20th C Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollack

 

Abstract Expressionism was an American art movement that started around the mid-20th century. One of the well-known artists from that period, Jackson Pollock, studied under Thomas Hart Benton. Benton was a painter known for using traditional materials like oil and tempera on canvas, a method going back to the Renaissance. Artists back then would often begin with an underpainting in tempera—a water-based paint made from mineral pigments mixed with egg yolk or egg white—then apply oil paint over it in thin layers.

Benton used that same approach. His style of drawing in these works looked similar to commercial illustration from the 1930s. The figures and the landscape were stylized, with exaggerated features, similar in some ways to Van Gogh’s swirling skies in Starry Night. Benton’s figures sometimes had clunky anatomy and oversized hands or feet, making the storytelling very clear. One painting shows a woman with an emotional expression and a man standing over her holding a knife. In the bottom right, there’s a group of people playing instruments—two playing harmonicas and another with a fiddle—drinking moonshine from coffee cups. The landscape links all the figures together through a kind of wave pattern running across the canvas.

The painting is based on an old folk song called The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley. It tells a dramatic story, like a rural tragedy. This kind of music, which later influenced artists like Bob Dylan, was part of a bigger cultural pattern in the U.S., where stories were passed down through songs. Benton used that tradition as the subject of his painting, showing how these stories were a part of everyday American life and especially rooted in rural culture.

 

Benton saw himself as a kind of traditionalist. He admired Renaissance art but wanted to create something that focused on American life and ideas. Before World War II, during the Great Depression, the U.S. government funded programs to help people find work. One of these was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which also gave jobs to artists. Benton gained recognition by painting murals for public buildings like post offices and town halls. His themes often lined up with what the government wanted—scenes of American life and labor that showed patriotic values.

He also spent time teaching in New York, including at the Art Students League in Manhattan. Even though he sometimes lived in the city, he had a strong preference for rural American life. He was skeptical of New York’s art scene and felt more connected to the American Midwest. But by the end of World War II, things started shifting in the art world, and Pollock—his former student—would eventually take a different direction entirely.

One of the students Thomas Hart Benton taught was Jackson Pollock. Pollock’s early life had a lot of mixed stories—some he told himself in interviews. He talked about working out West on oil rigs and presenting himself as this rugged, tough guy. When he moved to New York, he ended up in Benton’s class. Pollock had mental health struggles and was likely dealing with alcoholism.

 

At first, he tried to follow Benton’s lead and copy his style. But Benton’s method required strong drawing skills, which Pollock didn’t really have. He struggled with representing figures accurately and was impatient. He was more focused on emotional expression than detailed technique. While Benton painted with a focus on national themes and American ideals, Pollock wanted to express personal emotion.

In some of his early work, you can still see Pollock using similar shapes and curves that Benton used—like swooping skies and exaggerated landscapes—but with even more distortion. His figures were less anatomically accurate, and objects like wagon wheels were drawn in unusual or irregular ways. He even borrowed the moon-over-hills motif that Benton used, but his version was much looser.

Eventually, Pollock connected with a group of avant-garde artists in New York who were experimenting with new ideas about art. Some of these ideas were influenced by early 20th-century psychology, especially the theories of Carl Jung. Jung introduced concepts like the collective unconscious and archetypes, suggesting that people share a set of basic symbolic images and forms. There was also interest in gestalt, which in this context was tied to the idea that people could tap into deep mental processes through spontaneous drawing or writing—called automatic writing.

Pollock applied this idea to painting. Instead of sketching out a plan, he would paint in a free and continuous way, reacting to what was happening on the canvas. This was similar to automatic writing exercises where you write without stopping for a few minutes without editing or thinking. His painting became more like large-scale doodling, but done thoughtfully and over time. He would build up layers and react to earlier marks as he went along. The looping shapes, broken forms, and zig-zag lines show traces of his early training, but now applied in a different way.

Pollock also got involved with other artists, including Lee Krasner, who later became his partner. They were part of a group trying to invent a new way of making art, moving away from past traditions. Many modern art movements in the late 1800s and 1900s focused on creating something new and reacting to what was happening in society around them.

 

In America, around and after World War II, there was a shift in how artists expressed themselves. Some, worried about being seen as political or accused of communist sympathies, stopped making work that showed clear messages about social issues. Art historian Griselda Pollock has written about how artists turned inward, focusing more on the mind and emotions instead of public or political themes.

Benton's paintings often showed working-class people and scenes of labor, which some could interpret as having socialist or left-leaning ideas. Because of this, his style became less popular in postwar New York, and he eventually moved back to the Midwest. His career didn’t disappear, and he was financially stable in part because his wife managed their money, but his style was no longer the focus of the American art world.

Pollock, on the other hand, went in the direction of personal symbolism and unconscious imagery. In paintings like Moon Woman, some people have suggested that the shapes represent ideas about gender or reproduction—things like cells, sperm, and eggs. Others have pointed out that his work sometimes echoes patterns found in Native American art, like those on blankets or in sand painting. These influences aren’t exact or structured, though. He didn’t adopt a clear system of geometric shapes the way some Native American art does, like using squares for bodies or circles for heads. Instead, he painted more freely and with changing forms, reflecting what was on his mind at the time.

In one of his paintings called Male and Female, there's a cluster of symbols and objects, including what looks like a math equation in the margin and a bunch of diamond shapes. Some researchers have connected his style to Native American visual traditions, not in a direct or literal way, but more in how both forms might involve spontaneous creation and symbolic meaning. Next, we’ll look more closely at Native American sand painting and how it connects to patterns found in blankets, as a way to understand this connection better.

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20th C Art, Francis Bacon

 

 

Francis Bacon was a British painter whose work often blends references to art history with deeply personal and disturbing imagery. He was known for creating paintings that felt like psychological snapshots—intense, distorted, and emotionally raw. Although he exhibited with artists associated with Surrealism, some within the movement didn’t think his work fully fit the label. Still, Bacon shared a lot of their concerns—like exploring the unconscious mind and using unexpected combinations to produce strong emotional reactions.

He was familiar with classic European art and had studied design before focusing on painting. One of his most famous series involves reimagining Pope Innocent X, a 17th-century painting by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez. In Bacon’s version, the Pope sits in the same kind of throne, but his mouth is open in a silent scream. The face is blurred and distorted, and the figure is often shown behind a kind of curtain or cage-like frame. These paintings don’t copy Velázquez’s technique or color exactly—they twist it into something else entirely.

 

Part of the visual reference also comes from The Scream by Edvard Munch, especially in the open mouth and the suggestion of anxiety or pain. Bacon was interested in how the mouth could express raw emotion, and he sometimes looked at old medical or dental books to study this. Some of the mouths in his paintings were based on illustrations where tools were used to hold the jaw open—images that were both clinical and unsettling.

In some versions of the Pope paintings, Bacon added hanging sides of beef in the background. That detail echoes the slaughtered ox carcass in a painting by Rembrandt, and it brings in a sense of physical decay. Bacon painted directly onto unprimed canvas, which means the oil paint soaked into the fabric. It gave his work a kind of rough texture but also made it unstable over time. Many of his paintings have deteriorated because the surfaces weren’t sealed properly. That technique matched the emotional content—raw, exposed, and not meant to last.

Bacon once said that he wasn’t painting dreams; he was painting reality. But his version of reality includes the things most people try to avoid—fear, pain, violence, and loss. His works are filled with cognitive dissonance, especially when he places religious authority figures like popes in vulnerable or grotesque poses. The screaming pope is not just about religion or power—it can also be read in light of Bacon’s life as a gay man in mid-20th-century Britain, where homosexuality was still criminalized. The trapped, distorted figure may reflect feelings of repression and social pressure.

 

His paintings aren’t abstract, but they’re also not exactly realistic. They sit in between—rooted in human anatomy and classical forms, but twisted by emotion and personal experience. That uneasy mixture of recognizable images and psychological intensity is what makes his work feel so strange and unforgettable. Some viewers might call it dreamlike, but others see it more as a visual form of nightmare.

 

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20th C Art, Pop Art, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Oldenburg, and Johns,

 

 

To really get what’s going on in the contemporary art world, it helps to understand Pop Art, especially how it connects to earlier periods. Pop Art came about in the late 1950s and 1960s, mostly centered in Manhattan, New York. A couple of well-known names from that time are Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. There was also a music scene connected to it. Since there’s a lot to cover, this focuses just on a few key figures from that time.

Robert Rauschenberg is usually considered a Pop artist, though his work sometimes overlaps with other styles. One of the things he’s best known for is a type of art he called combines. These were artworks that brought together painting and sculpture using everyday stuff he found, like trash or random objects. The idea of using found objects goes back to Marcel Duchamp, who came up with the concept of the readymade. Rauschenberg took that idea further by assembling or reworking these objects into new compositions.

One of his pieces, Canyon, is a good example. It’s about six feet tall and five feet wide, and it includes all sorts of things—items he found, picked up, or repurposed. There’s a stuffed eagle coming out of a box, a dirty pillow tied with a cord hanging from a piece of wood, a flattened metal drum, and a canvas that includes cutouts from newspapers, magazines, family photos, and bits of political posters. These materials aren’t traditional for painting or sculpture, which is part of what made his approach different at the time.

 

Art history textbooks, like Stokstad, don’t offer a solid explanation for what Canyon means. They describe it as being packed with cultural references, too many to pin down to one specific message. Rauschenberg himself didn’t think it needed a single clear meaning. He believed that people should interpret the piece for themselves, finding their own connections or ideas in it. He once said he felt successful when his art resembled the disorder he sensed in the world.

 

The way some people see Canyon is kind of like one of those Rorschach inkblot tests used in psychology—what a viewer says about the work might reveal more about the viewer than about the artist. Rather than giving clear answers, the artwork creates space for different people to see and say different things based on what they notice and think it all means.

This kind of art connects to some earlier psychological ideas, like the ones we talked about with Freud and Jung—especially Jung's concept of archetypes. Marcel Duchamp was already playing with those ideas. What’s happening here is that when you place one image next to another, people automatically try to make sense of it. Our minds want to create stories or meaning, even when things aren't clearly connected.

Think about when you look at someone’s refrigerator door. There might be a bunch of random photos, postcards, magnets, or scraps, but just by seeing what’s stuck there, you start to imagine what kind of person lives in that house. Rauschenberg’s Canyon works in a similar way. It’s kind of like an artist’s version of a fridge door—a collection of images and stuff that meant something to him, or just seemed interesting, and now viewers have to figure out what to make of it. That’s probably the easiest way to think about it.

What makes Rauschenberg, and his roommate Jasper Johns, Pop artists is that they used popular stuff—images or objects from everyday life or mass culture—and rearranged them to make new things. They were pulling things from the culture around them and changing thecontext, which created different meanings. But even though it’s called Pop Art, it’s not all that different from what the Surrealists were doing decades earlier.

 

Take Max Ernst, for example. He made a work called Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, which we looked at when talking about surrealism. That piece is also kind of a combine. He took various found materials, stuck them together, and added a poetic-sounding title. The title doesn’t explain everything—it just suggests something—and it’s up to the viewer to come up with a personal interpretation.

This kind of artwork doesn’t try to give a fixed meaning. It’s more like a starting point for someone else to build their own idea around. The artist knows they’re giving up control over what the work “means,” and they’re okay with that. In fact, they kind of enjoy it. It turns the whole process into something more open, where viewers are invited to think, imagine, and decide for themselves, instead of being told what to think.

Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were roommates in New York during the 1950s, and there’s strong evidence they were also in a romantic relationship at the time. That personal connection shaped their work. They were part of a close-knit art scene and seemed to influence each other quite a bit. Johns created works that were similar in method to Rauschenberg’s, even though they used different terms to describe what they were doing. Rauschenberg used the word combine to describe his mix of painting and sculpture, while Johns didn’t apply that term to his own work, even when the materials and approach were pretty similar.

Like the Dada artists before them—people like Marcel Duchamp and Hannah Höch—both Johns and Rauschenberg took pieces from mass culture and everyday life and reused themin new ways. This recycling of popular or discarded material became a key part of how they made meaning in their art.

In one example, Johns made a work that included actual cans of paint, stencils, letters, and other physical objects attached to the canvas. When you look closely, you can see the words red, yellow, and blue stenciled onto the surface. The painting is made from two canvases placed side by side, and it’s called a field painting. That title refers to the color field style from just a few years earlier, which was practiced by artists like Mark Rothko.

Artists like Rothko, Kazimir Malevich, and Wassily Kandinsky were focused on formal elements—color, shape, and texture. Malevich’s Suprematism, for example, aimed to strip away recognizable imagery and focus on pure abstraction, emotion, and form. Rothko used large blocks of color to try to create emotional responses through visual simplicity.

Johns’ painting plays with that idea. He calls it a field painting, but instead of presenting a smooth, immersive color experience, he literally writes the names of colors on the surface. It’s like he’s pointing out the mechanics behind the painting rather than delivering a “pure” visual experience.

This approach ties into the idea of cognitive dissonance—a term from psychology that describes holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time. That idea became pretty central in modern art. In this case, Johns is saying this is a color field painting, while also making it clear that it isn’t, at least not in the traditional sense. The tension between the label and the object is part of the meaning.

It’s kind of like trying to hold a switch in both the on and off positions at the same time. You’re aware that something is referencing an earlier style or idea, but also aware that it’s not really the same thing anymore. That’s the way artists like Jasper Johns played with meaning—there’s a reference, but also a challenge to what that reference is supposed to represent.

 

Pop Art, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, often came with a kind of dry humor or sarcasm. A lot of it dealt with American culture in a way that could feel critical, even while using symbols from everyday life. It wasn’t always patriotic in a traditional sense, but that didn’tnecessarily mean the artists were unpatriotic either. They were just pointing at things that were taken for granted and asking people to look again.

In that earlier color field piece, Johns seemed to be poking fun at the seriousness of formalist painting by labeling colors instead of just showing them. That playful, ironic tone shows up again in one of his most well-known pieces: a painting of the American flag. On the surface, it’s just the Stars and Stripes, but the way he made it matters. He used encaustic, a type of paint made from melted beeswax mixed with pigment. That gives the flag a textured, almost waxy surface.

Underneath that surface, though, he placed pieces of newspaper from the 1950s, which were glued down like a collage. That newspaper layer is still visible through the waxy paint in some areas, and it gives the work a kind of hidden historical context. The flag becomes a cover over fragments of real events and headlines, almost like sealing them away in a time capsule. 

 

That layering is similar to what earlier artists like Hannah Höch and Duchamp did with collage, using scraps of printed material to suggest a deeper cultural or political meaning. In this case, painting an American flag over 1950s newspapers makes the whole thing feel like a frozen moment—like a document sealed inside a symbol.

For people in the U.S., the flag is a powerful icon. It represents the country in a direct and emotional way. Changing it or using it in an artwork can be provocative. This was just before the rise of political activists like Abbie Hoffman, and during a time when patriotic imagery was tightly protected. So painting the flag wasn’t just about making art; it was also about getting people to think about what that symbol meant, especially when it covered up layers of history.

Artists like Johns and Rauschenberg were testing what art could be and how far they could push meaning. The materials and techniques were important, but the ideas behind the work started to matter even more. That became a big shift in modern art. After movements like Surrealism, artists started focusing more on the thinking behind the piecethan on how beautiful or polished it looked. The object became kind of like a leftover or a trace of a bigger idea.

 

By the time you get to Pop Art, the goal isn’t always to make something pretty—it’s to make something that makes you think. And that change in priority is one of the biggest things that shaped art in the second half of the 20th century.

Jasper Johns made a series of works that were kind of like collages or what’s called assemblage. The word assemblage comes from French, and it basically means putting different objects together to make a new whole. It’s just a way of saying you’re assembling pieces—found objects, materials, textures—into something new that can be looked at as art.

One of Johns’ pieces from this group includes a hinged canvas, and it has plaster casts of faces stored in a small compartment that looks like a closet. The idea of being able to open the compartment and rearrange the faces adds this interactive feeling, even though it’s not actually meant to be used that way. Above the faces, there’s also a painted target—a recognizable image—and the surface includes layers of newspaper sealed under encaustic paint, just like some of his earlier work.

Again, it creates this time-capsule effect. The newspapers are from the 1950s, and the encaustic preserves them in place. Then you’ve got the faces, the target, and the structure that looks like a closet—all placed together in one artwork.

Now, Johns never explained exactly what this work was supposed to mean, and different people have interpreted it in different ways. That’s part of how he and Rauschenberg thought about art—you’re supposed to bring your own meaning to it.

Still, it’s worth pointing out that Johns and Rauschenberg were both gay men living together in New York at a time when being openly gay wasn’t widely accepted. There’s a reading of this artwork that sees the target and the closet structure as possible symbols for that experience. The word closet has a double meaning when people talk about someone being “in the closet.” And a target can suggest being watched or singled out. That interpretation isn’t written into the piece by Johns, but it’s a way some viewers have thought about it—especially in hindsight, with more historical context.

Even if Johns wasn’t trying to say something specific, it’s likely he knew that putting those elements together would suggest certain ideas or feelings. Artists like him often played with combinations that weren’t random. They left room for viewers to interpret, but they also understood that people would pick up on certain visual cues.

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