, 1962. The show sold out and made Lichtenstein notorious. By the time of Lichtenstein’s second solo exhibition at Castelli in September 1963, his work had been showcased in museums and galleries around the country. He was usually grouped with Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Rosenquist, Segal, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana and Tom Wesselmann. Taken together, their work was viewed as a slap in the face to Abstract Expressionism and, indeed, the Pop artists shifted attention away from many members of the New York School.
With the advent of critical and commercial success, Lichtenstein made significant changes in his life and continued to investigate new possibilities in his art. After separating from his wife, he moved from New Jersey to Manhattan in 1963; in 1964, he resigned from his teaching position at Douglass to concentrate exclusively on his work. The artist also ventured beyond comic book subjects, essaying paintings based on oils by Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso, as well as still lifes and landscapes.
Lichtenstein became a prolific printmaker and expanded into sculpture, which he had not attempted since the mid-1950s, and in both two- and three-dimensional pieces, he employed a host of industrial or “non-art” materials, and designed mass-produced editioned objects that were less expensive than traditional paintings and sculpture. Participating in one such project—the American Supermarket show in 1964 at the Paul Bianchini Gallery, for which he designed a shopping bag—Lichtenstein met Dorothy Herzka (b. 1939), a gallery employee, whom he married in 1968. The late 1960s also saw Lichtenstein’s first museum surveys: in 1967 the Pasadena Art Museum initiated a traveling retrospective, in 1968 the Stedelijk Musem in Amsterdam presented his first European retrospective, and in 1969 he had his first New York retrospective, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Wanting to grow, Lichtenstein turned away from the comic book subjects that had brought him prominence. In the late 1960s his work became less narrative and more abstract, as he continued to meditate on the nature of the art enterprise itself. He began to explore and deconstruct the notion of brushstrokes—the building blocks of Western painting. Brushstrokes are conventionally conceived as vehicles of expression, but Lichtenstein made them into a subject. Modern artists have typically maintained that the subject of a painting is painting itself. Lichtenstein took this idea one imaginative step further: a compositional element could serve as the subject matter of a work and make that bromide ring true.
The search for new forms and sources was even more emphatic after 1970, when Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein bought property in Southampton, New York, and made it their primary residence. During the fertile decade of the 1970s, Lichtenstein probed an aspect of perception that had steadily preoccupied him: how easily the unreal is validated as the real because viewers have accepted so many visual conceptions that they don’t analyze what they see. In the Mirror series, he dealt with light and shadow upon glass, and in the Entablature series, he considered the same phenomena by abstracting such Beaux-Art architectural elements as cornices, dentils, capitals and columns. Similarly, Lichtenstein created pioneering painted bronze sculpture that subverted the medium’s conventional three-dimensionality and permanence. The bronze forms were as flat and thin as possible, more related to line than volume, and they portrayed the most fugitive sensations—curls of steam, rays of light and reflections on glass. The steam, the reflections and the shadow were signs for themselves that would immediately be recognized as such by any viewer.
Another entire panoply of works produced during the 1970s were complex encounters with Cubism, Futurism, Purism, Surrealism and Expressionism. Lichtenstein expanded his palette beyond red, blue, yellow, black, white and green, and invented and combined forms. He was not merely isolating found images, but juxtaposing, overlapping, fragmenting and recomposing them. In the words of art historian Jack Cowart, Lichtenstein’s virtuosic compositions were “a rich dialogue of forms—all intuitively modified and released from their nominal sources.”v In the early 1980s, which coincided with re-establishing a studio in New York City, Lichtenstein was also at the apex of a busy mural career. In the 1960s and 1970s, he had completed four murals; between 1983 and 1990, he created five. He also completed major commissions for public sculptures in Miami Beach, Columbus, Minneapolis, Paris, Barcelona and Singapore.
Lichtenstein created three major series in the 1990s, each emblematic of his ongoing interest in solving pictorial problems. The Interiors, mural-sized canvases inspired by a miniscule advertisement in an Italian telephone book, delve again into the perceptual ambiguities of reflections from windows and mirrors. The Nudes reprise the theme of women in a romance-comic mode, which Lichtenstein had introduced in the 1960s and amplified in lush Surrealist-inspired beach scenes in the 1970s. As with the Interiors, there is ample quotation of elements from earlier canvases, the furniture of Lichtenstein’s painted world. He also used the series to investigate mixing chiaroscuro (which he devised with dots and shading) with flat areas of color. This effect was brought to an ultimate pitch in his Chinese Landscapes, Lichtenstein’s final encounter with a monumental art tradition—and one of his most subtle. Configurations of land, water, mountains and air found in Song dynasty paintings and scrolls are simulated by softly drifting fields of graduated dots. None of Lichtenstein’s usual black outlines define the monochromatic forms, which heightens the contemplative and abstract quality of the series.
In August 1997, Lichtenstein fell ill with pneumonia. He died unexpectedly of complications from the disease on September 29, 1997, at the age of 73, in New York City.
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Barbara Kruger (1945 – Present)
Another prominent female artist within the Postmodernism era was Barbara Kruger, whose works existed as iconic pieces of the movement. Kruger made use of advertising to design her artworks, with a few of her more well-known pieces being mass-produced on shopping bags and other products like T-shirts. A popular notion that appeared in some of her works was the theme of consumerism, which was the main feature in her iconic 1987 work, Untitled (I shop therefore I am).
This artwork was characteristic of Kruger’s style, as a juxtaposition was created through the combination of a found photography and an assertive or provocative slogan. An appropriation between high art and mass-media advertising was created within Kruger’s work, as this piece takes on the form of an advert as opposed to a formal work of art. The color scheme of red, black, and white helped place the writing at the forefront of the work, which acted as the focal point for viewers to consider first.
The quote “I shop therefore I am” subverted René Descartes’ philosophical statement of “I think therefore I am”, which referred to consumerism that was said to be shaping identities within society. Through this work, Kruger stated that a person’s value and identity ran no deeper than the surface, implying that the material possessions they owned dictated who they were. Additionally, the red frame surrounding the work created a confined space, which was said to emphasize the text against the blurred background.
Marina Abramović (1946 – Present)
Existing as the artist of a significant performance piece was artist Marina Abramović, whose works were well-known within the Postmodern period. Her most iconic piece, performed in 1974, was titled Rhythm 0/Seven Easy Pieces. In her work, Abramović placed herself in a gallery and invited audience members to do what they wanted to her without her eliciting any response.
Abramović set out 72 different objects that viewers could choose from to use on her, with these items consisting of knives and a loaded gun. With the items ranging from pain to pleasure, viewers were first hesitant to take part in her performance. However, after Abramović’s six-hour performance, her interactions with viewers became increasingly aggressive, which led to vicious and disturbing outcomes.
This performance was seen as groundbreaking at the time, as it aided in the Postmodern shift that leaned towards including audience participation as part of an artwork. Abramović demonstrated a total surrendering of control and authorship within her artwork by allowing audience members to dictate its outcome, which challenged the Modernist’s idea that art had to be unique and created by one famous artistic figure.
Cindy Sherman (1954 – Present)
An artist who experimented with the playful treatment of identity and self was Cindy Sherman, who incorporated this element of pluralism within all of her Postmodernism photography. Sherman’s works placed particular focus on the split that existed between an identity that was created through film or another type of media and the reality of women’s experiences in society.
In doing this, Sherman demonstrated that art could resist superior narratives. Within her Untitled Film Stills series, her 1978 work titled Untitled Film Still #21 exists as a well-known black and white photograph, as she depicts a female film heroine in a costume and a hat. A young woman from the 1950s is depicted and framed by the skyscrapers around her, with the era of the photograph being recognized by the dress she is wearing. The expression on her face is vague, as she seems both determined and uneasy at the same time.
The images within Sherman’s Postmodernism photography series experimented with the idea of a shattered postmodern identity, as she took on the role of both the photographer and the subject in her work. In each photograph in her Untitled Film Stills series, Sherman posed as an actress in a variety of settings from different eras, which spoke to the notion of time and genres that audience members could identify with.
Thus, Sherman’s photographs were Postmodern due to their lack of authenticity and the representation of identity as a fluid and interchanging concept. Through the borrowing of historic styles, Sherman was able to position herself both inside and outside the realm of media, which provided a strong critique about the idea of fixed feminism and the representation of women in society.
Jeff Koons (1955 – Present)
Another artist who created works that played off the kitsch potential of Postmodernism art was Jeff Koons. His most iconic art series, known as Banality, displayed this tacky aspect that existed in most of his works, as it demonstrated the contrast of the garish and sentimental within his pieces. His most significant Postmodernism sculpture was placed within this series and was titled Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988).
Within this artwork, Koons created a life-size sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet monkey, Bubbles, sitting on a bed of flowers. The sculpture demonstrated the height of Jackson’s fame at the time, with Koons painting it in gold to emphasize his popularity. In doing so, he also converted Jackson into a god-like icon through this color, which displayed the rejection of traditional religious imagery that was still present in the Modernist era.
Additionally, the white coloring of the faces referred to the Byzantine, Baroque, and Rococo periods of art, with Koons bringing back past styles in a theatrical and gaudy way which was typical of artworks within the period of Postmodern Art. This sculpture exists as a good example of the excess that was present within the artworks created by Koons, and also challenged the traditional notions of taste, high art, and pop culture.
Puppy (1992) by Jeff Koons; Zarateman, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Damien Hirst (1965 – Present)
Known for creating astonishing Postmodernism sculpture pieces was Damien Hirst, the leading artist of the Young British Artists movement, who were known for their provocative and shocking artworks. Of all the works he created, his most famous piece and an equally well-known artwork was his 1991 sculpture titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
This art piece, also known as The Shark, is possibly one of the most famous works of the Young British Artists movement in the 1990s, and is made up of a tiger shark that was preserved in formaldehyde. In this work, Hirst confronts viewers with their own death by presenting a once-feared beast, which forces viewers to further acknowledge their fears about dying in a public space as opposed to a private one.
Since most viewers would have only seen an animal of this size and force in a book or through the television, being physically confronted with the actual shark made it difficult for viewers to see it as “real” and not a replica. Through placing the shark in the gallery, Hirst played on the idea that the animal had lost its power and was, therefore, no harm to viewers because it was dead. This exists as an important Postmodern work through the spectacle that was created when looking at it, as well as the fact that the immense animal was viewed as a mere commodity because it was no longer alive.
The Shark (1991) and other pieces by the Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection installed at the Brooklyn Museum October 2, 1999 through January 9, 2000; Brooklyn Museum, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
The Legacy of Postmodern Art
As the Postmodern movement incorporated styles and techniques belonging to other art movements, it is easy to still wonder: What is Postmodernism? The best way to describe the movement is through the phrase “anything goes”, as this era of art collapsed the distinction that existed between high and low art, allowing for a combination of the two. The legacy of Postmodernism art continued after the movement’s demise, as its questioning of assigning value and judgement to artworks was taken further in the movements that followed.
While Postmodernism was thought to disrupt the Modernist art movement that appeared before, it has also been said that it enabled the continuation of Modernism, as there is evidence of both styles appearing in Contemporary art today. The attitudes and styles within Postmodern art were viewed as important shifts that initiated great change within artistic society, with the collaboration existing in Contemporary art said to belong to Postmodern influences.
Postmodern art sealed the gap that existed between high and low culture, as well as good and bad taste within art, yet some critics argue that these distinctions are still visible. It has been said that the art community has shifted into a post Postmodern era, as some characteristics of Postmodernism have been viewed as outdated. However, these claims have generally been dismissed, as some Contemporary artworks existing today borrow elements from both the Postmodern and Modern movements, simply combining different aspects.
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