International Survey Reveals How a Generation of Artists Assaulted a Genre , ArtDaily.org

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923 – 1997), Red Painting (Brushstroke), 1965. Oil and magna on canvas. Collection Charles Simonyi, Seattle. Courtesy of the lender, © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. (web image)
SEATTLE, WA.- In the years 1949-1978, a new attitude exploded across the art world. In reaction to various feelings of global instability, angst and dissatisfaction, artists from across continents– separately and simultaneously – began to reevaluate the traditional, two-dimensional medium of painting – to the point of the physical and theoretical destruction of the genre.

Organized by the Seattle Art Museum (SAM),Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 is an international, historical survey of the assaults that painting endured in the years following World War II, documenting why artists felt compelled to shoot, rip, tear, burn, erase, nail, unzip and deconstruct painting in order to usher in a new way of thinking. ...

Target Practice uses the work of Argentine artist Lucio Fontana as a launching point to explore the many ways in which these “movements” manifest throughout the world. Working in war-torn Italy in 1949, Fontana created Concetto spaziale or Spatial Concept pieces – works on paper mounted on canvas, which he pierced with masses of holes or buchi, reflecting the broken physical environment he observed around him. With his buchi, Fontana had suddenly brought the surface behind the canvas into play in his compositions. The lines between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional were blurred, and many of painting’s boundaries were irrevocably shattered. Fontana broke ground when he riddled his canvases with holes, however at the same moment other artists from disparate countries and circumstances were finding themselves compelled to react similarly to the seeming restraints of painting. In Japan in the 1950s, Shozo Shimamoto was puncturing his paintings in a series called Work; in the mid fifties in Italy, Alberto Burri tenuously sutured his torn and scorched Sacco (Sack) works; and in America in the mid-late 1950s, Jasper Johns was metaphorically inviting attack with his Target paintings. From Europe to Asia to North and South America, artists were moving toward a realization that painting was in need of a total reevaluation. ...
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