In contrast to Abstract Expressionism, which took center stage in the 1950s as the defining story of American Art, the following decades were characterized by simultaneous but differentiated movements. While Minimalism, Pop Art, and Conceptualism are the most recognized, other concerns also occupied artists during this period: abstraction in the form of Op Art and Hard-edge, a return to figuration, the rise of Second Wave Feminism, and an interest in craft as part of the Pattern & Decoration Movement. Presenting a cumulative challenge to the grand narrative and machismo of AbEx, this diverse array of artistic approaches revealed the burgeoning development of Postmodernism.

This new cluster of theories, attitudes about art, and its role in society in late-stage capitalism (from Marxist readings to a feminist lens), were described by theorist Frederic Jameson as a distinct departure from modernism:

The case for [postmodernism’s] existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s. As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus, abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry […]: all these are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high modernist impulse.

As the realm of exclusionary high art gave way to more seemingly democratic modes of making and viewing, such as the industrial readymade materials of Minimalism, craft production historically gendered as feminine, or the populist impulses of Pop Art, artists began looking outside of art’s own definition toward the permeable influence of culture at large. 

In stark contrast to the relative uniformity of Abstract Expressionism’s style and structure, attention to figuration manifested in a highly varied series of approaches. Artists such as Sally Cook, Martha Edelheit, Howard Kanovitz, Marcia Marcus, Philip Pearlstein, and Idle Weber employed the body to different ends, often bridging concerns with other movements of the period.

Sally Cook was an artist deeply ensconced in figuration and a decorative aesthetic, then out of fashion or considered unfit for artistic legitimacy. Embracing what has been frequently described as an eccentric painting style, Cook was a painter of uncanny mise-en-scènes defined by symbols, patterns, portraits, domestic spaces, her community, and pets. With nods to Expressionism, Magic Realism, Pattern & Decoration, and traditional portraiture, works such as Self Portrait Five Images (1975) exemplify the artist’s postmodern mashup of styles that allowed her to explore the strange fluidity of identity. As the artist herself said: “How can you know yourself from ten years ago, or ten years from now?” 

Painted the same year, Martha Edelheit’s Portrait of Debbie Castello (1975) likewise foregrounds not just the female sitter as subject but also gestures to her interiority. The woman here is distinctly caught in a moment of contemplation yet painted almost on the same flattened plane as the blanket behind her. Through this compressed space and the detail of the sitter’s slightly unbuttoned blouse, Edelheit references the typical objectification of female subjects while also celebrating her sexuality as a nuanced aspect of the self. By also embracing the textile and designed object with highly detailed care in its rendering, the painting offers a critique of dismissive attitudes toward the ornate or decorative as a lower “female art form.”

Although she exhibited with artists such as Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Lucas Samaras, Edeleit was, like many women artists of her generation, often excluded from major venues until the 1970s. Importantly, she pushed against a singular definition of her work as one only concerned with gender; she defined herself first and foremost, an artist, not just a woman artist. “I’m against anything that seduces me into shallow water,” she wrote in 1969. 

Among other important figures of the moment such as Sari Dienes and Carolee Schneeman, Edelheit showed with Miriam Schapiro, an artist associated with the Pattern & Decoration movement, which emerged in the 1970s in opposition to the male-dominated Conceptual and Minimalist narratives often inhospitable to women. Both Edelheit and Schapiro embraced patterns and textiles that, at the time, were associated with denigrated “women’s work.”

Gates of Paradise (1980) is an iconic example of Schapiro’s “femmages,” which reflect her interest in the materials and motifs associated with craft. Combining painting, fabric, and seemingly artisanal craft methods as large-scale assemblages, she appropriated the medium of collage from historical male figures such as Picassao and Braque and asserted her own place—and that of craft—in the cannon, going so far as to move out between two-dimensional space of the picture and three-dimensional space of the “real world.” 

Howard Kanovitz’s work also had crossover concerns with other media as he moved away from abstraction and New York’s downtown scene in the early 1960s to begin painting from photographs. While many of these works drew from family snapshots, they often used an airbrush (beginning in 1967) for a perfect, almost commercial quality to his portraits. His 1967 lightbox construction, The New Yorkers further emphasizes his use of commercial methods, especially in depicting his artworld community at the time. The scene here is Kanovitz’s Second Avenue studio picturing Morton Feldman, Sam Hunter, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, B.H. Friedman and Alex Katz.

A friend and colleague of Katz as well as Lois Dodd in New York and Maine where he split his time, painter Charles Duback was also known for portraits and figurative scenes throughout the 60s and 70s with a particularly economical and graphic quality akin to Pop Art. Another artist whose work straddled several artistic strains, from color field to landscape, Duback defied any easy categorization.

Pittsburgh-born portraitist Philip Pearlstein was another artist known for working against the modernist nature of Abstract Expressionism’s devotion to self-reflexive abstraction, instead bringing in influences from contemporary culture. In stark contrast to the posed or allegorical nature of representing individuals as one might find in the traditional genre of portraiture, Pearlstein caught his subjects slightly unaware, casually slumped, or cropped as in a photograph. In the cinematic painting, Portrait of Al Held and Sylvia Stone (1968), two fellow artists are depicted in an almost matter-of-fact realism—or what Pearlstein described in 1967 as “hard realism” relatively devoid of subjectivity, but with the drama of movement and choreography of the figure as in a film.

As a result of the artistic diversity of his practice, in addition to working outside of New York as a leading member of the Bennington School, Michael Steiner has been overlooked for many years as a key contributor to Minimalism. In contrast to more well-known artists associated with Minimalism, Steiner expanded his career from his exploration of “primary structures” made from 1965-1966 into a later consideration of Cubism’s legacy. Among his “primary structures” is untitled (“flags”) (1966), one of the most significant works in the collection, which emphasizes materials traditionally excluded from the vernacular of high art and, through its repetition, recalls the conveyor belt production of the period.

Although contemporaries such as David Smith and Mark di Suvero also experimented with industrial materials, Steiner’s sculpture eschews the more expressive forms in favor of a strict geometry: a row of ten machine-fabricated triangular elements. Refusing any evocation of the artist’s authorship, critic Joseph Mashek noted Steiner’s neutrality and his work’s relationship to the viewer: “[…] the pleasure is in lining up forms and their edges and overlap pings, in shifting your own position and discovering arrangements of great strength and appeal separated, as in a good film […].”

Not unlike Steiner, Saul Steinberg was an idiosyncratic artist whose practice defied belonging in any singular movement, touching on elements of Dada as well as Pop and commercial illustration. Importantly, for Steinberg, his commercial illustration work (primarily for The New Yorker for almost six decades) did not exist in a separate category of high or low art; they were always one in the same, with no act of elevation or equivalence required by converting to a different scale or medium. He was “a writer of pictures, an architect of speech and sounds, a draftsman of philosophical reflections,” the famous critic Harold Rosenberg characterized Steinberg, who drew on his long term fascination with the mail, which began during his service in World War II.

In addition to slightly surrealist drawings exploring the representations, symbols, and everyday artifacts of how the world reveals itself—what Artforum described as an “eccentric idea of representation”—Steinberg created collages, such as his 1971 work Air Mail Table, which recalled a Dada, or Neo-Dada sensibility akin to figures such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg whose use of symbols, found images, and mass media ephemera has been considered a precursor to Pop.

Incorporating the early 20th century avant-garde Dadaist exploration of irrationality under capitalism and bourgeois lifestyle, Steinberg’s drawings seemingly deconstruct the icons and pre-made images one might associate with nations, cities, and the beginnings of globalization. With the use of such elements of “official identity,” including diagrams, envelopes, and stamps, Air Mail Table imbues an almost child-like, whimsical drafting style with geopolitical underpinnings—perhaps a nod to his own journey of fleeing Romania for New York in 1942.

Ida Kohlmeyer, based in Louisiana, was an artist of the period whose work also operated in signs and symbols: glyphs, stars, and other emblems influenced by South American folk art. Operating between Conceptual art, Pop, and California Light/Space, Joe Goode has remained another enigmatic figure with works that welcomed in the so-called “outside world.” The Los Angeles-based artist—a friend of Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, and Larry Bell as well as a student of Robert Irwin—created an incredibly diverse output. Untitled (Shotgun Series) (1982-83) demonstrates the artist’s investment in chance process by harnessing actions encountered in society at large to make his work: in particular, a shotgun fired at the surface, creating irregular patterns of destruction.