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Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961). The image is a photo of the actual piece. From the collection of the artist.
Michael Darling, the Seattle Art Museum's curator of modern and contemporary art, has assembled a surprisingly cool show with Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1948-1978, which opened last weekend at SAM and runs through Sept. 7. The post-WWII period saw the apex of high Modernism in painting with the abstract expressionists, led by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. They took the Modernists' radical approach to painting to the utmost extreme, by actually separating the brush from the canvas and completely rejecting representational art. At the same time, though, a new group of painters were laying the groundwork of Postmodernism, and were searching for new ways to break free of the canvas.
Darling's show begins with the sudden and spontaneous explosion from all over the world, starting around 1948, of painters began actually attacking, distorting, and destroying the surface of their paintings. While some American artists, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, figure into this insurgent movement, it really originated in Europe and Japan, nations still trying to recover from the horrors of the Second World War.
From the earliest pieces, in which artists began tearing, cutting, and--in the case of Niki de Saint Phalle actually shooting--their canvases, the assault on the very idea of painting is ratcheted up in the 1960s by a new wave of evermore radical artists.
Among the standout pieces in the show is Jasper Johns' famous Target (1958), which put us to mind of Art Brut's "Modern Art"--it makes you want to charge it. Yoko Ono's interactive Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961) and Gunther Uecker's Gross Wolke (1965) both apply nails to canvases to different but equally interesting effect. And a lesser known piece by Iain Baxter called Standards: 24 (1962) is worth spending a while making out. There are a few other notable pieces by Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol's famous Oxidation Painting (1978) made by having people piss on copper-painted canvases, amongst others from Poland to South Korea to Brazil.
Also on display is a much smaller show of work by the late Andrew Wyeth (through Oct. 18), focusing on seven very private paintings of a much-favored model, Helga Testorf. While the selection is worth seeing, it lacks the surprising urgency of Target Practice and is, in fact, completely representative of everything the more impressive artists in that show were fighting against.
Seattle Art Museum // 1300 First Ave. // Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. & Fri. 5-8 p.m. // tix $15/$12/$9
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Fun fact: Mention Andy Warhol to Little Miss Seattlest and she'll start giggling because "he's the painter who peed on his paintings."