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An Incomplete History of Protest Art
Protest Art is a broad term that refers to creative works that are produced by artists (and activists) in response to global events, social movements, and acts of oppression, violence, injustice, and inequalities.
Many variations of protest art can be found throughout the history, so it is difficult to establish the beginning of this politically engaging artistic expression. Conceptual art and performance activist art was majorly influenced by Dada, an movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry, and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature. When it comes to fine art, Picasso’s Guernica (1937) based on the Spanish Civil War and capturing its atrocities and inhumanity, served as an inspiration for the modern human rights movement.
During the 1960s and 1970s, many creatives that can be seen as protest artists visibly opposed the Vietnam War and produced artworks that raised awareness and called for the responsibility.
ARTICLE | Willem de Kooning: How to Be an Artist
Willem de Kooning detested conformity. While he became one of the most influential painters of Abstract Expressionism, he resisted association with the movement. Adhering to a single style—in particular, one that insisted on leaving representational imagery behind—was too limiting for the New York–based Dutch artist. Famously, he complicated pure abstraction by embedding figures within tempestuous slashes of paint and nebulous, biomorphic forms, as in his masterpiece Woman I (1950–52).
“Some painters, including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on.…They do not want to ‘sit in style,’” he explained during a 1951 lecture, entitled “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” at the Museum of Modern Art. “Those artists do not want to conform,” he continued. “They only want to be inspired.”
Over the course of de Kooning’s seven-decade career, he gave numerous lectures and interviews that revealed the inspirations behind his shape-shifting, explosive compositions. Below, we highlight several lessons for artists that can be gleaned from his words. They explore the importance of dialogue, observation, iconoclasm, and even failure.
Lesson #1: Don’t be afraid to be influenced by fellow artists’ work
When de Kooning was 21, in 1926, he moved from Holland to the U.S. to pursue a career in commercial art. But after landing in Manhattan, he met several artists who propelled him to focus on his personal practice. The early development of his work hinged on dialogue with his contemporaries, and he routinely noted his debt to fellow painters Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham, in particular. “I was lucky when I came to this country to meet the three smartest guys on the scene,” he said in the biography Willem de Kooning, 1904–1997: Content as a Glimpse by Barbara Hess. “They knew I had my own eyes, but I wasn’t always looking in the right direction. I was certainly in need of a helping hand at times.”
De Kooning was never too proud to acknowledge the influence of his peers on his own work. He emphasized the importance of more formal, organized exchanges between artists, too. In 1949, de Kooning and 17 other artists, including Gorky, Franz Kline, and Ad Reinhardt, founded The Club, a loft on East 8th Street where they gathered to talk aesthetics (and drink, too). Weekly Friday night conversations were dubbed “Subjects of the Artist” and later “Studio 35.” “It was so important, getting together, arguing, thinking,” de Kooning explained to Anne Parsons in a late-1960s interview.
The artist also made a point to see fellow artists’ work in exhibitions around New York. “You can safely say he saw everything,” his wife, the painter Elaine de Kooning, once told art historian Sally Yard. His interests weren’t just limited to the work of his peers, though; absorbing historical references also became integral to de Kooning’s process. “Picasso and Matisse showed us the way and we filled in with our own personalities,” he said in 1982. He openly drew from Rembrandt, Cézanne, Ingres, Mesopotamian idols, and Pompeian frescoes, too. “My paintings come more from other paintings,” he modestly told Harold Rosenberg in 1972. “This is my pleasure of living — of discovering what I enjoy in paintings.”
Lesson #2: Seek out glimpses of inspiration in the world around you
Unlike most of de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist peers, observation of the world around him—as opposed to his inner life—provided the initial impulse for his paintings. He once referred to himself as a “slipping glimpser,” or a painter who drew from flashes of content he encountered in daily life. In a landmark 1960 interview with critic David Sylvester, he explained this: “Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash—it’s very tiny, very tiny, content.” In other words, the bits of content that inspired elements of de Kooning’s canvases weren’t products of premeditated, planned observation, but rather a relaxed awareness of his surroundings.
Bits of color or random objects seen traversing Manhattan or Long Island, where he later lived, could inspire a painting or an entire series. “The artist associated the glimpse with the most ordinary kind of ‘happening’—somebody sitting on a chair, or a puddle of water reflecting light,” wrote art historian Richard Shiff. A mouth he glimpsed in a magazine inspired the focal point of the “Woman” series: her wide, toothy smile. “If I really think about it,” de Kooning explained to Sylvester of these shards of content, “it will come out in the painting.”
But de Kooning wasn’t as interested in the formal qualities of these glimpses as much as their psychological hold on him. He sought to paint “the emotion of a concrete experience,” as he told Sylvester, rather than the object or encounter itself.
Lesson #3: Pay attention to your desires, not the critics
De Kooning’s eclectic, experimental approach to painting wasn’t always admired by his peers. “No single image represents his style or characterizes his career as do, for example, the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock and the abstracted topographies of Clyfford Still,” Lake explained in Willem de Kooning: The Artist’s Materials (2010).
He boldly blended styles—figuration and abstraction, most notably—a practice that was anathema to the era’s traditional and progressive critics. “Conservative critics complained about the artist’s attempt to mix painterly abstraction and expressionist figuration,” while “champions of ‘advanced’ art attacked de Kooning for his conservative return to figure painting,” Lake continued.
But the painter remained staunchly committed to hybridization. “Even abstract shapes must have a likeness,” he once said.
Several times, de Kooning refused to become an official member of American Abstract Artists, an organization that would have restricted his use of figuration. In a statement accompanying his black-and-white canvas Painting (1948), an abstract composition incorporating elements of figurative drawings, he conveyed his disdain for blindly following a single style or movement: “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color,” he wrote. “I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in—drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space.”
In 1960, Sylvester asked de Kooning about the reaction he received, upon embedding recognizable imagery into abstraction. The painter responded bluntly and resolutely: “They attacked me for that, certain artists and critics. But I felt this was their problem, not mine.…I fear that I’ll have to follow my desires.”
Lesson #4: Embrace imperfection—even failure
De Kooning didn’t shy away from failure. In fact, he believed “that serious art was doomed to fall short of its potential,” as art historian Robert Storr has explained. Perhaps surprisingly, the concept motivated de Kooning’s work. “Failure ought to take your whole life, active life,” the painter once said. Often, he would rework canvases over and over again, letting mistakes guide his next composition.
De Kooning explained that accepting failure and imperfection unburdened him, and opened him up to new modes of experimentation. “I get freer.…I have this sort of feeling that I am all there now,” he explained in “What Abstract Art Means to Me.” “It’s not even thinking in terms of one’s limitations, because they have to come naturally. I think whatever you have you can do wonders with it, if you accept it.”
Even into his seventies and eighties, de Kooning continued to experiment. His paintings become looser, more pared down, and buoyant. Storr ascribes this shift, in part, to his fearlessness and his willingness to fail. “Failure would have confirmed the opinion of those who had been impatiently awaiting definitive proof of his decline,” Storr wrote. “But de Kooning had never been afraid of failure.”
“I never was interested, you know, how to make a good painting,” the artist told Sylvester as early as 1960. “I didn’t want to pin it down at all.” In other words, embracing imperfection freed de Kooning, and led him to make some of art history’s most daring and influential canvases.
RELATED PROGRAMMING: ART TALKS: WILLEM DE KOONING
SOURCE: Artsy
MEET THE ARTIST | Willem de Kooning
LIFE STORY
1904 | Born in the Netherlands
1914-18 | WWI
1918-19 | Influenza pandemic
1926 | Moves to the USA
1927 | “The Jazz Singer” premieres
1929-33 | The Great Depression
1933 | The New Deal launches
1933 | Prohibition ends
1935 | Employed by the WPA
1939-45 | WWII
1943 | Marries Elaine Fried
1950-53 | The Korean War
1956 | Daughter Lisa is born
1957-58 | Influenza pandemic
1962 | Becomes a US citizen
1962 | Seattle Century 21 Expo
1963 | March on Washington, DC
1964 | The Vietnam Conflict begins
1968 | Influenza pandemic
1969 | First moon walk
1973 | Vietnam ceasefire
1981-present | AIDS pandemic
1986 | Challenger explosion
1987 | Diagnosed with dementia
1989 | Wife Elaine dies
1991 | Paints final works
1997 | Dies at age 92
Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904, into a working class family in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Driven by an acutely perceptive mind, a strong work ethic, and persistent self doubt – coupled with the determination to achieve – the charismatic de Kooning became one of America’s and the twentieth century’s most influential artists.
Showing an interest in art from an early age, de Kooning was apprenticed to a leading design firm when he was twelve and, with its encouragement, enrolled in night school at the prestigious Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques (Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen te Rotterdam), which was renamed in his honor in 1998 as the Willem de Kooning Academie. With the help of his friend, Leo Cohan, in 1926 he stowed away on a ship to the United States, settling in New York City in 1927. At that point, it was not the life of an artist that he was in search of; rather, like many young Europeans, it was the movie version of the American dream (big money, girls, cowboys, etc.). Nevertheless, after briefly working as a house painter, he established himself as a commercial artist and became immersed in his own painting and the New York art world, befriending such artists as Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky.
In 1936, during the Great Depression, de Kooning worked in the mural division of the Works Project Administration (WPA). The experience convinced him to take up painting full time. By the late forties and early fifties, de Kooning and his New York contemporaries, including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, became notorious for rejecting the accepted stylistic norms such as Regionalism, Surrealism, and Cubism by dissolving the relationship between foreground and background and using paint to create emotive, abstract gestures. This movement was variously labeled “Action Painting,” “Abstract Expressionism,” or simply the “New York School.” Until this time, Paris had been considered the center of the avant-garde, and the groundbreaking nature of Picasso’s contributions was frustratingly difficult to surpass for this group of highly competitive New York artists. De Kooning said it plainly: “Picasso is the man to beat.” De Kooning and this group finally stole the spotlight and were responsible for the historic shift of attention to New York in the years following World War II.
De Kooning became known as an “artist’s artist” among his peers in New York and then gained critical acclaim in 1948 with his first one-man exhibition held at Charles Egan Gallery, at the age of forty-four. The exhibition revealed densely worked oil and enamel paintings, including his now well-known black-and-white paintings. This exhibition was essential to de Kooning’s reputation. Shortly thereafter, in 1951, de Kooning made one of his first major sales when he received the Logan Medal and Purchase Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago for his grand-scale abstraction, Excavation (1950). This is arguably one of the most important paintings of the twentieth century. During this period, de Kooning gained the support of Clement Greenberg and later Harold Rosenberg, the two foremost and rivaling critics in New York.
De Kooning’s success did not dampen his need for exploration and experimentation. In 1953, he shocked the art world by exhibiting a series of aggressively painted figural works, commonly known as the “Women” paintings. These women were types or icons more than portraits of individuals. His return to figuration was perceived by some as a betrayal of Abstract Expressionist principles, which emphasized abstraction. He lost Greenberg’s support, yet Rosenberg remained convinced of his relevance. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, accepted de Kooning’s change in style as an advancement in his work and purchased Woman I (1950 – 1952) in 1953. What seemed to some as stylistically reactionary, to others was clearly avant-garde.
De Kooning’s dramatic rise to prominence between 1948 and 1953 was only the first act in a remarkable artistic career. While many of his contemporaries developed a mature “signature style,” de Kooning’s inquisitive spirit did not allow such constraint. Fighting adherence to any orthodoxy, he continued to explore new styles and methods, often challenging his own facility. “You have to change to stay the same,” is his frequently quoted adage.
De Kooning was equally comfortable working on paper and canvas. In fact, paper allowed for an immediacy that appealed to him. From September 1959 to January 1960, de Kooning stayed in Italy, during which time he produced a large number of experimental black-and-white works on paper known as the “Rome” drawings. After his return, he traveled to the West Coast. While in San Francisco, he worked with brush and ink, but, more interesting, he experimented with lithography. The two resulting prints (known as Waves I and Waves II) became prime examples of Abstract Expressionist printmaking.
By the late fifties, he had moved from women, to women in landscapes, to what seemed to be a return to “pure” abstraction, with works respectively referred to as “Urban,” “Parkway,” and “Pastoral” landscapes; yet he never completely left the world of actual objects for pure abstraction. In 1960, he said, “It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear that I’ll have to follow my desires.” The figure reasserted itself, now in its more carnal form.
In 1963, de Kooning moved from New York City to Springs, in East Hampton, Long Island. Manipulating space as a sculptor would, he designed and built a soaring, butterfly-roofed, light-filled studio and home in a quiet, wooded neighborhood where he worked through the sixties before moving in permanently in 1971. The light and landscape of East Hampton reminded him of his native Holland, and the change in environment was reflected in his work.Colors softened and figures became loosely painted and fleshy, more “go-go” girl and “come hither” than angry and tooth-filled. He continued to experiment with his medium, adding water and safflower oil to make it slippery and wet, formulating what would seem to many an extremely difficult mixture to handle.
On a brief trip to Italy in 1969, after encountering a sculptor friend, Herzl Emmanuel, de Kooning produced thirteen small figures in clay, which were editioned in bronze. In the early seventies he explored both sculpture and lithography, producing a sizable body of work while continuing to paint and draw. In this period, more graphic elements appear in his paintings, some with flat applications of paint as opposed to a more painterly approach. This may derive from his exposure to Japanese art and design while in Japan in early 1970. His lithographs seem to reflect the influence of Japanese ink drawing and calligraphy as many exhibit a newly gained sense of open space, which in turn is also reflected in some of the paintings. The 1970s decade was marked first by material experimentation and then by breakthrough. Because of or in spite of the explorations, the late 1970s were a prolific period in which he produced voluptuous, thickly painted works which are among his most sensually abstract.
Visual struggle and wrestling are markers of much of de Kooning’s career. He was fortunate in his final decade to dispel some of the angst. Coming out of a methodology of sanding, drawing, layering, scraping, rotating the canvas and repeatedly stepping back to consider each change, the pared-down and at times serene paintings of the eighties can be seen as de Kooning’s ultimate synthesis of figuration and abstraction, of painting and drawing, and of balance and imbalance. Year after year throughout the 1980s, de Kooning explored new forms of pictorial space as revealed by works with ethereal ribbon-like passages; or some with cantilevers whereby straight lines may float or abruptly stop and balance against broad open areas; or others of crammed, bold, lyrical spaces. Vividly colored, predominately linear elements were juxtaposed against subtly toned white areas. With his avowed inclination to embrace the “ordinary,” he was free to acknowledge the unintellectual, mundane or humorous characters or objects at times perceptible in his abstract paintings. This again exemplifies his insistence on freedom from doctrinaire ideas of what art should be. It is also reflected in the spontaneity and simplicity of the light-hearted titles he gave to a few works in the 1980s, for example: The Key and the Parade, The Cat’s Meow and A Deer and the Lampshade. De Kooning had reached a more thoroughly open, less anxiously complex place in his artistic career.
Succumbing to the affects of old age and dementia, de Kooning worked on his last painting in 1991 and passed away in 1997 at the age of 92, after an extraordinarily long, rich and successful career. De Kooning never stopped exploring and expanding the possibilities of his craft, leaving an indelible mark on American and international artists and viewers.
De Kooning was awarded many honors in his lifetime, including The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. His works have been included in thousands of exhibitions and are in the permanent collections of many of the finest art institutions abroad, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and in America such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
RELATED PROGRAMMING: ART TALKS: WILLEM DE KOONING
SOURCE: The Willem de Kooning Foundation
RELATED PROGRAMMING
ART TALKS: WILLEM DE KOONING | DATES TBA
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THE DOLL’S HOUSE PROJECT
Directed by Deana Duncan
A DOLL’S HOUSE
Henrik Ibsen’s controversial masterpiece about Nora and Torvald Helmer's fragile marriage was a watershed moment in both theatre and feminism. As Christmas Eve approaches and purse strings tighten; the Helmer's discover that the facade of their perfect lives is beginning to crack. Nora has a secret and what begins as an exquisite family drama quickly reveals itself to be a life-or-death thriller with no clear villains or means of escape.
Featuring Anja Bentson, Kaia Bentson, Katrina Bentson, Olena Hodges, Zora Lungren, Kevin Lynch, David Mayer, Cindy Rutstein, Zachary Schneider.
Performance dates to be announced!
A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2
Fifteen years have passed between a door slam in Ibsen’s classic and a “knock-knock” that begins Part 2. What follows are 90 deft, devastating minutes that connect the past and present and shine a light on how we seem to be going backwards in our thinking about women’s rights, identities, ownership of bodies, and gender roles.
Featuring David Churchill, Ada Faith-Feyma, Shelley Hartle, Amy Walker.