Philadelphia Art Alliance

251 S. 18th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Tel: 215.545.4302
E-mail: curator@philartalliance.org
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First-Floor Galleries

Artistic Alternatives celebrates the contributions made by five outstanding artists living in the United States active over the past fifty years: Keith Haring (b. Kutztown, PA 1958-1990); David Hockney (b. Bradford, England, 1937); Jasper Johns (b. Augusta, GA, 1930); Robert Rauschenberg (b. Port Arthur, TX, 1925); and Andy Warhol (b. Pittsburgh, PA, 1928-1987). This exhibition is sponsored by PrideFest America, the nation's largest annual gay and lesbian symposium and festival, held in Philadelphia from April 30 to May 6, 2001, with a grant from The Ethel and Jack Sandman Charitable Trust, and was organized by the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

The Philadelphia Art Alliance wishes to gratefully recognize and thank the lenders to this exhibition: Robert Morrison, for loaning works by Warhol and Johns as well as editing the videotape on view here; Karen DeLong, with the assistance of the Allentown Art Museum, and the entire Haring family; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in particular John Ittmann, curator of prints; Lafayette College and Michiko Okaya, director of its art properties and gallery; Paul Cornwall-Jones of Petersburg Press (New York and London), for generously loaning and framing prints by Hockney and Johns; and James Caroll of the New Arts Program in Kutztown, PA, for the original video footage used in "Haring Drawing," on view here. We would also like to thank Robert Morrison, Michael Petronko, and Katharine Umsted for their assistance in the development of this exhibition.

Dr. Amy Ingrid Schlegel, curator, Philadelphia Art Alliance

Keith Haring
Keith Haring was born in 1958 in Kutztown, PA. He attended art school in Pittsburgh, PA and exhibited several abstract drawings at his first solo exhibition in 1978. In 1979, he moved to New York City and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts. In 1980, he created his first drawings of flying saucers, animals, and other human imagery and by 1981 he was drawing with chalk on black paper in the subway. Haring's signature vocabulary of the child, barking dog, flying saucer, halo, cross, pyramid, and heart eventually commingled with sexually explicit imagery in the 1980s.

By 1984 Haring had taken his Pop and Graffiti Art-inspired work from its origins in the New York subway to the upper echelons of the art world. He was invited to exhibit at: Documenta 7, Kassel (1982), The Whitney Biennial (1983), Bienal de Sao Paulo (1983), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux (1985), the Paris Biennale (1985), and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1986), to name just a few prestigious institutions that embraced his work with both solo and group exhibitions.

Throughout his career, Haring was dedicated to public art. He created his first mural on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as well as others in Chicago, Sydney, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, Dobbs Ferry, Minneapolis, Amsterdam, Paris, Pisa, and the Berlin Wall. In the late 1980s Haring led art workshops for children and collaborated with them on the creation of several murals worldwide. In 1985, Haring began to paint monstrous and apocalyptic imagery as well as sexually explicit, sometimes homoerotic, subjects and exhibited them at both the Tony Schafrazi and Leo Castelli Galleries in New York. In 1986, he opened the first "Pop Shop," which featured multiples of his paintings and other merchandise in New York. After he was diagnosed with AIDS, Haring joined the campaign for AIDS awareness in 1989 and established the Keith Haring Foundation, a charitable organization devoted to various social causes. He continued to devote his time and energy to social causes, ranging from AIDS awareness to drug abuse in the inner cities. When Haring died of AIDS-related causes in 1990 he was internationally renowned for his use of schematic images of babies, dogs, and human figures, the staples of his visually complex and powerfully direct murals, paintings, sculptures, and digital works. A video of Keith Haring drawing from 1982 at the New Arts Program in Kutztown, PA has been produced especially for this exhibition. -->

KEITH HARING, Untitled (Andy Mouse), 1985
Keith Haring made his first drawing including Mickey Mouse in 1981, early in his career. He and Andy Warhol met in 1983 and became fast friends. This 1985 untitled work offers a playful portrait of Pop artist Andy Warhol wearing Mickey Mouse ears and his trademark oversized glasses. Rendered schematically in thick bright pink and white lines on a neutral gray flat field of color, this painting combines two icons of American popular culture in a bold and simplified personal ode to Haring's friendship with Warhol.

KEITH HARING, Untitled (Free South Africa), 1984
This untitled drawing in black and red marker on white paper by Keith Haring was so widely reproduced in the mid-1980s that it became one of his best known images. The signature Haring figures, boldly rendered with a thick line that suggests a simultaneously flat and a volumetric form, are coded simply by color and scale to indicate racial difference and the inequity of the Apartheid system political and social domination in South Africa at the time. Although the black figure is much larger, it is enchained by the smaller white figure. Haring achieved an incredible visual directness in the delivery of his message. With the addition of the words "Free South Africa," the text that accompanied some of the later reproductions of this image, this drawing became an anti-apartheid icon. As the debate heated up in American universities to divest their financial holdings from multinational companies doing business in South Africa, this drawing by Keith Haring simply stated in visual terms the ethical racial injustice underpinning Apartheid.

David Hockney

Born in 1937 in Bradford, England into a politically radical working-class family, David Hockney studied at the Bradford School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. At the Royal College in the early 1960s, Hockney banded with a handful of other artists in their early 20s to form what art critic Lawrence Alloway called "the third phase of [British] Pop Art."

In 1961 Hockney and his cohorts participated in the important juried exhibition "Young Contemporaries" in London. Hockney recalled that: "For a student, the exhibition was a big event. That's when I began to sell my pictures. It was probably the first time there'd been a student movement in painting that was uninfluenced by older artists in [England] . . . this generation was not [influenced by American Abstract Expressionism]."

Alloway, one of the jurors, characterized the "Young Contemporaries" work as: "connect[ed] with the city. . . by using typical products and objets, including the techniques of graffiti and the imagery of mass communications. . . The impact of popular art is present, but checked by puzzles and paradoxes . . . their work . . . combines real objects, same-size representation, sketchy notation, and writing." Indeed Hockney's work of the 1960s and 1970s combines handwritten, graffiti-like text and a seemingly quickly rendered, naïve, sketchy figurative drawing style, in both his paintings and prints. Alloway described Hockney's approach as an overlay of children's art, primitive painting, and graffiti. Art critic Arthur Danto sees Hockney's work of the early 1960s as "about love -- erotic and indeed homoerotic love rather than the abstract . . . but [it is] unashamedly literary as well."

By 1964 David Hockney had settled in Hollywood, where he has lived ever since, with the exception of two years in Paris (1973 to 1975). Once in Los Angeles, Hockney's painting style changed dramatically, taking on a weightier, more traditionally representational manner. Portraits of friends and lovers, domestic scenes of couples (gay and straight), the outdoor swimming pool, and bathing emerged as some of his favorite subjects from the mid-1960s through the 1970s.

During the 1980s, Hockey experimented intensely with photography, creating photographic collages (Ian Washing His Hair, London [1983] is included here) and prints of previous work reproduced on the photocopier machine.

DAVID HOCKNEY, Kaisarion With All His Beauty, 1961
In 1961, while a student at the Royal College in London, David Hockney turned to graphic work because he could not afford painting materials. Some of his earliest etchings are included in this exhibition: this 1961 color etching called Kaisarion with All His Beauty comes from the series "Me and My Heroes" and is based on the poetry of the openly gay ancient Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy. Hockney had been interested in Cavafy's poetry for quite a while and remembers, even while still living with his parents in the working class northern English city of Bradford, that Cavafy's poems were not available in the open stacks at his local public library but that he had to request it, which was one way of controlling who the readers of the homoerotic poetry were. Hockney recalls that he liked the book so much he stole it from his local library and still has it in his personal collection.

While still a student at the Royal College, Hockney received the Guinness Award for Etching. Kaisarion With All His Beauty is an exemplary etching made while a student. Its formal and conceptual complexity demonstrates why he won this prestigious award. Kaisarion is also exemplary of Hockney's paintings and prints of the 1960s and 1970s in that it combines handwritten, graffiti-like text and a seemingly quickly rendered, naïve, sketchy figurative drawing style. Indeed the British art critic Lawrence Alloway was one of the first to single out Hockney and a handful of other young British artists in the early 1960s as "the third phase of [British] Pop Art." Alloway described Hockney's approach as an overlay of children's art, primitive painting, and graffiti.

DAVID HOCKNEY, Two Boys Aged 22 and 23, 1966
Hockney's interest in the explicitly homoerotic poetry of the ancient Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy was one of several literary sources that inspired his prints during the 1960s. In addition to Kaisarion with All His Beauty, Hockney created 13 etchings to accompany a 1966 livre d'artist translation of Cavafy's poems, oneo f which is Two Boys Aged 22 and 23. To prepare himself for this project, Hockney visited Beirut in early 1966, as he recalled, "just to get atmosphere and drawings for the prints . . . I thought Beirut was more like Alexandria would have been when Cavafy was there, cosmopolitan, different groups of people, French and Arabic. . ."

DAVID HOCKNEY, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1965
In 1963 David Hockney traveled for the first time from England to Los Angeles, where he met Andy Warhol and curator Henry Geldzahler of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who became a close friend. By 1964 Hockney had settled in Los Angeles, where he has lived ever since, with the exception of two years in Paris. Once he expatriated himself to California, Hockney's painting style changed dramatically and took on a weightier, more traditionally representational manner. He has made many painted and printed portraits of friends and lovers, that are essentially domestic scenes of couples both straight and gay, as in this lithograph of the British expatriot writer Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, which was made after a painting of the couple in the same year, 1965. The very personal subject matter of Hockney's work is at once a tender testament to a friendship and an emblem of his own position as an openly gay man.

Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns, painter, printmaker, and sculptor, is regarded, along with Robert Rauschenberg, one of the forerunners of Pop Art. Over his long career, Johns has developed and refined a repertoire of imagery based on "ready-made", ubiquitous objects and symbols -- flags, targets, numbers, letters, maps, and rulers, to name just his most typical. Regardless of the medium in which he works -- encaustic (hot wax with pigment), oil painting, collage, lithography, etching, and casting -- Johns's work, like Rauschenberg's, exhibits a lucid consistency of vision. (Examples of his masterful printmaking skills are exhibited here.)

Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, GA and grew up in rural South Carolina. Between 1947 and 1948 he attended at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. In 1949 he attended commercial art school for two semesters. After serving in the Army, Johns moved back to New York in 1951. While working at a bookstore and painting at night, Johns met Rauschenberg in 1954, who convinced him to quit his day-job and to work together department store window displays to earn quick money. In1954 Johns painted his first "flag" and "target" paintings.

In 1958 Johns had his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, which still represents him. Three paintings from that exhibition were bought immediately by the Museum of Modern Art and in 1959 he was included in an exhibition there called Sixteen Americans. In 1964 Johns was given his first retrospective exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. In 1966 he had a solo exhibition of drawings at the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C. In 1970 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective exhibition of his prints.

In 1973 Johns bought a house near John Cage in Stony Point, NY and moved out of New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art organized a full-scale retrospective in 1977 that traveled to Europe. It was not until 1988 that Johns was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale.

Some of Johns's more recent major exhibitions include: The Drawings of Jasper Johns, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (traveled to Switzerland, England, and New York, 1990-92); Jasper Johns: 35 Years with Leo Castelli and Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1997. In 1993 The Prints of Jasper Johns, 1960-1993: A Catalogue Raisonné was published.

JASPER JOHNS, Targets, 1978-80
Over his long career as painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Jasper Johns has developed and refined a repertoire of imagery based on "ready-made", ubiquitous objects and symbols -- flags, targets, numbers, letters, maps, and rulers. Along with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns is regarded as a forerunner of Pop Art in America. Jasper Johns began making paintings of targets in 1954, shortly after he met Rauschenberg in New York. These etchings with aquatint date to 1978-80 (one has color, the other is drypoint). Johns added an upper register to his paintings, above the image of the target, comprised of a row of small boxes in which he placed fragments of body parts cast from his own body (those boxes are empty in these prints). Johns has said he chose the target because it was at once a simple geometric form (a series of concentric circles nestled upon one another), a conceptual abstraction, and a flat surface, devoid of illusion.

Johns does not privilege his painting practice over his printmaking. Indeed, he has been prolific in both areas. He carries through ideas from painting to print, however. For instance, the encaustic process he used in his early Target paintings (in which pigment was dissolved in hot wax and then painted on to the canvas surface) is "translated" conceptually in the dense mark-making covering the entire surface of the etching.

JASPER JOHNS, Land's End, 1978
It is often remarked that Jasper Johns's work is enigmatic, dense, and cryptic, at once literal and opaque. Johns gives us representations of common, identifiable objects, sometimes affixing an object to the surface. His compositions often juxtapose seemingly unrelated "ready-made" or "found" objects in a flattenend, shallow field lacking depth. In both the 1963 painting and the subsequent prints titled Land's End, Johns combines several seemingly unrelated everyday objects with personal and literary references: he stenciled the words "red," "yellow," and "blue" three times ­ once backwards and twice forwards (mirror images of each other), layering the smaller word over the larger; maintaining the word's legibility but making it difficult to read. Johns also reformulates motifs recycled from earlier works ­ the outline of a ruler at the center right edge, a measuring device that creates a circular outline at the top right, a surprisingly personal reference in the impression of Johns's own hand and a schematic outline of an arm. The entire surface has been filled with freer, more spontaneous marks and lines that do not seem to represent anything, but exist as counterpoints to the hard-edged lines that connote the objects just described.

Land's End was inspired by Jasper Johns's reading of the poetry of Hart Crane, who had committed suicide by drowning while on his honeymoon. It has been noted that Johns's work of the mid-1960s, when he first made the painting on which this print is based and other closely related works, was a time of personal desperation for the artist, which is born out in the literary references he chose. Curator Kirk Varnedoe has described the outstretched, elongated arm -- possibly the frantic gesture of a drowning victim­ as "seem[ing] to reach with a thwarted desperation" and "evok[ing] the extreme reach of a solitary figure virtually crucified in space."

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg is one of the most protean American artists of the 20th century. Inspired by French avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp and his Dadaist iconoclasm, Rauschenberg introduced radically new materials and startling combinations of objects plucked from his immediate surroundings. With these materials he made highly unorthodox paintings and hybrids he called "Combines." With his famous Erased DeKooning Drawing of 1949, in which the act of erasure and the mere trace of another artist's expression constituted the work of art, Rauschenberg registered his strong reaction against the introspection of Abstract Expressionism. He believes there is no difference between "art" and "life" ­ that anything is valid subject matter and material. As Rauschenberg once stated: "I don't want my personality to come out through the piece . . . I want my paintings to be reflections of life . . . your self-visualization is a reflection of your surroundings."

Rauschenberg sought to conjure new and unexpected associations for viewers. Many of his works are like puzzles that challenge the player to figure out how the various pieces are related, if at all. From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Rauschenberg was deeply involved with dance, theater, and performance art (a filmed excerpt of his 1966 performance "Linoleum" is on view here), in addition to his painting practice, which expanded to include silkscreening, especially photographs and appropriated images (transferred onto many kinds of surfaces) and lithography.

The vision underlying Rauschenberg's remarkable body of work is absolutely consistent: meaning is created through accidental, improvised, and even illogical juxtapositions and associations. One might say that Rauschenberg's life-long project as an artist has been to represent the "truth" of reality ­ that it is fractured, fleeting, and highly contingent.

Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1925 at Port Arthur, Texas. In 1942 he studied pharmacy briefly at the University of Texas before enlisting in the U.S. Marines. From 1947 to 1948 he was enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute, and in 1948 he attended the Académie Julian in Paris. He then studied at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, a hotbed of avant-garde activity. He was married to fellow American artist Susan Weil, whom he had met in Paris, from 1950 to1952; they had a son in 1951. He spent time in New York City intermittently from 1949 to 1953, the year he moved into a studio in a downtown loft building. He had his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1951.

In 1954 he met Jasper Johns, with whom he was closely associated until 1961. They had studios one floor apart in the same building. Rauschenberg had his first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery 1958, and regularly thereafter for more than 30 years. In 1962, he began silkscreening with photographs at the same time Andy Warhol began using stenciled silkscreens based on appropriated images. 1964 was a pivotal year for Rauschenberg: he won the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale, the event that catapulted him to art world fame. He has had touring retrospective exhibitions every decade since then.

Robert Rauschenberg lives on Captiva Island, Florida and in New York City.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, Autobiography, 1968
The three panels of this large offset lithograph by Robert Rauschenberg from 1968 titled Autobiography are displayed vertically and exceed 16 feet in height. They were printed with the type of press used to make commercial billboards. The three panels are layered with seemingly disparate images that, on closer examination, are probably thematically grouped. The top panel features a composite X-ray of Rauschenberg's own body superimposed with the artist's astrological chart, suggesting both the present and the future. The center panel deals with the artist's past; at its center is a photosilkscreen of the artist as a two-year-old boy with his parents boating on a bayou near his home in Port Arthur, Texas. Surrounding this photosilkscreen is a labyrinthine oval of handwritten text narrating events in the artist's life. The lower panel seems to address artistic creativity and is dominated by an enlarged photograph of Rauschenberg during his 1963 performance "Pelican," in which he wears rollerskates and a parachute on a wooden armature harnessed to his back. Rauschenberg was one of several performers and he also choreographed this performance. This particular image suggests both movement and flight, which are themes carried through in Rauschenberg's art and life.

Autobiography's visual overlay of seemingly discrete and unrelated appropriated images is quintessential Rauschenberg, but the emphasis on personal or autobiographical subject matter is not. The vision underlying Rauschenberg's aesthetic has often been interpreted to mean that meaning itself is created through accidental, improvised, intuited, and even illogical juxtapositions and associations. In that sense, what Rauschenberg offers us in Autobiography are images he had at hand but they are also images of personal significance to him. Rauschenberg once stated: "I don't want my personality to come out through the piece . . . I want my [work] to be [a] reflection of life . . . your self-visualization is a reflection of your surroundings."

Andy Warhol

No artist is more identified with Pop Art than Andy Warhol. Critic Arthur Danto once called him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced." Warhol is best known for his use of visual images from comic books, newspapers, film stills, publicity photos, and advertisements. His use of the stencil silkscreen technique allowed him to appropriate images directly from their source, making minimal alterations during the process. The stencil (and later the photo) silkscreen process of producing nearly-identical multiples allowed Warhol to remove any trace of the artist's "hand" in the creative process and hence to question the authenticity and originality of a work of art.

Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg started employing silkscreening techniques independently in 1962. Lawrence Alloway (the critic who coined the term Pop Art) noted that: "the subject matter of Warhol's paintings is taken from the public realm, and clearly so. This is unlike Rauschenberg's use . . . which tend[s] to a porous interpretation . . . [Warhol's technique] is a brilliant fusion of the readymade with the flatness of painting."

Andy Warhol was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA. He studied art at Carnegie Institute of Technology and immediately moved to New York City after graduation in 1949. Warhol began his career as a commercial artist whose clients included Glamour, Vogue, Seventeen, Harper's Bazaar, and Bergdorf Goodman. In 1956 Warhol started making paintings that selectively copied advertisements, newspaper headlines, and comics by hand. In 1962 Warhol discovered that the photo-silkscreen technique allowed him to transfer appropriated images directly to the surface rather than copying them by hand. In that same year he had several breakthrough solo exhibitions at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and the Stable Gallery in New York. In 1963 he moved his studio to a loft building on the Upper East Side, which later became known as The Factory.

During his years at The Factory, an entourage of artists, poets, and actors in his paintings, prints, and films assisted Warhol. (His films served as raw material for his relatively few sculptures. For instance, several frames from his 1963 film Kiss were silkscreened on to Plexiglas, as in the multiple/sculpture Kiss [1966]). In the 1970s Warhol extended the scope of his artistic activity to book collaborations, graphic design (a special issue of the avant-garde publication Aspen Magazine from 1966 was designed by Warhol and is on view in this exhibition), and producing the magazine Interview (a sample with Liza Minelli on the cover is included).

During the 1970s, Warhol endorsed a range of companies (airlines and news magazines, for example) while continuing to make films as well as commissioned portraits of celebrities, aristocracy, and leaders. The silkscreen "portraits" of Chinese political leader Mao Zedong on view here were not commissioned but made from a leaflet on Mao's teachings circulating in the U.S. among Leftist and anti-war groups. During the late 1970s and 1980s Warhol was the subject of countless survey and retrospective exhibitions in the United States and Europe.

Andy Warhol died in February 1987 following gall-bladder surgery in New York City.

ANDY WARHOL, The Kiss, 1966
The Kiss by Andy Warhol appropriates a fragment of an earlier image (a handful of identical, repeated frames from one of Warhol's own films, also called The Kiss from 1963, which zeros in on and freezes the action of the mouths of a black man and a white woman kissing.) This work, which appeared as a "multiple" in a portfolio called "7 Objects in a Box," demonstrates Warhol's interest in recycling imagery, even from his own earlier work and also underscores the importance of his filmmaking, which took place alongside his other two-dimensional paintings and silkscreens. Warhol used the same approach as he had with his other silkscreened works: the film strip treated as a "found image," fragmented from the larger reel, and then enlarged into a screen that was then transferred to a piece of Plexiglas. The framing of the image, along with its dark and light contrast, tends to abstract the image in to a formally pleasing composition, downplaying what for the 1960s would have been considered the provocative content of interracial romance.

ANDY WARHOL, Mao, 1972
The silkscreen used to make this "portrait" of Mao Zedong was based on an official photograph of the Chinese leader that was ubiquitous in China at the time and readily available to Warhol from a leaflet on Mao's teachings circulating in the U.S. among Leftist and anti-war groups in the early 1970s. President Nixon had visited China in 1972, the year that Warhol first started to use Mao's image.

Warhol discovered the photo-silkscreen technique in 1962 and began using it widely in his art. This printmaking technique, in which a prepared stencil is adhered to a screen made of a very fine mesh, allowed Warhol to transfer an appropriated image, in this case a photograph that he had enlarged and had manufactured in to a screen, directly to the surface, rather than having to copy the image by hand.

In many of the different versions of Mao's image, Warhol drew, scribbled, and added painterly touches by hand over the brightly and multi-colored screened bust of Mao. This contrast of the quasi-mechanical silkscreened image and the free-hand gestures is a hallmark of Warhol's portraits of the 1970s. The seriousness and menacing presence of this icon of Communism is contrasted with the nonnaturalistic, clashing colors. Warhol's portrait of Mao seems to beg the question of whether Warhol was caricaturing Mao in these portraits, and thereby making some sort of political statement, or whether, as the artist once stated, "Since fashion is art now and Chinese is in fashion, I could make a lot of money. Mao would be really nutty [as a choice of image] . . . not to believe in it, it'd just be fashion." The unresolvable ambiguity of this image makes this one of Warhol's most brilliant portraits.