Term first formally used by the American artist Allan Kaprow for his 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, presented in early October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery, New York City, as the inaugurating event for that space. (Informal “happening-like” experiments had been presented by Kaprow in April 1958 at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, and at the Reuben Gallery in a pre-opening piece called Intermission [June 1959].) Through 1960, the artists pioneering the Happenings form were: Kaprow, Robert Whitman (b 1935), Claes Oldenburg, Simone Forti, Red Grooms, Al Hansen and Jim Dine. Happenings appeared at experimental downtown spaces such as Groom’s “Delancey Street Museum” (his studio on the lower East Side), the Judson Church (on Washington Square) and the Reuben Gallery, as well as in New Jersey, at George Segal’s farm, and on the campus of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where Kaprow was teaching and Whitman was a student. According to Whitman, when Kaprow named ...
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Richard Wollheim
(Horatio)
(b London, Aug 4, 1839; d Oxford, July 30, 1894).
English writer, critic and man of letters. He was educated at the University of Oxford, and in 1864 he was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose College, where he remained until his death. He was a highly conscientious college tutor and a frequent university lecturer, lecturing mostly on philosophy and sometimes on Classical art. In 1873 Pater published Studies in the History of the Renaissance (later renamed The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry), which included essays on Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo as a poet, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose devotion to paganism and to male beauty in all its forms captivated Pater. For the third edition Pater added ‘The School of Giorgione’, in which he claimed that the representation of sound in particular, and synaesthesia generally, was central to early 16th-century Venetian painting. What secured The Renaissance fame, or notoriety, was the six-page ‘Conclusion’, which was taken as advocating a form of extreme, if refined, hedonism in both the conduct of life and the appreciation of art. The ‘Conclusion’ became the gospel for what the poet William Butler Yeats called the ‘tragic generation’, of which Oscar Wilde was representative, and it became central to the doctrine of ...
