Six Painters and the Object

The artists in this exhibition (all born between 1923 and 1933) have been persistently aligned, in group exhibitions and survey articles, with object-makers, and two of the artists, Robert Rauschenbergand Jim Dine, are themselves object-makers. In the present exhibition, however, all six artists are presented as painters; some of their works include moderate collage elements, but no three-dimensional appendages. The association of paintings and objects has tended to blur both media differentiations and the individuality of the artists concerned. The unique qualities of the separate work of art and of the artist responsible for it have tended to sink into an environmental mélange, which in practice favors the object-makers, but not the painters. Object-makers, like the producers of happenings (often they are the same person), work towards the dissolution of formal boundaries ¹ and sponsor paradoxical cross-overs between art and nature. However, the painter, committed to the surface of his canvas and to the process of translating objects into signs, does not have a wide-ranging freedom in which everything becomes art and art becomes anything. Because the painters have been identified with the object-makers, under various slogans, ² the definition of painting qua painting has been attached recently, more than it need have been, to abstract art. It is hoped, therefore, that by presenting six painters in this exhibition, they can be detached from an amorphous setting and, also, that the definition of painting can be extended to cope with the problem that their work presents.