Three American Painters, Then and Now
Frank Stella, Union Pacific, 1960. Aluminum paint on canvas. 77.24 x 148.5 inches. Des Moines Art Center.
Jeff Wall, Mother of pearl, 2016. Inkjet print. 23 5/8 x 27 3/4 inches. Private Collection, via Gagosian Gallery (Los Angeles).
Helen Frankenthaler, Adriatic, 1968. Acrylic on canvas. 132 1/8 x 93 inches. Norton Simon Museum of Art.
James Welling, 0494 (Phillip Johnson Glass House), 2009. Inkjet print. 33 1/2 x 50 1/2 inches. J. Paul Getty Museum.
This ambitious loan exhibition presents an overview of the artists championed by the famed critic and art historian, Michael Fried, over the course of the last 50 years. It starts with a conceptual recreation of Fried’s 1965 exhibition Three American Painters, which featured large canvases by postpainterly-abstract artists, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella, and is the first exhibition to juxtapose large-scale color field canvases of the 60s and 70s alongside monumental, contemporary photography and sculpture, to suggest a surprising continuity. Artists included are Walter Darby Bannard, Willard Boepple, Jack Bush, Anthony Caro, Friedel Dzubas, Helen Frankenthaler, Joseph Marioni, Jackson Pollock, Charles Ray, David Smith, and video artist Anri Sala, as well as a host of photographers (Robert Adams, Luc Delahaye, Thomas Demand, Mitch Epstein, Candida Höfer, John Riddy, Michael Schmidt, Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, and James Welling).
