Like other artists associated with
Minimalism and Conceptualism, So LeWitt sought a means of direct and objective
expression. He often produced works in series using a simple modular unit—in
this case, the open cube—to create hundreds of artworks that articulate the
possible variations and configurations. Consisting of systematically arranged
rows and stacks of cubes, 13/11 is one of LeWitt’s three-dimensional
“structures.” With its complex lattice of white lines and gray shadows, the
work is as visually compelling as it is formally precise.
His monumental sculpture, “Brushstroke,” sits on our plaza,
facing the National Mall. Roy Lichtenstein, who emerged with Robert Indiana,
James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and others in the early 1960s, contributed to the
development of American Pop art with his paintings of comic-book action and
melodramatic scenes. The artist began creating large-scale sculptures of
painted aluminum in the 1980s, the model for “Brushstroke” was completed in
1996. The artist attended to every detail of its future realization before his
death, making it one of the last examples of Lichtenstein’s ongoing engagement
with the brushstroke motif.
Remembering Isamu Noguchi, born on this day in 1904. “Lunar Landscape”(1943-44) is drawn from the imagination of the artist after several months in a Japanese-American internment camp, isolated in the desert during WWII. Noguchi had a lifelong preference for stone as a medium (he had worked with Constantin Brancusi in Paris in the late 1920s), but he also worked with clay and paper and was well known as a designer of landscapes, stage sets, and furniture. This sculpture is a rare surviving example of the “Lunar” series, in which Noguchi used a new material, magnesite, to create abstract biomorphic forms.
Morris Louis was a central figure of the Washington Color
School, a group of abstract painters that emerged in Washington, DC, in the
late 1950s. Inspired by the techniques of Helen Frankenthaler, who used thinned
pigments to “stain” her paintings, Louis devised a process of pouring diluted
paint over the surfaces of unprimed and unstretched canvases. “Point of
Tranquility,” from Louis’s Floral series, features flows of paint spreading
outward from a dense center. The intense, sensual colors suggest dynamic processes
of movement and growth.