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Native Son by Richard Wright
It is a difficult novel, in which a young black man named Bigger Thomas, living in Chicago in the 1930s, who suffocates, decapitates, and burns the body of a white woman, then rapes and kills his own girlfriend after he tells her about it, and eventually is sentenced to death, to which he goes without expressing much remorse. It is an intentional exaggeration meant to expose the racism and oppression that could create such a individual. -
Symphony No. 1 The Transcendental by Richard Pousette Dart
Organized upon an uneven grid, this oil on canvas consists of circles, teardrops, ovals, arcs, diamonds, and crosses in a rhythmic spread of black, white, and earth tones with points of bright color. Identifiable subjects appear—perhaps a bird at lower left, or some primitive weaponry at upper left—but also fade away. The musical title suggests the artist’s desire to create in paint a grand, intensely personal aesthetic experience, like an orchestral symphony. -
The Liver is the Cock's Comb by Arshile Gorky
Comprised of vibrant, energetic colors that exist in organic shapes this oil on canvas is said to be inspired by the gardens of Armenia, Gorky's homeland. The middle third of the painting is different in that it houses the greatest contrast of color. We see chunks of pure white, black, dark brown, blood red, fleshy pink, cool blues, mustard yellow, and emerald green. There are black lines that help define certain spaces of color. -
Effervescence by Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was 64 years old when “Effervescence” was created and he’d been a studio artist and art instructor for many decades. His “casual” gestures and the “accidents of process” not withstanding, this work is balanced and has a composition that not only references the outer world but demands that the viewer also seek to understand and interpret what may have started out as a series of random processes but inevitably must be resolved into a meaningful image. -
Cyclops by William Baziotes
Inspired by an encounter he had at the zoo, Baziotes explained: “I had some peanuts, and as I gave them to the rhino, he sucked my hand and held it. My wife got scared but I was terribly interested. He was playful and cute and toylike, but at the same time he chilled me. He seemed prehistoric and his eyes were cold and deadly.” This oil on canvas was denounced as “unintelligible” by mainstream critics, but was awarded a prize in a juried exhibition at the Art Institute, 1948. -
Untitled by Janet Sobel
As an unschooled woman artist, Sobel was not taken seriously by many art critics, but she persevered. Over the next few years, her style evolved from a primitive look with recognizable figures to a more abstract style wherein paint was poured, dripped, and blown to create colorful shapes and patterns.
Sobel’s work was featured in a series of New York’s leading galleries, including Peggy Guggenheim’s 1945 exhibition The Women. -
Onement, 1 by Barnett Newman
This oil on canvas is the first time the artist used a vertical band to define the spatial structure of his work. This band, later dubbed a “zip,” became Newman’s signature mark. The artist applied the light cadmium red zip atop a strip of masking tape with a palette knife. This thick, irregular band on the smooth field of Indian Red simultaneously divides and unites the composition. -
Number 13A: Arabesque by Jackson Pollock
Number 13 was one of a series of large, horizontal murals that Pollock made in the late 1940s. Its looping skeins of paint poured onto the henna-brown stained canvas possess an airy spatiality that distinguishes the painting from some of Pollock’s other, more densely-painted works. “Arabesque” is most likely a name by Pollock’s friends, the evocation of dance is fitting for its rhythmically repeating passages, which inscribe the gestures the artist made as he moved around the canvas. -
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
“Nineteen Eighty-Four goes through the reader like an east wind, cracking the skin, opening the sores,” wrote V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman upon the book’s release. But what’s more impressive is the way it has remained in the cultural consciousness ever since. Big Brother is a TV show. “Orwellian” is in common usage, and of course, the novel has been used time and time again to criticize both Democrats and Republicans, depending on who’s in power. -
PH-950 by Clyfford Still
Still expressively applied paint to the canvas with a palette knife to produce large swathes of color, layering different tones. On the canvas, the dense material surface gives the impression that a layer of color has been "torn" off the painting to reveal the underlying hues. Rejecting symmetry and balance, Still created an original composition and allowed the oil paint to run off the edge of the canvas, implying an unlimited vista of abstract forms and color. -
Untitled by Jean-Paul Riopelle
Best known for his non-representational landscape paintings Riopelle slowly transitioned his work to follow the cues of Pollock, with drips, and later mosaics. Squeezing paint straight from the tube he applied it liberally with a palette knife to craft his mosaic-like works. “When I begin a painting I always hope to complete it in a few strokes, starting with the first colors I daub down anywhere and anyhow,” he once said. “But it never works, so I add more, without realizing it.” -
Mountains and Sea by Helen Frankenthaler
This work is a perfect example of Frankenthaler’s technique of making pictures entirely by "staining," a process in which she poured thinned paint onto raw, unprimed canvas. This method results in fields of transparent color that seem to float in space, with the weave of the canvas establishing the flatness of the image. Her arrangement of colors and shapes often evoke the natural environment, and each work creates a unique visual space and atmosphere. -
Two Women with Still Life by Willem de Kooning
de Kooning's expressive use of pastels ran counter to the traditional technique of applying the darkest pigments first, then layering lighter pigments to build forms and create highlights. Here, he applied dark and light colors exuberantly, with no attention to hierarchy of tone. When shown in a 1953 exhibition in New York, this work and related paintings and drawings were considered sensational for their rendering of women in garish colors and aggressive frenetic lines. -
The Deep by Jackson Pollock
The Deep evokes a chasm - an abyss either to be avoided or to get lost inside. White paint was built up with layered brush strokes, showing a return of Pollock's direct involvement with the canvas. Drips are still evident, now creating a web that floats above the chasm. Pollock was clearly looking for a new approach, an image to create, desperate to break away from his signature style, yet his last paintings represent neither a new beginning nor a conclusion. -
Zone by Philip Guston
Zone, a painting that reflects the focused concentration of Guston's mature work, suggests a warm calm, with its mist of red hatch-marks filling the painting's center. Here, Guston hones his mark-making, and builds layers of paint out of quick, small stokes that are quite distinct from the wilder gestures of some of his colleagues. "Look at any inspired painting," he once said, "it's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation." -
No 2 by Kline
Kline often enjoyed working with black and whites in order to create barriers for himself, to restrict what he was doing to highlight the zones the intersections of the black lines created on the lighter background. With this oil on canvas painting, Kline intended to create a new type of world, that illustrated improvisation. -
Boon by James Brooks
To create it he applied oil paints to cotton duck canvas that had been treated with rabbit-skin glue. According to Brooks, the painting’s title does not share any deliberate resonant meaning with the painting and exists merely as a means of identifying the work. The areas of black paint are the most visually pronounced, while patches of brilliant golden yellow punctuate the background and bring coherence to the otherwise chaotic central area of the shallow pictorial space. -
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged is Rand’s treatise on Objectivism (read: “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”), her love letter to capitalism, her libertarian rant, and her magnum opus. -
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
On the Road is without a doubt the most important book, indeed the defining text, of the much-mythologized American “Beat Generation.” Gilbert Millstein in his 1957 New York Times review wrote: “Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the “Lost Generation,” so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the “Beat Generation.” -
Jailhouse Rock by Elvis Presley
Since it was perceived by most as a quirky tongue in cheek song, due to Elvis singing it as straight rock & roll, many overlooked the jokes in the lyrics (like the suggestion of gay romance when inmate Number 47 tells Number 3, 'You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see'. One of the first songs to address homosexuality, many gender studies scholars cite the song for "its famous reference to homoerotic behavior behind bars. Maybe not PC, but still a step toward sexual orientation equality. -
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Achebe introduced African literature to the rest of the world—and opened the door for a whole host of African writers in the UK and America, both by his success and as an editor of the African Writers Series, published by Heinemann. His first novel has sold over 20 million copies and been translated into 57 languages, and has been taught ever since its publication as a text essential for understanding decolonization and mid-century Africa. -
Good Golly, Miss Molly by Little Richard
Little Richard's shows were some of the first concerts that allowed for "intergration" of whites and blacks in the audience, which was a step toward something of equality. His song Good Golly, Miss Molly was written for him, and has been remade countless times by dozens of artists. -
Bullfight by Elaine de Kooning
In 1957, de Kooning left New York City to teach at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The western scenery influenced her work as did a trip to Ciudad Juárez, located across the Mexican border from El Paso. Here, she saw corridas, or bullfights, that inspired a series of paintings, including Bullfight. Her work is known for free brush strokes, a sense of movement, attention to balance and design, alongside deliberate choices about scale, color, form, and composition. -
Pompeii by Hans Hofmann
Hofmann's later paintings are characterized by the juxtaposition of strongly colored rectangles. These created the feeling of space because the human eye sees different colors as being at different distances from it. Hofman termed this effect 'push and pull'. The paintings were often worked out by pinning rectangles of colored paper to the canvas. -
Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 70 by Robert Motherwell
Beginning about 1948, Motherwell began making oil sketches and paintings that evolved into a series of more than one hundred variations on a theme he called Elegies to the Spanish Republic.The series is a meditation on life and death. Horizontal white canvases are divided rhythmically by two or three freely drawn vertical bars and punctuated at various intervals by ovoid forms. The series is most often composed entirely of black and white the colors of mourning and radiance. -
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein’s classic was the first science fiction novel ever to become a New York Times bestseller. “It didn’t just sell to science fiction readers, it sold widely to everyone, even people who didn’t normally read at all,” Jo Walton wrote. People claim it was one of the things that founded the counter-culture of the sixties in the U.S. -
Runic II by Peter Busa
Busa developed an interest in American Indian art, and worked to combine styles with surrealism. Runic is one of his later pieces, as he was working to continue to create impressions among st the emergence of Mod and Pop art culture. Runic, oil on paper, is one of Busa's pieces dedicated to the relics of Native American Culture. -
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
It sold millions of copies and established Friedan as one of the chief architects of the women’s liberation and second-wave feminist movement—which, despite being rather passé now, made a monumental difference in American society. Social theorist Alvin Toffler described it as “the book that pulled the trigger on history.” -
Untitled by Taro Yamamoto
This 1964 oil on canvas was one of the last calls to abstract expressionism. Bordering two art movements, abstract and Mod, the influence of both is clearly seen in the majority of Yamamoto's work. Bold colors, and color blocking at that, were a shout out to the 'futuristic' lines of the 1960's architecture and fashion. However, the uneven brush strokes within the color blocks, and the near miss of symmetrical lines still heralds the rebellion of abstract expressionism. -
The Times They Are A-Changin' by Bob Dylan
Dylan recalled writing the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the moment. In 1985, he told Cameron Crowe, "I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time."
