Perhaps the archetypal work of artistic fiction is Duchamp's “Fountain”. Without a narrative it is just a urinal:
The late twentieth century artists are the children of Dadaism and many have taken the path of narrative art rather than purely visual art.
Pop Art
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)
Lichtenstein deserves a special place in the history of late twentieth century art because he unselfconsciously combined the narrative and graphic forms. He was born an upper middle class New Yorker, served in the army from 1943-1946 and attended Ohio State University, obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in 1949. He became an Art teacher.
Lichtenstein began painting in the style of graphic novels after his son pointed to a comic and said “I bet you can't paint as good as that, eh, Dad”. (The 1960s was the “Silver Age of Comic Books”).
The popularity of Lichtenstein's pictures depended largely on the popularity of DC and Marvel Comics amongst young, male adults. They contained two narratives, firstly the text on the picture but more importantly the debate about whether they are “worthy”. Can ephemera, “Pop Art”, be art? Etc...
The term “lowbrow art” has been used to describe the least “fine art” versions of pop art.
However, don't get lost in the “narrative”, enjoyable though it may be, the truth is about fashion and sales.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Warhol started professional life as a commercial artist and worked on vinyl album covers. He created “The Factory”, a studio that operated between 1962 and 1984.
Warhol's great skill was to be fashionable, both moving with the Zeitgeist and creating it. As part of this holistic approach to fashion he formed the rock band “Velvet Undergound”.
Warhol was the raw spirit of commercial America, happy to use socialism, being gay, drugs etc. if it created a fashionable narrative for sales.
Vettriano is a Scots artist who has extended the style of American Realism into a Pop format involving largely imaginary scenes. The net result is a romantic pop art.
He was born in Fife, became a student mining engineer then worked in a variety of jobs before devoting himself full time to art. He is the only revolutionary artist of the late 20th century, being widely rejected by the Establishment and offensive to postmodern tastes
Notice that his pictures have a need for an accompanying narrative and are romantic successors to Lichtenstein.
Conceptual Art
By 1960 Modernist art had become increasingly concerned with visual perception, paintings becoming reduced to documents about illusions (Op-Art) or colour combinations. Some artists began to focus on concepts rather than percepts. Pop artists were also taking this path. The Art & Language Group, founded in Coventry, provided a focus for this new conceptual art. The narrative was considered to be the most important part of an art work. Many artists, such as Ed Ruscha produced paintings that were poster text and expected a justifying narrative to be created.
Pop & Conceptual Art becomes Post-Modernism
In the late 1970s in France a group of philosophers founded the “International College of Philosophy” which was a secular version of “Council of Trent”. They extolled “Postmodernism” in which every work is part of the narrative of the person who creates it, the narrative of society etc. The group declared that no Meta-narratives such as religion or science truly exist and truth is relative.
Postmodernism is widely believed despite being a meta-narrative of narratives that holds itself to be false (ie: nonsense). Postmodernism is a secular religion for some of its adherents.
The essence of postmodernism is that it frees the artist from the truth. Anything can be an artwork so long as it has a popular narrative. Art can be fiction.
As narratives have grown in importance visual art now often incorporates multimedia to explain the narrative.
Brit Art
Brit Art is a short name for the art produced by "The Young British Artists" who were a group of graduates of Goldsmith's College between 1987 and 1990.
The group adopted the postmodern concept of art. Their work was heavily dependent on narrative.
The Visual Arts Survive
The visual arts continued throughout the late twentieth century despite the assignment of gallery space to largely conceptual works.
David Hockney (1937- )
Hockney is perhaps the greatest British visual artist of the late 20th Century.
“It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.”
He began his career as a Pop Artist and then moved towards naturalism.
Francis Bacon(1909-92) and Lucien Freud (1922-2011)
Francis Bacon began life as a wealthy dilettante and Lucian Freud was grandson of Sigmund Freud and also well heeled.
Both artists were friends and bisexual or gay. Both paint in an expressionist style. Francis Bacon's paintings are the most expensive representational works produced in the past 50 years (Modernist Rothko and Pop Artist Warhol have fetched more at auction).
Neo Expressionism
Neo-Expressionism is representational art filtered through the artists' experience with an expressionist style. It was located mainly in Germany and Italy. Some important neo-expressionists were: Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Morris, Francesco Clemente, Jorg Immendorff
Other Late Twentieth Century Art Movements
Ignoring Installations, Sculptures, Happenings, Performances etc. there have been relatively few movements after 1975 devoted to the creation of pictures using pigment. Some movements that may be of interest are:
Photorealism
Psychedelic Art
Graffiti Art
Photorealism
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