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    This document provides background on the history and development of postmodernism. It traces the origins of the term to late 19th century English painter John Watkins Chapman. In the post-World War II era, postmodernism emerged as a movement beyond modern abstraction and social realism. In the 1950s and 1960s, artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol produced works that blurred distinctions between high and low art. Postmodern architecture in the 1970s reintroduced traditional styles and popular culture influences. The works discussed, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych and Gerhard Richter's Apple Trees, can both be considered postmodern for undermining notions of authenticity and representation.

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    This document provides background on the history and development of postmodernism. It traces the origins of the term to late 19th century English painter John Watkins Chapman. In the post-World War II era, postmodernism emerged as a movement beyond modern abstraction and social realism. In the 1950s and 1960s, artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol produced works that blurred distinctions between high and low art. Postmodern architecture in the 1970s reintroduced traditional styles and popular culture influences. The works discussed, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych and Gerhard Richter's Apple Trees, can both be considered postmodern for undermining notions of authenticity and representation.

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    20 views3 pages

    History Background: Abstraction

    Uploaded by

    HURHUR
    This document provides background on the history and development of postmodernism. It traces the origins of the term to late 19th century English painter John Watkins Chapman. In the post-World War II era, postmodernism emerged as a movement beyond modern abstraction and social realism. In the 1950s and 1960s, artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol produced works that blurred distinctions between high and low art. Postmodern architecture in the 1970s reintroduced traditional styles and popular culture influences. The works discussed, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych and Gerhard Richter's Apple Trees, can both be considered postmodern for undermining notions of authenticity and representation.

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    History Background

     The historical origins of the term lead back at least to English painter John Watkins Chapman,
    who was probably the first to use the term "postmodernism." He used it in the 1870s to simply
    mean what is today understood to be post-impressionism.

     In 1945, Australian art historian Bernard Smith took up the term


    to suggest a movement of social realism in painting
    beyond abstraction.
     Postmodernism have begun in the post-World War II era, roughly the 1950s.
     In the mid-50s, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had produced the first post-
    modern style works of Neo-Dada and Pop Neo-Dada was a movement with audio, visual
    and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with
    earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a
    combination of playfulness, iconoclasm, and appropriation.

     In the 60s post modernism took full flight in the 1960s in the face of global social and
    political unrest.

     1970 - Postmodernist architects began to re-humanize 20th century architecture by designing


    structures with interesting features, taken from popular culture and from more traditional styles.

    THE MANY FACES OF POSTMODERNISM

    JACQUES LACAN

    Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), was a prominent French psychoanalyst and theorist. His ideas had a huge
    impact on critical theory in the twentieth century and were particularly influential on post-structuralist
    philosophy and the development of postmodernism.
     Marilyn Diptych (1962)
     Artist: Andy Warhol
     Acrylic on Canvas

     Apples Trees
     Artist: Gerhard Richter
     Oil on canvas
    ART

    This series of silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe was taken from her image in the film, Niagara and
    reproduced first in color, and then in black and white. They were made in the months after her death in
    1962 by Warhol who was fascinated by both the cult of celebrity and by death itself; this series fused the
    artist's interests. The color contrasted against the monochrome that fades out to the right is suggestive
    of life and death, while the repetition of images echoes Marilyn's ubiquitous presence in the media.

    This work can be conceived of as postmodern in many senses: its overt reference to popular culture (and
    low art) challenges the purity of the modernist aesthetic, its repetitive element is an homage to mass
    production, and its ironic play on the concept of authenticity undermines the authority of the artist. The
    use of a diptych format, which was common in Christian altarpieces in the Renaissance period, draws
    attention to the American worship of both celebrities and images. All of these translate into an artwork
    that challenges traditional demarcations between high and low art and makes a statement about the
    importance of consumerism and spectacle in the 1960s.

    Acrylic on Canvas - Tate Modern, London

    Gerhard Richter is known for his mixing of aesthetic codes and his refusal to maintain a cohesive artistic
    style, experimenting with gestural painting, sculpture, photo collage, and various other media. At a time
    when many artists had abandoned painting for performance or installation art, Richter was one of
    several German artists who revived the medium, but in ways that challenged its traditional qualities,
    using his experiments to question basic assumptions about the notion of representation itself. He would
    appropriate his subject matter from newspapers or photographs so that he could focus on the act of
    painting rather than on deciding what to paint. In  Apple Trees, for example, Richter produces a
    traditional landscape such as one might find in German Romantic landscape painting, but he blurs the
    image so that details and information about the landscape are not obvious or even available, thus
    calling into question the point of representational art, which is to represent. He argues that this method
    keeps interpretational possibilities open by not limiting what the viewer can see.

    Oil on canvas - n/a

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