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(b Cincinnati, OH, June 6, 1935).

American painter, sculptor, printmaker, illustrator, performance artist, stage designer and poet. He studied art at the Cincinnati Arts Academy (1951–3) and later at the Boston Museum School and Ohio University (1954–7). In 1957 he married Nancy Minto and the following year they moved to New York. Dine’s first involvement with the art world was in his Happenings of 1959–60. These historic theatrical events, for example The Smiling Workman (performed at the Judson Gallery, New York, 1959), took place in chaotic, makeshift environments built by the artist–performer. During the same period he created his first assemblages, which incorporated found materials. Simultaneously he developed the method by which he produced his best known work—paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures that depict and expressively interpret common images and objects.

Clothing and domestic objects featured prominently in Dine’s paintings of the 1960s, with a range of favoured motifs including ties, shoes and bathroom items such as basins, showers and toothbrushes (e.g. ...

(b Valrico, FL, 1930).

American performance artist and sculptor. Hay started out in the performance scene at Judson Memorial Church in downtown New York City in the early 1960s. He arrived in New York from Florida in 1959, after studying at the Florida State University (1953–8). His wife, the dancer Deborah Hay, was a key figure in the Judson Dance Theater, launched in the summer of 1962, and Alex Hay performed in many of its productions. In the early 1960s he assisted Robert Rauschenberg on set designs for Merce Cunningham, and danced with him with roller-skates and parachutes in Rauschenberg’s now famous performance piece Pelican (1963). After these collaborations, Hay was invited to participate in 9 Evenings: Theater & Engineering at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory (fall 1966). This initiative, conceived by Rauschenberg with critical contributions from the engineer Billy Klüver, was an idealistic effort to pair artists with engineers, to merge art and new technologies. That project evolved into ...

(b Detroit, Oct 16, 1927; d Sag Harbor, NY, Jan 13, 1995).

American painter, draughtsman, and performance artist. He studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, NC, from 1945 to 1948, where he met John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Richard Lippold. His collages, paintings, drawings, and performances have been associated with geometric abstraction, Pop art, Neo-Dada, and conceptual art, although they do not fit neatly into any existing categories. Relationship, correspondence, interaction, metaphor, and flux are all themes of Johnson’s work, which reflects an often witty and satirical, but essentially poetic, perception. Delicate collages such as Anna May Wong (1971; New York, Whitney) incorporate found objects, altered photographs, textured surfaces, drawing, painting, words and syllables, printed text, and other materials. Similar combinations of text and image were used in his book, The Paper Snake (New York, 1965). Operating from 1968 as the New York Correspondence School and from 1975 as Buddha University, he circulated collages and other materials using the US postal system, establishing ...

(Thure)

(b Stockholm, Jan 28, 1929).

American sculptor, draughtsman, printmaker, performance artist, and writer of Swedish birth. He was brought from Sweden to the USA as an infant and moved with his family to Chicago in 1936 following his father’s appointment to the consulship there. Except for four years of study (1946–50) at Yale University in New Haven, CT, during which time he decided to pursue a career in art, Chicago remained his home until his move to New York in 1956. Within two years of this move, Oldenburg had become part of a group of artists who challenged Abstract Expressionism by modifying its thickly impastoed bravura paint with figurative images and found objects. Oldenburg’s first one-man show in 1959, at the Judson Gallery in New York, included figurative drawings and papier mâché sculptures. For his second show, also at the Judson Gallery, in 1960, shared with Jim Dine, Oldenburg transformed his expressionist, figurative paintings into a found-object environment, ...

(Milton Ernest)

(b Port Arthur, TX, Oct 22, 1925; d Captiva Island, FL, May 12, 2008).

American painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, and performance artist. While too much of an individualist ever to be fully a part of any movement, he acted as an important bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art and can be credited as one of the major influences in the return to favour of representational art in the USA. As iconoclastic in his invention of new techniques as in his wide-ranging iconography of modern life, he suggested new possibilities that continued to be exploited by younger artists throughout the latter decades of the 20th century.

Rauschenberg studied at Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design from 1947 to 1948 under the terms of the GI Bill before travelling to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian for a period of about six months. On reading about the work of Josef Albers he returned to the USA to study from autumn 1948 to spring ...

[Grossberg, Yitzroch Loiza]

(b New York, Aug 17, 1923; d Southampton, NY, Aug 14, 2002).

American painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet and Musician. He was a jazz saxophonist before he was encouraged to take up painting by two artist friends, Jane Freilicher and Nell Blaine (b 1922), who shared his enthusiasm for jazz. After brief service in the US Army Air Corps during World War II (1942–3), he studied with Hans Hofmann from 1947–8 in New York and Provincetown, MA. He painted for a short period under the influence of the Abstract Expressionists but, after seeing Pierre Bonnard’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948, he began to apply his facility for drawing to figurative subjects extracted from the intimate circumstances of his family life and everyday surroundings. The first such pictures, for example Interior, Woman at a Table (c. 1948; New York, Pat Cooper priv. col., see Harrison, p. 29), were stylistically very close to Bonnard’s work, but in such works as ...

(b Burlington, IA, 1923; d Martins Creek, PA, Sept 21, 1988).

American multimedia and performance artist. Watts was a pioneering figure in the development of Fluxus and Pop art . Before settling squarely into Fluxus, Watts was associated first with both because of his use of ready-made objects, his concern with space-time activation of the work and for the insertion of objects into performance frameworks. Watts was a pioneering figure in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s experimentation with new media (e.g., industrial plastics, aluminum foil) and emergent technologies as well as new distribution mechanisms. He trained as a mechanical engineer before turning full-time to art, studying in New York at the Art Students League, and at Columbia University, and receiving his MA in Art History (1951). Watts taught at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, from 1952 to 1984, where he had a significant influence on a generation of students who would produce some of the leading intermedia art of the 1960s and 1970s. His own art began at the cutting edge of new media experimentation—with works of the 1950s incorporating electric light, incandescent wire, random circuitry—and intelligently extending the critique established by the Duchampian readymade. In the early 1960s he made original contributions to the emergent vocabulary of everyday objects that would define advanced art of the 1960s. In particular, his deployment of photography—with actual objects to fracture the “real” (e.g., photographs of food and cutlery, mounted as a place setting in ...