Robert Motherwell 1915 1995 Capriccio 1945 Oil on bone board Purchased with funds from the Connie Perkins Endowment and gift of the Dedalus Foundation 2001.5 Capriccio is a transitional work for Motherwell, looking forward to his mature Abstract Expressionist style and the epic series Elegy to the Spanish Republic, which he was to begin in 1948. The composition of Capriccio, painted with broad, gestural brushstrokes, consists of an ovoid shape suspended between two black rectilinear elements. For Motherwell, the color black was symbolic of death; he was also interested in exploring it as his primary means of creating form. His use of black was influenced by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, whose print series Los Caprichos may have inspired this painting. Educated at Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia, Motherwell became a leading artist and theorist of Abstract Expressionism. His work differs from orthodox Abstract Expressionism because it includes symbolic content and references to the outside world. He believed that a purely abstract art was impossible because viewers would always imbue colors and shapes with meaning. Sam Maloof 1916 2009 Double Music Stand and Musician s Chair 1972 Brazilian rosewood Lent by Sam Maloof One of the leading figures in the postwar American studio furniture movement, Sam Maloof has been creating elegant forms in wood for over 60 years. Offering an alternative to the industrial environment that dominated 20th-century furniture production, Maloof s intimately scaled studio where he employs three assistants continues and expands upon the workshop tradition. In his shop, Maloof creates inventive new forms using venerable craft practices. The handsome Double Music Stand and Musician s Chair were made in 1972 for Jan Hlinka, the principal violist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The chair, specifically designed to meet the musician s needs for lower back support and freedom of arm movement, represents an example, rare in Maloof s career, of a truly unique piece. Recognizing the work s significance, Hlinka s wife returned it to Maloof when her husband passed away. The commissioned pieces Maloof has produced throughout his long and productive career reflect a rich set of relationships with his patrons; this chair and music stand speak to an abiding friendship between the artist and the musician.
Richard Diebenkorn 1922 1993 Berkeley #24 1954 Lent by the Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Rowan Richard Diebenkorn developed a West Coast version of Abstract Expressionism characterized by a strong sense of place. Diebenkorn s division of this painting into three sections, with grey above and green below, resembles a landscape, perhaps of fog rolling in over the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California. His muted colors also evoke the often misty atmosphere of the cities of Berkeley and San Francisco. The worked-over surface of the painting, with its large, multidirectional brushwork and layers of color, calls attention to the physical act of painting. Diebenkorn started the Berkeley series after returning to the city from extended stays in New Mexico and Illinois. It represents the beginning of his mature style, with its combination of gestural and solid passages, and abstraction and representation. Edward Ruscha b. 1937 Bird Drinks Creek Dry, Fish Escapes 1965 Lent by Mr. and Mrs. Jack Quinn Artists in the early 1960s faced a crisis as profound as that following the Armory Show of 1913, which revolutionized the art world by introducing Modernism to America. If, as some believed, Abstract Expressionism was the logical culmination of modern art, what could the next generation of artists do? Los Angeles based Ed Ruscha responded to the challenge by creating representational paintings and drawings in the style of graphic design and commercial illustration and infusing them with deadpan humor. The cartoon-like bird in this painting is presented without context, as if isolated in an advertisement, and the narrative of the work would be a mystery without its title. Ruscha s use of text to make the work understandable relates to the conventions of advertising and illustration, but also to Conceptual Art, which often playfully incorporates text.
Helen Frankenthaler b. 1928 Adriatic 1968 Lent by the Norton Simon Museum, Gift of the artist In the early 1950s, Helen Frankenthaler began mixing paint with turpentine or kerosene so that it soaked into the canvas. This technique created lyrical and luminous abstractions in which color provides the expressive power. Adriatic features a rectangular form suspended within the larger rectangle of the canvas. Because the inner rectangle is skewed and in a lighter tint of orange than the surrounding area, it appears to float in space. Frankenthaler became one of the youngest artists and the only woman to be associated with the Abstract Expressionist group in New York. Her work shares with Abstract Expressionism an emphasis on the inherent flatness of painting, but plays down the gestural and painterly application aspect of the medium critical to the work of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Her innovative staining technique influenced other artists, including Clyfford Still and Morris Louis, who along with Frankenthaler became part of a style known as Post-Painterly Abstraction. Sam Francis 1923 1994 Free Floating Clouds 1980 Acrylic on canvas Gift of the Sam Francis Foundation 2009.3 Sam Francis created Free Floating Clouds by pouring, dripping, and brushing paint on the canvas as it lay on the floor of his studio in Santa Monica, California. This technique is similar to the action painting of Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. However, Francis combined freely applied paint with underlying structure; in Free Floating Clouds, he first made a grid with a wet roller to provide an armature for the thicker, more biomorphic forms. The grid balances dense areas of paint with the white of the canvas. Francis served as a pilot in World War II, and much of his work reflects the perspective of an aviator. Francis, like the Bay Area abstractionists with whom he associated, often also explored the emotional qualities of color. The contrast between light and dark of Free Floating Clouds is characteristic of Francis s paintings and represented for him the duality of the human soul.
Karl Benjamin b. 1925 #4 1968 Gift of Donald M. Treiman in memory of his mother, Joyce Treiman 2007.29 #4 is an example of Karl Benjamin s hard-edged, geometric abstraction. Benjamin s paintings have a rigorous internal logic to their composition; this work is formed of squares subdivided into quadrants, each painted a different color. There are twelve colors used two shades of each of the three primary colors (blue, red, and yellow) and two shades of each of the three secondary colors (green, orange, and purple). The secondary colors are created by blending the primaries together (for example, yellow and blue making green). The juxtaposition of the bright hues creates a highly animated painting that seems to vibrate in front of the eye. Benjamin began his career working in an Abstract Expressionist style, but abandoned it in the late 1950s to focus on geometry and color. A long-time resident of Claremont, California, he studied at Claremont Graduate School and taught there and at Pomona College. Robert Motherwell 1915 1991 Drawings from the Lyric Suite 1965 Ink on Japanese rice paper Purchased with funds from the Connie Perkins Endowment and support from the Dedalus Foundation 2006.13.4,.6,.11 In a period of just two months in 1965, Motherwell created the nearly 600 drawings that constitute the Lyric Suite as an exercise in automatic drawing. In this technique pioneered by the Surrealists, the artist produces art without forethought, reflecting the subconscious mind rather than the rational intellect. Motherwell made each drawing in just seconds, using bold, forthright brushstrokes. After he finished drawing, he allowed the ink to spread out uncontrolled on the absorbent rice paper so that the drawings were completed without further interference from the artist. This incorporation of chance also demonstrates Motherwell s debt to the Surrealists, who invited accidents into their work. Motherwell set out to create a suite of 1,000 drawings, but halted the project after the death of his close friend, the sculptor David Smith, on May 23, 1965. The title, Lyric Suite, refers to a musical composition for string quartet by Alban Berg that Motherwell listened to while making the drawings.
Joseph Cornell 1903 1972 Untitled 1967 Collage of magazine photographs, book illustration, ink, and pencil Gift of the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation 2005.19.7 Cornell worked on several pieces at a time and could take years to complete a work. He began a series of collages featuring clocks after his beloved brother Robert s death in February 1965, but noted on the back of this collage that he did not finish it until November 1967. The clock pieces reference Robert s death in particular and the theme of mortality in general. Clocks, marking the passage of time, symbolize the fleeting nature of life, while birds are symbolic of the soul s ability to transcend earthly bounds. In this piece, Cornell evoked the idea of the soul s passage by placing a bird just outside the image of the clock, where it shares a space occupied by the constellation Cassiopeia. Robert, crippled by cerebral palsy, enjoyed looking at birds from his window, so Cornell s inclusion of a bird may also be a direct reference to him. Joseph Cornell 1903 1972 Untitled 1969 Collage of photoprint, ink, and pencil Gift of the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation 2005.19.3 On the back of this work, Cornell recorded his struggles to create the collage, which features the quince tree that stood in the backyard of the Cornell family home at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, New York. He initially thought it to be a reject, but was inspired to finish it in the early morning hours of March 10, 1969. An obsessive collector of objects and experiences, Cornell filled his diaries with minute observations of the world immediately around him. He often wrote of the activity of birds and squirrels that visited the quince tree and of the tree s changing appearance during different seasons of the year. On the day he completed this collage, he noted that jays and a sparrow had squabbled in its snow-covered branches.