Pollock, Johns, Warhol Together

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City has received an unprecedented gift of 87 pieces of postwar American art.

The exhibit, entitled "An American Legacy, A Gift To New York" features some of America's most acclaimed 20th century artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

This is the only time all pieces in this collection- with a value estimated at $200 milion - will be presented together. The collection was acquired over three years from the personal collections of the Whitney board of trustees as well as from studios, galleries and auction houses. This mammoth effort was spearheaded by Whitney trustee chairman, Leonard A. Lauder.

Marla Prather, Whitney curator, shows The Early Show eight pieces of art featured in this exhibit. Below you will find a general explanation of the exhibit, description and background of the paintings and artists'biographies.

JACKSON POLLOCK, 1912-1956:
Born in Wyoming, Jackson Pollock grew up in rural areas of Arizona and California and began his formal studies in art in 1928 at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. Two years later, he moved to New York City, settled in Greenwich Village, and enrolled at the Art Students League. There, he studied drawing and painting.

In the late 1930s, Pollock worked for the Easel Division of the Federal Art Project, a part of the WPA. Pollock's first one-artist exhibition took place at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of the This Century Gallery in New York in 1942. His paintings from the 1940s usually involved some degree of actual or implied figuration. Coarse and heavy, and suggestive of Picasso, they were charged with a nervous, brutal energy.

In 1945, Pollock married artist Lee Krasner and moved to The Springs, on New York's Long Island. By 1947, his mature, radically innovative painting style had emerged. The paint appeared to extend beyond the limits of the canvas, with complex linear patterns evoking the energetic movements of the artist's body. Pollock's mature work constitutes one of the most influential achievements of the 20th century.

MARK ROTHKO, 1903-1970:
One of the key figures of The New York School (a school of modern art), March Rothko was born in Russia. His family moved to Oregon in 1913. Before settling in New York City in the mid-20s, Rothko attended Yale University but left during his second year of study. In New York, Rothko studied at the Art Students League. His work became more abstract during the 1940s, until, at the end of the decade, his biomorphic forms dissolved into clouds of color. For the next 20 years, he explored abstraction through subtly defined expanses of luminous color. He believed these paintings could elicit from an attentive viewer profound human emotions, including "tragedy, ecstasy, and doom." Rothko suffered from various physical ailments in the 1960s, and in early 1970, he committed suicide.

JASPER JOHNS, 1930-:
Jasper Johns was born in August, Ga., and grew up in South Carolina, spending much of his youth with his grandparents in the town of Allendale. Johsn received his first art training at the University of South Carolina at Columbia in 1947 and 1948. He spent the next two years stationed in Japan in the United States Army. By 1952, Johns had settled in New York City, where he supported himself with odd jobs, including designing window displays for department stores. In 1954, Johns destroyed virtually all of his prior work, determined from that point on to purge it of any resemblance to the works of other artists. He began to base his compositions on the most familiar symbols, enriching these banal subjects with distinctive brushwork in oil and encaustic.

Today Johns maintains studios in Sharon, Conn., and St. Martin, in the French West Indies.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, 1923-1997:
Roy Lichetenstein's paintings based on comic strips are synonymous with Pop art. In the late 1950s, Lichtenstein had made abstract paintings in gestural mode but suddenly, in 1961 he introduced the cartoon as subject, faithfully enlarging banal images culled from newspapers and comic books. (Like Johns and Warhol, he took images from everyday products. He restricted himself to simple black contours and primary colors (based on those used in commercial printing), and even mimicked the Benday dot patterns of half tone printing, first painting them by hand and, later, employing a metal stencil.

Lichtenstein completed his undergraduate degree in 1946 and earned a graduate degree in 1949, both at Ohio State University. His well-known cartoon paintings drew upon popular, cheaply produced romance and war comic books such as Girls' Romance and Our Army at Work.

His images are visually arresting by virtue of their large scale, and Lichtenstein enhanced their sense of drama and irony by reproducing the word balloons.

ANDY WARHOL, 1928-1987:
Born Andrew Warhola and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa., Warhold attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his BFA in 1949. That year he moved to NYC, when he became a highly successful commercial artist and designed window displays for department stores. In the early 1960s, he decided to concentrate on painting and used images from comic strips, advertisements, and commercial products, such as Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell's Soup cans.

His first paintings were done freehand, but by 1962 he had adopted a silkscreen process that transformed photographs of subjects, ranging from celebrities and flowers to disasters such as car crashes and riots, into some of the most emblematic images of the Pop era. Warhol appropriated his subjects from mass-produced printed sources and composed them in a serial manner, accentuating their banality and underscoring his own detachment from the subject. In the mid-1960s, he began making films in his New York studio, The Factory. Toward the end of his career he worked primarily as a society portraitist, making brightly colored silkscreen paintings of friends, art world figures, celebrities, and himself.

CLAES OLDENBURG, 1929-:
Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm but spent most of his childhood in the United States. After studies at Yale University and the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved to New York in 1956, where he established himself in the early 1960s with a series so installations and performances influenced by his surroundings on the Lower East Side. Oldenburg's initial interests in constructing environments, which soon evolved into a concentration on single sculptures. Using ordinary, everyday objects as his form of expression, he went to develop "soft" sculpture and fantastic proposals for civic monuments. Since 1976 he has worked in partnership with the art historian and writer Coosje van Bruggen. The couple married in 1977, has executed over 40 large-scale projects, which have been inserted into various urban surroundings in Europe, Asia and the United States.

ABOUT MARLA PRATHER:
Marla Prather, who has overseen the installation of "An American Legacy, A Gift to New York," joined the Whitney Museum in January 2000. Formerly curator of 20th century art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., she was curator in charge of the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garde, a six-and-a-half acre site on the mall, which opened in May 1999. She is also the co-author with H.H. Arnason of a leading textbook on 20th-century art, History of Modern Art, now in its fourth edition. At the Whitney, she has overseen major retrospectives of the work of Sol LeWitt, Wayne Theibaud, Agnes Martin and Robert Rauschenberg. Prather is responsible for the Whitney's permanent installation of postwar art. Her current projects for the Whitney include exhibitions of the work of Lusa Samaras and Isamu Noguchi.
(Source: The above excerpts about the pieces of art are from Prather's book.)