Inspiring Art of The 80’s

                American Art of the 1980s opens with a reception on Friday, Jan. 23, in the Gallery of Art and remains on view through April 18. Ten more days from today for anyone in the area. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; and noon to 4:30 p.m. weekends. (The Gallery of Art is closed Mondays.) The exhibit is free and open to the public. The Gallery of Art is located in Steinberg Hall.

 

“Over the last four decades, Eli and Edythe Broad have built one of the world’s most important collec­tions of modern and contem­porary art, including works by some of our provocative artists,” said Mark S. Weil, Ph.D., ”American Art of the 1980s presents a rare oppor­tunity to explore themes and trends not otherwise available in St. Louis public collections.”

“The decade of the 1980s is char­ac­terized by the coex­is­tence of a varied range of artistic prac­tices,” said Sabine M. Eckmann, Ph.D., curator of the Gallery of Art. “Taken together, these different posi­tions demon­strate the complete arrival of the post­modern in the art world.”

In the1970s, Eckmann explained, artists chal­lenged the domi­nance of tradi­tional forms such as painting and sculpture, empha­sizing instead the “anti-aesthetics” of conceptual art, process art and earth art. By the early 1980s, however, neo-expressionists such as Basquiat, Schnabel and Salle had returned symbolic art to the aesthetic conflict while injecting a new sense of ironic detachment — appro­pri­ating, rather than inhab­iting, “authentic” painterly ideas and techniques.

For example, Basquiat’s Untitled (Skull) (1981), on left, is at first a strongly expressive semi-self portrait and a skillful catalog of painterly devices. Salle’s Pound Notes (1986) is a spoof of found imagery that never­theless suggests a dramatic, if not broken, narrative. Schnabel’s massive Self-Portrait in Andy’s Shadow (1987), painted on the artist’s signature broken plates and dishes, offers nostalgic and ironic self-presentation while paying respect to coolly sarcastic Andy Warhol, whose date-of-death is inscribed on the painting’s surface.

 

Other major paintings on view include Longo’s iconic Untitled (White Riot Series), Tansey’s deadpan Four Forbidden Senses (Taste, Sound, Smell, Touch) (1982) and Haring’s massive Red Room (1988).

“Due to their figu­rative nature, these works appear easily acces­sible, yet in fact address the problem of estab­lishing fixed meaning in the post­modern era,” Eckmann said. “They provoke us to recon­sider the position, capacity and role of figu­ration at the end of the 20^th century.”

Appro­pri­ation was also central to the work of Levine, whose wry “re-creations” of works by other artists are repre­sented by Untitled (After Duchamp: Chess­boards 1989). Simi­larly, Koons’ complex stainless steel Italian Woman and Louis XIV (both 1986) repeat arts historical pattern while also having received stan­dards of “good taste.”

 

Abstract painting too grew increas­ingly rebel­lious. Bleckner’s glowing Brothers’ Sword (1986) suggests a sense of almost reli­gious tran­scen­dence, yet also is a political statement of support for AIDS victims. The violent, colorful burst of Goldstein’s Untitled (1988) recalls the spon­taneity of abstract expres­sionism, yet its cool tone and glossy shine myste­ri­ously reveal the painting’s photo­graphic insight.

 

“In order to engage with these artworks, we may best under­stand them as post­modern alle­gories reflecting a frag­mented and compart­men­talized world,” Eckmann concluded. “These utterly ambivalent artworks address various strands of modernist art — figu­rative painting, high art, the spec­tacle — in order to question and even­tually bury those approaches.”

Eli and Edythe Broad have been listed surrounded by the top art collectors in the world by Art News and Art and Antiques maga­zines. Since the early 1960s, they have built a personal collection of more than 400 modern and contem­porary works, while The Broad Art Foun­dation, which they founded in Santa Monica, Calif., in 1984, has grown to more than 750 artworks by more than 100 artists of the time.

Eli Broad has been an important patron and board member at more than 25 major museums and art insti­tu­tions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and the Archives of American Art of The Smith­sonian Insti­tution in Wash­ington, D.C.

As founding chairman of The Museum of Contem­porary Art, Los Angeles, Broad secured the initial acqui­si­tions of the permanent collection, recruited the first two directors and opened both the renowned temporary facility designed by Frank Gehry and the main building designed by Arata Isozaki. From 1996 to 1999, he chaired the capital campaign for Gehry’s recently opened Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Most recently, the Broads pledged $60 million to LACMA to create a new building for contem­porary art.

 

When Eli Broad started his own real estate business in Detroit, he couldn’t have imagined that in five decades he’d be number one in the field, the 3^rd richest person in Los Angeles — according to Forbes — and, together with his wife Edythe, one of the most active phil­an­thropists in the U.S. as well as a passionate art collector. Talk about a success story, what an inspi­ration! Eli Broad certainly played a big role in deter­mining the direction of visual and performing arts of the 1980’s and beyond.