8.4 A Closer Look at No. F, 1959

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From the course by The Museum of Modern Art

In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting

570 ratings

The Museum of Modern Art

In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting

570 ratings

Want to know how some of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists made abstract paintings? This course offers an in-depth, hands-on look at the materials, techniques, and thinking of seven New York School artists, including Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. Through studio demonstrations and gallery walkthroughs, you’ll form a deeper understanding of what a studio practice means and how ideas develop from close looking, and you’ll gain a sensitivity to the physical qualities of paint. Readings and other resources will round out your understanding, providing broader cultural, intellectual, and historical context about the decades after World War II, when these artists were active. The works of art you will explore in this course may also serve as points of departure to make your own abstract paintings. You may choose to participate in the studio exercises, for which you are invited to post images of your own paintings to the discussion boards, or you may choose to complete the course through its quizzes and written assessments only. Learners who wish to participate in the optional studio exercises may need to purchase art supplies. A list of suggested materials is included in the first module. Learning Objectives: Learn about the materials, techniques, and approaches of seven New York School artists who made abstract paintings. Trace the development of each artist’s work and studio practice in relation to broader cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts in the decades after World War II. Hone your visual analysis skills. Use each artist’s works as a point of departure for making your own abstract paintings.

From the lesson

Yayoi Kusama

8.3 In the Studio: Materials & Techniques of Yayoi Kusama20:12

8.4 A Closer Look at No. F, 19594:14

8.5 A Closer Look at Violet Obsession, 19943:11

8.6 Curator Laura Hoptman on Accumulation No. 1, 19621:39

Meet the Instructors

Corey D'Augustine
Art conservator, technical art historian, and artist
Department of Education

Let's take a look at a painting by Yayoi Kusama named Number F.

This canvas comes from 1959 and it's one of her Infinity Net paintings.

This is really her signature style, the one that really drives the majority

of the creative production, really of her entire career.

When we think about a net, realize that this is a perfect grid when it's woven or

sewn but of course once you start to use it that grid deforms, becomes soft, and

round and looping.

And in fact that is exactly what we are looking at here.

I want to start in with these holes.

Remember that she's previously worked with polka dots, so

we know she has inverted the figure ground relationships here.

Those polka dots are no longer dots but

spaces between these woven lattice of brushwork with the white stuff on the top.

But as we zoom in on these holes, they're not so simple.

When you look at this painting overall,

you get the impression of a very thickly painted, heavily encrusted surface, and

it's true, but first she's working very thinly she's working in oils.

She's using a generous amount of turpentine here and

she's layering these two colors over each other, the black and

the white here, in a way that you see both.

In other words, it's a very active surface, it's not opaque, it's not thick

and it's not a simple color that she's going to be using as a background.

So, having worked with this washed scrubbed appearance of this black and

white background, she then switches gears into really the bulk of this painting.

And this is thick toothpaste quality artist oil paint

rather than adding medium linseed oil, which of course,

thins the paint lowers its viscosity we see her doing that sometimes, for

example here, where the paint has a more liquid quality, a softer, thinner quality.

But then, as we move here we realize this is very stiff paint adjacent to it.

Now, it's all the same color, it's very likely all from the same tube or

maybe a couple tubes of the same paint.

But, she's changing the consistency of it continually

as she's looping mark to mark across the canvas.

Let's talk about these marks, since this is a gestural painting after all,

these are not the heroic gestures between quotes of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock here.

These are really rotations of the knuckles and of the wrists.

So a much gentler, a much more quiet approach to the surface here but

still an extremely gestural one. We think about this painting as an action painting,

as a painting that recalls how it's being made.

It's very transparent.

We can understand every single mark on this painting.

And in fact, we can start to extrapolate what the practice of making this painting

would be like or feel like.

Kusama has a lot of patience, or perhaps you say anxiety, as she's working again

and again and again and again in this very serialized, very repetitive process.

This is an easel-scale canvas and we could image that she was probably painting on

the surface here for several hours.

Stepping back from the canvas now and appreciating again the overall

composition, we see the net effect of all of those transitions of the paint itself,

changing the viscosity of the paint from thick to thin etc.

Essentially what this does is it creates multiple centers of

gravity in the painting.

There are dense areas, there are weaker, looser painted areas and

as your eye wanders restlessly around this all over composition,

there are some anchors where your eye really gets weighted down by this very

heavy encrusted area of the painting such as this one we're looking at now.

Let's quickly take a look at a couple other examples here so

you have a sense of the variety of infinity Nets that she's working with.

Sometimes fluorescent colors, sometimes monochrome paintings,

sometimes very loud screaming almost psychedelic kind of paintings and

other times very calm quiet almost Minimalist kind of paintings.

So like many of the artists in this

course there is a single idea but on this theme, there are infinite numbers of

variations when an artist has found very rich fertile territory to explore and

comes back and

finds as many different versions of this fundamental idea as possible.

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