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
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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. 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
Davis developed his signature work, the stripe painting, in the company of the Washington Color School, a loose, regional group of artists that developed out of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. Davis explored the possibilities of unifying color and its support by staining saturated color into an unprimed canvas.
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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.
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Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928-2011),
Monoscape
, 1969,
acrylic on canvas, 104 ¾ x 124 1/8 in.; 266.07 x 315.28 cm
Museum purchase with funds from National Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Plan Grant and matching funds from Joslyn Women's Association, 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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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. 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.
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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.
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Miriam Schapiro (American, born in Canada, born 1923),
Vestiture: Paris Series #2
, ,
acrylic and fabric on canvas, 60 x 50 1/4 in.; 152.4 x 127.635 cm
Gift of Barbara Gladstone, 1984.53
Miriam Schapiro is a pioneer in feminist art. Schapiro began painting in the Abstract Expressionist style but later developed her own experimental, innovative style hwich she called "femmage" (female laborer's hand-sewn work melded with high-art collage). Credited with establishing the Pattern and Decoration movement, Schapiro's work, as in the case of Joslyn's piece, often combines fabric and paint on canvas.
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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. 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.
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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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