1958 - Art

Art

Painting: Three Flags by Jasper Johns; Four Darks on Red by Mark Rothko; Peace by Pablo Picasso, whose hand extending a bouquet will be widely reproduced; La Création de l'homme by Marc Chagall; Homage to Malkevich by Victor Vasarely; Song by Asheville, N.C.-born abstract expressionist Kenneth Noland, 34, who helps to pioneer the technique of staining canvas with thinned paints and deploying colors in geometric shapes proportioned to the shapes of the canvases; Blue on a Point by Sam Francis; White Study (oil on canvas) and The Garden (paint, wood, found objects) by Canadian-born U.S. artist Agnes Martin, 46; Lizzie at the Table, Still Life, and Anne, Lizzie, and Kate by Fairfield Porter; The Runaway by Norman Rockwell (cover illustration, Saturday Evening Post, September 2). Georges Rouault dies at Paris February 13 at age 86; Maurice de Vlaminck at Rueil-la-Gadeliére outside Paris October 11 at age 82.

Robert Rauschenberg pioneers pop art with a semi-abstract hole into which he inserts four Coca-Cola bottles.

Sculpture: Marseilles-born Paris sculptor César (César Baldaccini), 37, exhibits his first "compressions"—found objects compacted by an hydraulic press with help on occasion from a welding torch or sledgehammer (his works will include a composition featuring thousands of crushed, counterfeit Cartier watches seized by customs officials and Sein (pink polyester resin modeled on a cabaret dancer's breast); Sea Form (Porthmeor) (bronze) by Barbara Hepworth; New York's Leo Castelli Gallery gives Paris-born Venezuelan artist Marisol (Escobar), 28, her first individual exhibition; Mad House (Douglas fir, metal, enamel) by Los Angeles-born sculptor H. C. (Horace Clifford) Westermann, 35, who joined the Marine Corps at age 19 and later toured the Far East as a USO acrobat; Isamu Noguchi designs a garden for the UNESCO Building at Paris; Giacomo Manzu creates bronze doors for the Salzburg Cathedral (he has revived the tradition of sculptured doors for ecclesiastical buildings).