| Map | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Jasper Johns |
| Year | 1961 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 200 cm× 312.7 cm(78 in× 123+1⁄8 in) |
| Location | Museum of Modern Art, New York |
Map is a 1961 oil-on-canvas painting by Jasper Johns. It represents the overall proportions and shapes of the states of the United States and parts of Mexico and Canada, although executed with a more "energetic application of paint" [1] than found in cartography. The names of the states and ocean areas are stencilled.
The painting measures 198.2 centimetres (78.0 in) by 314.7 centimetres (123.9 in). Johns was inspired by a gift from Robert Rauschenberg of some mimeographed outline maps of US states, of the sort that can be colored in by schoolchildren. Johns was attracted to an image that is ubiquitous but "seen and not looked at, not examined", [1] effectively a found object. He copied the outlines to a large canvas, to which he added bright splashes of red, yellow, and blue, sometimes mixed, with accents of black and white. His rough brushwork resembles an Abstract Expressionist style or the late works of Cézanne. Although the outlines of the states are recognizable, the colors do not always respect state borders, perhaps suggesting the blurring of boundaries and homogenization of post-war American society, reinforced by the mass-produced effect of the stencilled names. It has been suggested that the painting may be a visual pun, as Johns "deliberately put American painting on the map" in the 1950s. [2] Johns considered that he was painting a map, not making a painting of a map.
The painting was donated by Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Johns continued to make map paintings through the 1960s, including gray versions in 1962 and 1963, a white map in 1965, and a mural 33 feet (10 m) wide and 15 feet (4.6 m) high for Expo 67 in Montreal. Other map paintings by Johns employ encaustic in place of oil paint.
Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is a permanent, fast-drying painting medium consisting of pigments mixed with a water-soluble binder medium, usually glutinous material such as egg yolk. Tempera also refers to the paintings done in this medium. Tempera paintings are very long-lasting, and examples from the first century AD still exist. Egg tempera was a primary method of painting until after 1500 when it was superseded by oil painting. A paint consisting of pigment and binder commonly used in the United States as poster paint is also often referred to as "tempera paint", although the binders in this paint are different from traditional tempera paint.
Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art. He is well known for his depictions of the American flag and other common objects and signs, such as targets, maps, letters, and numbers. At multiple points in his career, his work has held the title of highest known price paid for an artwork by a living artist.
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art.
Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.
Monochromatic painting has played a significant role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes. Artists have explored the non-representational potential of a single color, investigating shifts in value, diversity of texture, and formal nuances as a means of emotional expression, visual investigation into the inherent properties of painting, as well as a starting point for conceptual works. Ranging from geometric abstraction in a variety of mediums to non-representational gestural painting, monochromatic works continue to be an important influence in contemporary art.
Precisionism was a modernist art movement that emerged in the United States after World War I. Influenced by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionist artists reduced subjects to their essential geometric shapes, eliminated detail, and often used planes of light to create a sense of crisp focus and suggest the sleekness and sheen of machine forms. At the height of its popularity during the 1920s and early 1930s, Precisionism celebrated the new American landscape of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories in a form that has also been called "Cubist-Realism." The term "Precisionism" was first coined in the mid-1920s, possibly by Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr although according to Amy Dempsey the term "Precisionism" was coined by Charles Sheeler. Painters working in this style were also known as the "Immaculates", which was the more commonly used term at the time. The stiffness of both art-historical labels suggests the difficulties contemporary critics had in attempting to characterize these artists.
John Steuart Curry was an American painter whose career spanned the years from 1924 until his death. He was noted for his paintings depicting rural life in his home state, Kansas. Along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, he was hailed as one of the three great painters of American Regionalism of the first half of the twentieth century. Curry's artistic production was varied, including paintings, book illustrations, prints, and posters.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
John Frederick Kensett was an American landscape painter and engraver born in Cheshire, Connecticut. He was a member of the second generation of the Hudson River School of artists. Kensett's signature works are landscape paintings of New England and New York State, whose clear light and serene surfaces celebrate transcendental qualities of nature, and are associated with Luminism. Kensett's early work owed much to the influence of Thomas Cole, but was from the outset distinguished by a preference for cooler colors and an interest in less dramatic topography, favoring restraint in both palette and composition. The work of Kensett's maturity features tranquil scenery depicted with a spare geometry, culminating in series of paintings in which coastal promontories are balanced against glass-smooth water. He was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Robert Ryman was an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. He was best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings. He lived and worked in New York City.
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
Alex Katz is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Since 1951, Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are considered as precursors to Pop Art.
John Quinn was an Irish-American cognoscente of the art world and a lawyer in New York City who fought to overturn censorship laws restricting modern literature and art from entering the United States.
Campbell's Soup Cans is a work of art produced between November 1961 and June 1962 by American artist Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring 20 inches (51 cm) in height × 16 inches (41 cm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can—one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The works were Warhol's hand-painted depictions of printed imagery deriving from commercial products and popular culture and belong to the pop art movement.
White Flag is an encaustic painting by the American artist Jasper Johns. Created in 1955, soon after his first flag painting, entitled simply Flag, it was the first painting by Johns to be acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, bought from the artist in 1998. The price was undisclosed but experts estimated its value at the time as more than $20 million.
Flag is an encaustic painting by the American artist Jasper Johns. It was created in 1954-1955, when Johns was 24, two years after he was discharged from the US Army. This painting was the first of many works that Johns made, as he said, that were inspired by a dream of the U.S. flag in 1954. It is arguably the painting for which Johns is best known. It is held in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) is an abstract oil-on-canvas painting by Kazimir Malevich. It is one of the more well-known examples of the Russian Suprematism movement, painted the year after the October Revolution.
Mural is a 1943 large painting by American artist Jackson Pollock. Although signed and dated 1943, the signature and date were not added until 1947, and the work was probably completed around the fall of 1943. It was made with oil paint on linen, and is Pollock's largest canvas, measuring 2.43 by 6.04 metres. The work was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim for the long entrance hall of her townhouse at 155 East 61st Street in New York City.
Robert Bordo is a New York-based, Canadian-American artist known for paintings that blend modernist formal concerns with postmodern approaches to image, subject matter and metaphor. Throughout his career, he has worked in painting series positioned between representation and abstraction that critics characterize as conceptually structured, yet sensual in execution. These series explore recurring, often overlapping themes, such as memory and experience, the passage of time, landscape and weather phenomena, mapping, and mark-making as an indicator of thought. New York Times critic Roberta Smith described Bordo's early map paintings as charting an idiosyncratic "hybrid discipline … a kind of cartographically conscious rerouting of modernism"; in a 2019 New Yorker review of his "crackup" paintings, Andrea Scott wrote, "Bordo's imagery is an apt metaphor for our current, contentious political climate, but his true subject is painting itself: how easily it can tip realism into abstraction or shift figure-ground relations until it's impossible to discern whether you’re on the inside looking out or vice versa."
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