American, 20th century, male.
Born 7 March 1926, in Halfway (Oregon); died 5 December 2008, in Cologne.
Painter, sculptor. Multimedia.
Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus.
From 1946 to 1950, George Brecht studied physical sciences at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Science, and from 1950 to 1955, he trained as a chemist. He met John Cage in ...
(b Brühl, nr Cologne, April 2, 1891; d Paris, April 1, 1976).
German painter, printmaker, and sculptor, naturalized American in 1948 and French in 1958. He was a major contributor to the theory and practice of Surrealism (see Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924). His work challenged and disrupted what he considered to be repressive aspects of European culture, in particular Christian doctrine, conventional morality, and the aesthetic codes of Western academic art. Until the mid-1920s he was little known outside a small circle of artists and writers in Cologne and Paris, but he became increasingly successful from c. 1928 onwards. After 1945 he was respected and honoured as a surviving representative of a ‘heroic’ generation of avant-garde artists.
real name Charles Rogers Grooms
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1 June 1937, in Nashville (Tennessee).
Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, performance artist, environmental artist, installation artist, filmmaker.
Neo-Dadaism, Pop Art.
Born Charles Rogers Grooms, the red-headed Red Grooms studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1955), the New School for Social Research in New York (1956), and under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1957). He was one of the first performance artists amongst others such as Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Whitman. Grooms introduced his ‘happenings’ in New York City as early as 1957, the most famous being The Burning Building at the Delancey Street Museum. Grooms’ style of performance art, non-verbal yet with its theatrical narrative flow and comedic elements, quickly transferred into filmmaking, and he produced Shoot the Moon (1962), after A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès....
American, 20th century, male.
Born 15 May 1930, in Allendale (South Carolina) or Augusta (Georgia).
Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, printmaker, mixed media, costume and set designer, illustrator. Encaustic.
Neo-Dadaism, Pop Art.
Jasper Johns grew up in South Carolina. He attended courses in art and painting at the University of South Carolina and, in 1948, enrolled in a commercial art school for two semesters in New York City. He served in the US Army for two years during the Korean War but was able to resume his studies at City College in New York in 1953, thanks to the GI Bill. It was at this time that he met his lifelong friend Robert Rauschenberg, the composer John Cage, and the dancer Merce Cunningham. He acted as artistic adviser for Cage and Cunningham’s dance company until 1972, collaborating with painters such as Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Bruce Nauman, and Andy Warhol. He lives and works in New York State and St Martin in the French West Indies. He has been a member of the New York Academy of Arts and Letters since 1988....
(b Los Angeles, CA, 1960).
American sculptor. Kersels graduated with a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1984, and later returned to the same institution to take an MA (1993–5). From 1984 to 1993 he was a member of a neo-Dada performance group, SHRIMPS, and this clearly influenced his sculpture, both in terms of its echos of performance and its tone of light-hearted absurdity and futility. His photographic series Tossing a Friend (Melinda 1, 2 and 3) (1996; see 1998 exh. cat.) is indicative of his interest in the consequences of accidental movement: a woman is shown, in various positions, being thrown in the air by the artist. Objects of the Dealer (1995; see Pagel, 1995) suggests a more critical edge to his anarchic humour: all the mechanical and electrical components on an art dealer’s desk were wired up to different microcassettes and whenever they were used music would come from some of the 26 speakers. His well-known ...
born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg,also called Bob Rauschenberg
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 22 October 1925, in Port Arthur (Texas); died 12 May 2008, in Captiva Island (Florida).
Painter (mixed media), watercolourist, sculptor of assemblages, engraver, lithographer, screen printer, installation artist, performance artist. Stage sets.
Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus, Citationism, Copy Art.
Experiments in Art and Technology group.
Milton Ernest Rauschenberg studied pharmacology at the University of Texas in 1943. Serving in the Marines between 1943 and 1945, he worked for the psychiatric service in a military hospital in San Diego. In 1945, he attended courses at the Art Institute in Kansas City and changed his first name, Milton, to Bob. Thanks to an army grant, he stayed in Paris for almost a year in 1947–1948, where he attended courses at the Académie Julian. He entered the Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948 under the direction of Josef Albers. There he met fellow artist Susan Weil, whom he later married. Between 1949 and 1952, he trained at the Art Students League of New York with the teachers Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor and met Frank Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jack Tworkov. He often spent time at Black Mountain College, the centre of activity for a new generation for artists. He made a journey to Europe with Cy Twombly in 1953 that took him to Italy and to North Africa. On his return he met Jasper Johns. In 1960, he met Marcel Duchamp. From 1961, he went on tour with the dance company of Merce Cunningham. Rauschenberg travelled frequently, working in a number of countries: France, Israel, India, China, Japan, Chile, Venezuela, Cuba, Tibet, the USSR (now Russia), and Malaysia. From 1984, under the aegis of the ROCI association (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange), he carried out an enormous multicultural creative project that took the form, in each chosen country, of a work created in situ and a dialogue with the artists of that nation. He lived and worked in New York and, from 1970, Captiva Island near Tampa in Florida....
American, 20th century, female.
Born 3 March 1893, in San Francisco; died 12 March 1998, in Ojai (California).
Draughtswoman, watercolourist, illustrator, ceramicist, sculptor, writer. Figures, nudes.
Dadaism.
Beatrice Wood studied in Paris before the World War I, at the Académie Julian and the Comédie Française. She moved to Italy with Gordon Craig before returning to New York in ...
