Dr. Thomas Folland

“A poetics of drunkenness” is how the artist Martha Rosler once described her 24-panel photo-text installation, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems.
Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate ...

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Coming Soon: Postwar Aftermath and Abstraction

Rauschenberg's Signs is a montage of iconic symbols of 1960s culture
Robert Rauschenberg, Signs

From a live Smarthistory webinar: Dr. Thomas Folland on Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
From a live Smarthistory webinar: Dr. Thomas ...

Minimalism privileges a creative thought process, on the part of both viewer and artist, over the making of objects
Carl Andre, Lever

On the cusp of the decade of the 1960s, his art embraced the machine, if only as a symbol of the demise of the modern world or at least as another example of the disillusionment with it on the part of many artists.
Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York

In the 1990s, as artists searched for new alternatives, many considered conceptual art of the 1970s an unfinished project.
Tracey Emin, My Bed

Metaphorically therefore, it could be argued that Rauschenberg was erasing not just a drawing, but this very idea of artistic, masculine authorship.
Erasing Art: Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning drawing

Kruger’s art is characterized by a visual wit sharpened in the trenches of the advertising world.
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your gaze hits the ...

Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventions explored modernist architecture and urban decay.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting

When an artist erases another artist's drawing, is it still a drawing, and whose? This work challenges the art definitions and contexts of its time.
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing ...

The idea of sculpture was the subject of Antin’s work, which interrogates beauty, gender, and “traditional” art.
Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture

Conceptualism questions art’s role as a showcase for the creative genius and technical abilities of the artist.
Conceptual Art: An Introduction

Kosuth wrote that “being an artist now means to question the nature of art.” Take a seat to find out how he did it.
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs

Painted for a divided US, people from North and South could identify with this image—others remain marginalized.
War News from Mexico

Manet decided to replace the idealized female nude with the image of a known prostitute. It didn’t go so well.
A-Level: Édouard Manet, Olympia

As the European public grew increasingly hard to scandalize, Duchamp crossed the Atlantic to stir up more trouble.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No ...

Krasner severed the link between art and the everyday world, making important breakthroughs in abstraction.
Lee Krasner, Untitled

Dumas paints from photographs, and deliberately makes her pictures strange, unsettling, and ugly.