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Briefly: The Modern and Contemporary Collection

Joslyn’s collection of modern and contemporary art includes major works by many of the leading figures of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The centerpiece of the collection is Jackson Pollock’s magnificent 1947 canvas Galaxy, which is complemented by paintings and sculpture by Hans Hoffman, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, Helen Frankenthaler, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, Sol Le Witt, and Petah Coyne, offering a rich and varied narrative of the art of our time.

Below are highlights selected from Joslyn's Modern and Contemporary collection.

Modern and Contemporary

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976),
Numbered One to Seven , 1950,
painted sheet metal and wire, 82 x 62 in., 208.3 x 157.5 cm
Gift of the Joslyn Women's Association, 1978.265
Calder, America's first abstract artist of international renown, is forever associated with his invention of the mobile, which he developed by 1930 as freely moving sculptures of arcs and spheres. Calder's mobiles embodied the avant-garde spirit of the times by their engagement with machine technology, their use of abstraction as a valid, universal language of artistic expression, and their playful reliance on chance arrangement. Made up of delicately balanced, colorful sheet-metal shapes, Calder's kinetic sculptures look weightless and effortless, gliding randomly into new configurations on the motion of air currents. Numbered One to Seven is characteristic of Calder's work, its biomorphic forms calling to mind planets and galaxies, plant life, and atomic particles, as large leaflike shapes vertically balance a smaller constellation of colorful circles.
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Charles Clough (American, 1951-),
Dioecious , 1992,
enamel on masonite, 13 x 12 in.; 33.02 x 30.48 cm
Gift of the Dorthy and Herbert Vogel Collection - Fifty Works for Fifty States, 2009.8

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Charles Clough (American, 1951),
January Twenty-First , 1988-9,
enamel on board, 21 1/2 x 12 1/4 in.; 54.61 x 31.12 cm
Gift of the Dorthy and Herbert Vogel Collection - Fifty Works for Fifty States, 2009.9

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Gene Davis (American, 1920-1985),
Pink Parachute , 1980,
acrylic on unprimed canvas, 47 x 69 in.; 119.38 x 175.26
Gift of Sylvia B. and Jerome I. Cohn in Memory of Margy Schneider, 2007.42

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Stuart Davis (American, 1892-1964),
American Painting , 1932-51,
oil on canvas, 40 x 50¼, 101.6 x 127.64 cm
Lent by the University of Nebraska at Omaha, L-1974.71
Convinced that American art could combine popular themes with progressive pictorial construction, Davis invented a personal form of Cubism — bright, improvisatory compositions of lines and planar facets that captured the sights and sounds of this country's Modern Age. American Painting contains composite images referring to many things that stood for the new and national, including jazz music, skyscrapers, racing planes, even cartoon characters — innovations introduced or popularized in Davis’ lifetime. Returning later in his career to work on this canvas, Davis overlaid color blocks and word shapes as general references to life's fast pace — full of color, syncopated rhythms, key phrases, and repeated motifs. MORE DETAILS

Helen Frankenthaler (American, born 1928),
Monoscape , 1969,
acrylic on canvas, 104 ¾ x 124 1/8 in.; 266.07 x 315.28 cm
Museum purchase with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Plan Grant and m, 1978.74
The lyrical, colorful abstractions of Frankenthaler descend from the open, gestural expressions of Jackson Pollock. Painting on unstretched, unprimed canvas laid on the floor, a method adopted from Pollock, enabled her to work from all sides. Frankenthaler flooded her canvases with thinned oils and acrylics that stained like a dye. By permeating the fabric with paint rather than layering it, she emphasized its flat surface and further accented the liquid nature of her medium. The result, in large, dramatic works like Monoscape, is atmospheric effects of shifting, fragile forms. Fluid shapes move freely across the canvas, flickering with light that seems to come from within. MORE DETAILS

Hans Hofmann (American, born Germany, 1880-1966),
Morning , 1948,
oil on canvas, 14 x 18 in.; 35.56 x 45.72 cm
Gift of Milton Wolsky, 1967.101

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Robert Irwin (American, born 1928),
Untitled , 1969,
acrylic and formed acrylic disc, diameter: 54 in., 137.16 cm
Museum purchase, 1970.84
Like many artists in the 1960s, Irwin tested abstraction's limits by reducing art to geometric forms, all but eliminating the act of painting and the need for a frame. Irwin focused on the act of visual perception, using such materials as acrylic, lighting, and scrim, he "dematerialized" art and created work that challenged the viewer's sense of space and boundaries. An example of the "light and space" movement with which Irwin is associated, Joslyn's untitled sculpture is a painted, convex acrylic disc affixed to the wall by a clear acrylic cylinder and lit from equidistant points, forming identical shadows. A band of gray provides a horizon line on the disc that merges into the cast shadows. The result is an ethereal sculpture overlapping circles formed by the disc and its four shadows that breaks down standard distinctions between the object, its background, and its environment.
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Keith Jacobshagen (American, born 1941),
All Souls , 1994–95,
oil on canvas, 38 1/8 x 36 1/8 in.; 96.84 x 91.76 cm
Museum Purchase with funds provided by David and Anne Rismiller, 1998.26
The sky dominates Jacobshagen's landscapes, but his pictures are also carefully composed to draw the eye to the land and man's relation to it — here one sees a farmstead and a bonfire, perhaps burning the leaves of autumn on All Souls Day, November 1. The artist bases his paintings on photographs and field sketches that he makes in the country near his Nebraska home. The scenes appear to be very site-specific, but Jacobshagen says that they are composites of many locations, a multitude of vistas consolidated into one vision. MORE DETAILS

Keith Jacobshagen (American, 1941),
Spreading Evening Sky with Crows , 1988,
oil on paper, 12 x 36 in.; 30.48 x 91.44 cm
Gift of the Frederick Weisman Company, 1989.3

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Donald Judd (American, 1928–1994),
Untitled , 1982,
brass and blue anodized aluminum, 40 ½ x 84 x 6 ¾ in.; 102.87 x 213.36 x 17.15 cm
Museum purchase, 1984.16
“The medium is the message.” This Marshall McLuhan epithet is a reference point for looking at Judd's work, with its industrial vocabulary of manufactured surfaces—the product of an industrial age. Judd created large-scale sculpture that insisted on being an object instead of representing one. The clean lines, pure colors, simple repeated volumes, and smooth surfaces of his works address the basic language of three-dimensional form. Placed directly on the wall, not on a pedestal or platform, Judd’s work asserts that issues of shape, volume, color, arrangement, and placement represent the same basic aesthetic decisions faced by every artist. MORE DETAILS

Kenneth Noland (American, 1924–2010),
Cirium , 1964,
acrylic on canvas, 103 x 216 ¼ in.; 261.62 x 549.91 cm
Museum purchase with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts Purchase Plan Grant and matching, 1978.266
In the 1960s artists questioned the nature and role of art and began to focus on specific areas of creativity. For Noland, the answer lay in the very materials used in making a painting or a sculpture, rather than the "hand"—the brush strokes or chisel marks—of its author. Noland emphasized the flat, absorbent fabric of the canvas, the liquid nature of paint, and the light-filled intensities of color, arranging vibrant, stained color in regular, geometric shapes. In Cirium he additionally explored what happens if the form inside a work is allowed to determine the shape outside. Cirium is an unusual and elegant diamond that seems to float on the wall. MORE DETAILS

Tony Oursler (American, born 1957),
The Three Faces of... , 1996,
fiberglass; video disc; electronic playback gear, sphere: 18 in.; 45.72 cm
Museum purchase with funds from the Collectors' Circle for Contemporary Art, 1998.49.A-C
Oursler takes as his subject matter the contemporary media-obsessed human psyche, fashioning mini-dramas filled with sharp humor and thought-provoking irony. He uses television and videotape in the creation of mesmerizing and often disturbing video projections onto such surfaces as this orb. In The Three Faces of…, we assume the role of voyeur, looking at the image of an eye that is watching television. Oursler's source, a well-known movie about a schizophrenic, demonstrates his interest in multiple personality disorder, for which he finds an equivalent in the habit of channel surfing. The artist suggests that our mass-media-informed preoccupation with continual visual stimulus creates masks for our true selves. The eye, no longer a window to the soul, projects only an outward gaze.

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Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956),
Galaxy , 1947,
oil and aluminum paint on canvas, 43½ x 34, 110.49 x 86.36 cm
Gift of Peggy Guggenheim, 1949.164
Pollock is the best known artist associated with Abstract Expressionism, a movement that explored the impulses of creativity and the expression of the inner self. In 1947 Pollock made his first revolutionary “drip” paintings, among them Galaxy. These were completely abstract and a declaration that the easel tradition was dying as a significant method of picture-making. For Galaxy, Pollock set a previously completed composition on the floor and, with deliberate gestures, veiled it with poured, dripped, and spattered paint. Adding to the texture and complexity of Pollock’s surfaces is his use of unorthodox materials such as sand, gravel, and industrial aluminum paint. MORE DETAILS

George Segal (American, born 1924),
Times Square at Night , 1970,
light, plaster, wood, plastic and electrical parts, 108 x 96 x 108 in.; 182.88 x 66.04 x 66.04 cm
Museum purchase, 1973.95
Against the idealism and prosperity of the 1950s, the 1960s in America provided a reality check marked by a divisive war, civil rights struggles, and senseless assassinations. Visual artists, too, returned to reality — the observable and the tangible — rejecting the chauvinistic individualism of Abstract Expressionism. For Segal, this meant magnifying the heroic in the small, routine dramas of ordinary people.
Working with plaster casts of individuals, he constructed tableaux dealing with such everyday environments as the diner, the bus stop, and the bedroom inhabited by figures who usually appear lonely, weary, or distracted. Although made from plaster casts of neighbors and acquaintances (in Times Square at Night, the man on the left is Jan van der Marck, then director of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art), Segal removed much portraitlike detail from the casts while the plaster was still wet to intensify the quality of anonymity. An effective example of his expressive sculptures, Times Square at Night shows two men moving silently down a street where a pancake house is neighbor to an adult movie theatre. Segal enhanced the social isolation of his figures with this theme of impersonal voyeurism and commodified sex.
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Roger Shimomura (American, 1939-),
Untitled , 1985,
acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 in.; 152.4 x 182.88 cm
Museum Purchase with funds provided by the friends of Jerome I. Cohn, 1999.35

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Daryl Trivieri (American, 1957-),
Direction of the Same , 1989,
acrylic on canvas, 10 x 14 in.; 25.4 x 35.56 cm
Gift of the Dorthy and Herbert Vogel Collection - Fifty Works for Fifty States, 2009.39

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Richard Tuttle (American, 1941-),
Mesa , 1995,
gouache, pencil, silver, blue and pink glitter, clear liquid adhesive on two seamed sheets, 23 1/4 x 17 in.; 59.06 x 43.18 cm
Gift of the Dorthy and Herbert Vogel Collection - Fifty Works for Fifty States, 2009.42

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Richard Van Buren (American, 1937),
Untitled , 1971-1972,
Polyester resin fiberglass with dyed paper, pigment, multi-hued glitter inclusions, 23 3/4 x 16 x 2 3/8 in.; 60.33 x 40.64 x 6.03 cm
Gift of the Dorthy and Herbert Vogel Collection - Fifty Works for Fifty States, 2009.50

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Tom Wesselmann (American, 1931-2004),
Bedroom painting #25 , 1971 (1967-1971),
oil on raw linen canvas, 96 1/4 x 120 1/4 in.; 244.48 x 305.44 cm
Museum purchase with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1982.62

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Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917-2009),
Half Bushel , 1959,
watercolor on paper, 21 11/16 x 30 in.; 55.08 x 76.2 cm
Museum purchase, 1960.271

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