Analysis Of Modernist Painting By Wayne Thiebaud And James Rosenquist

Following the second World War, art broke out of the traditions and theology of academia severely. Unlike the previous generation of artists, post-war artists cut almost all ties with conceived notions of high art, and continually broke down barriers of what art is and should be about. Critics such as Clement Greenberg described this newly discovered onslaught of art ideology in his essay “Modernist Painting” in 1960, that stated art should be self critical and call attention to itself and the medium. In Greenberg’s words, “Modernism used art to call attention to art”. This idea was depicted throughout art following 1945, by many different artists, movements, and theologies that emerged from this idea of “Modernism”. Two artists, Wayne Thiebaud and James Rosenquist, exemplified this idea of modernism in painting that Greenberg would support, but accomplished this feat through two drastically different methods of painting which used very different imagery. By directly comparing two works by said artists, key differences …show more content…
Rosenquist pursues a shared philosophy of self-criticism held in Thiebaud and other modernist painter’s works, but displays this concept in a way contrary to previous artists. The work itself is a triptych of common objects in modern culture at the time displayed vertically. Each portion depicts a cropped view of said objects creating three segments of abstraction. “Rippling, shiny pink fabric” makes up the bottom portion, the middle “an image of hood and part of the windshield of a blue car, and two wood posts on top with a single piece of wire stretched with a wire stretched horizontally across”. Similar to Thiebaud’s work, Rosenquist uses inanimate subject matter, but non traditionally. Through his cropping and odd grouping of imagery, the artist references the mix of textures found in commonly seen