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Painting: Jackson Pollock - Autumn Rhythm
Watch Pollock painting In this nonrepresentational picture, thinned paint was applied to unprimed, unstretched canvas that lay flat on the floor rather than propped on an easel. Spontaneity was a critical element. But lack of premeditation should not be confused with ceding control; as Pollock stated, "I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident." -
Period: to
1950 - Present
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Painting: Willem de Kooning - Woman I
Listen to a discussion about Woman I De Kooning famously said, "Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented," and although he often worked in an abstract style he continually returned to the figure. Woman, I took an unusually long time to complete. De Kooning made numerous preliminary studies then repainted the canvas repeatedly, eventually arriving at this hulking, wild-eyed figure of a woman. -
Drama: Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
Read the playWatch the play Waiting for Godot was voted the most significant English language play of the 20th century. It explores important contemporary political, religious and social themes. -
Literature: Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. -
Painting: Jasper Johns - Three Flags
The single flag became the ubiquitous subject matter of the first period of Johns's art. From the beginning, Johns divested the flag of its original symbolic and conventional aesthetic usage. Instead, he transformed it into data for examining perception, visual ambiguity, and the meaning of art itself. What Johns painted was not the wavy, windblown banner of flagpoles and parades, but the flat, rigid flag characteristic American folk art and craft. -
Painting: Mark Rothko - Black on Maroon
This painting comes from one of three series of canvases painted by Rothko in 1958-9 in response to a commission for murals for the small dining room of the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. The Four Seasons, one of the smartest restaurants in the city, is in the Seagram Building, a celebrated classic modern skyscraper on Park Avenue designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. -
Painting: Andy Warhol - Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato)
With Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) Andy Warhol takes as his subject a ubiquitous staple food found in millions of American homes and turns it into high art. With the unique candor he displayed in the best of his early Pop art works he appropriates the curved lines and iconic graphic imagery of a tin of canned soup and re-examines them in the context of their pure visual qualities. -
Painting: Roy Lichtenstein - Whaam!
'Whaam!' is based on an image from 'All American Men of War' published by DC comics in 1962. Throughout the 1960s, Lichtenstein frequently drew on commercial art sources such as comic images or advertisements, attracted by the way highly emotional subject matter could be depicted using detached techniques. Transferring this to a painting context, Lichtenstein could present powerfully charged scenes in an impersonal manner, leaving the viewer to decipher meanings for themselves. -
Music: Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
Listen to the album hereThe best Beach Boys album, and one of the best of the 1960s. The group here reached a whole new level in terms of both composition and production, layering tracks upon tracks of vocals and instruments to create a richly symphonic sound. -
Painting: Frank Stella - Harran II
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Frank Stella broke the stronghold of Abstract Expressionism. Stella also introduced curves into his works, marking the beginning of the Protractor series. Harran II evinces the great vaulting compositions and lyrically decorative patterns that are the leitmotif of the series, which is based on the semicircular drafting instrument used for measuring. -
Painting: Pablo Picasso - Nude Woman with Necklace
Throughout his life, Picasso reworked the theme of the female nude. In his eighties, he revised the traditional ideal of beauty with particular violence, subjecting the body to a repeated assault in paint. Here, a reclining female figure is presented as a raw, sexualised arrangement of orifices, breasts and cumbersome limbs. ‘It’s all there’, Picasso said, ‘I try to do a nude as it is.’ The face is that of his second wife, Jacqueline Roque. -
Sculpture: George Segal - Couple
Naked female body provided the principal inspiration in the 1970s. Segal's reliefs, often painted, are plastically and softly molded. He used color in sculpture as a means of estrangement. Segal confided that if he painted sculptures they gave him the impression of a carnival. -
Painting: Gerhard Richter - Grey
During the 1970s Richter produced several groups of grey paintings, attracted to the neutrality and inconspicuousness of the colour. This series followed a set of vibrant colour paintings, and has been seen as a reaffirmation of artistic purity. ‘Grey is the epitome of non-statement’, he has observed, ‘it does not trigger off feelings or associations, it is actually neither visible nor invisible... Like no other colour it is suitable for illustrating ‘nothing’.’ -
Photography: Cindy Sherman - Untitled Film Still #21
Cindy Sherman photographs herself in made-up settings, suggesting stories of which she is a part. These stories are often unclear and confusing. She uses body language (the way someone sits, walks, stands) to communicate her feelings and the mood of the photograph. -
Painting: Susan Rothenberg - Horse
Susan Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945. She received a BFA from Cornell University. Her early work—large acrylic, figurative paintings—came to prominence in the 1970s New York art world, a time and place almost completely dominated and defined by Minimalist aesthetics and theories. -
Conceptual Art: Christo - Surrounded Islands
In 1983, eleven of the islands situated in Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, were surrounded with 6.5 million square feet (603,870 square meters) of floating pink woven polypropylene fabric covering the surface of the water and extending out from each island into the bay. -
Painting: John Michael Basquiat - Untitled (Skull)
Throughout his career Basquiat focused on "suggestive dichotomies," such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. Basquiat's art utilized a synergy of appropriation, poetry, drawing and painting, which married text and image, abstraction and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. -
Painting: Francis Bacon - Study for a Self-Portrait
The work is an acknowledgment and examination of the effect of age and time on the human body and spirit, and was painted after a period when many close friends of the artist died. Although widely considered a masterpiece and one of Bacon's most personal works, the triptych is at the same time one of his least experimental and most conventional paintings. -
Painting: Chuck Close - Lucas
Close had been known for his skillful brushwork as a graduate student at Yale University. There, he emulated Willem de Kooning and seemed "destined to become a third-generation abstract expressionist, although with a dash of Pop iconoclasm". After a brief experiment with figurative constructions, Close began copying black-and-white photographs of a female nude in colour on to canvas. -
Sculpture: Richard Serra - Trip Hammer
Two sheets of steel are delicately balanced. One stands upright, 2.6 m high, and balances on an edge 5 cm wide. The other rests horizontally on this thin edge, with its only other means of support provided by its minimum contact with the wall. This large, heavy work dominates the space in which in stands, both physically and psychologically through the anxiety it provokes in the viewer. -
Installation: Damien Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ has become embedded in popular culture as one of the most iconic images of contemporary art. Conceived by Hirst in 1989 whilst at Goldsmiths, the ‘Natural History’ work consists of a thirteen-foot tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, weighing a total of 23 tons. The shark is contained within a steel and glass vitrine three times longer than high and divided into three cubes. -
Sculpture: Jeff Koons - Bourgeois Bust
'Bourgeois Bust' was originally created for the 'Made in Heaven' exhibition, in which Jeff Koons explored the concept of love in relation to his own marriage to porn star Ilona Staller. Represented as a marble portrait bust, the couple are depicted within a traditional Baroque style that drew its inspiration from antique classical sculpture. With her plaited hair and string of pearls, Staller appears like Venus, the Greek goddess of love. -
Music: Nirvana - Nevermind
Listen to the full albumNevermind was never meant to change the world, but you can never predict when the Zeitgeist will hit, and Nirvana's second album turned out to be the place where alternative rock crashed into the mainstream. By January 1992 it had replaced Michael Jackson’s album Dangerous at number one on the Billboard charts, and would subsequently be regarded as one of the best rock albums of all time. -
Conceptual art: Lawrence Weiner - Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole
In 1968, when Sol LeWitt came up with his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Weiner formulated his "Declaration of Intent" (1968):
1. The artist may construct the piece.
2. The piece may be fabricated.
3. The piece need not be built.
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership. -
Poster: Shepherd Fairey - Hope
The Barack Obama "Hope" poster is an image of Barack Obama designed by artist Shepard Fairey, which was widely described as iconic and came to represent the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.[1][2] It consists of a stylized stencil portrait of Obama in solid red, beige and (pastel and dark) blue, with the word "progress", "hope", or "change" below (and other words in some versions).
