Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject. Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement. Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made . . . A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric. --Robert Rauschenberg, 1959 In the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg devised a radical new form, blending two- dimensional collage techniques with three-dimensional objects on painted surfaces. Definable neither as sculpture nor painting, these works were dubbed "combines" by the artist to describe their interdisciplinary formal roots. Rauschenberg's combination of found imagery and gestural brushwork places these works between two movements in painting: Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) is one of a series of five combines, all called "trophies," which alluded to the unconventional creative spirit of artists whose work Rauschenberg greatly admired: in this case, Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny. Using found objects, photographs, and paint, the artist considered himself "a collaborator with objects." In this way, he sought to avoid excessive autobiographical readings and instead refers to the dynamics of the urban landscape. Walker solo exhibition: Robert Rauschenberg: Painting, 1965

We are living in the mechanical age. Painted canvas and standing plaster figures no longer have any reason to exist. What is needed is a change in both essence and form. What is needed is the supercession of painting, sculpture, poetry, and music. It is necessary to have an art that is in greater harmony with the needs of the new spirit. Lucio Fontana, 1946

Kazuo Shiraga is a member of the avant-garde movement in Japan known as the Gutai Art Association. Established in the summer of 1954, the group sought to create a new art "never known until now." Gutai, which means "embodiment," has similarities to the Action Painting of New York in the 1950s, but is uniquely influenced by its own time and place--postwar Japan. Coming out of that country's surrender in World War II, Gutai practitioners desired an art free of social criticism or political implication. Their artistic process combined action and performance with painting. Unlike Happenings in Europe and America, Gutai events were meant to result in the creation of sculptures and paintings. During the first Gutai exhibition in 1955, Shiraga dove into a pile of mud and wrestled, kicked, and thrashed the clay mound to create an artwork sculpted by physical action. In this painting, Shiraga used his body as a tool--this time a large paint brush. Swinging from a hanging rope, he used his bare feet to apply paint onto a canvas on the floor. The finished work depicts his random spins, swirls, and slips.

With this recently acquired painting, the Walker adds to its collection a work representative of an important avant-garde art movement that is not very well known in the United States: the Gutai Art Association. Gutai, which means "embodiment," has similarities to the Action Painting of New York in the 1950s, but is uniquely influenced by its own time and place--postwar Japan. Established in the summer of 1954, the group formed around artist Jiro Yoshihara in Osaka and sought to create a new art "never known until now." Coming out of Japan's surrender in World War II, Gutai artists desired an art free of social criticism or political implication. Their first exhibition was in 1955 and featured a performance wherein Shiraga dove into a pile of mud and wrestled, kicked, and thrashed the clay mound to create an artwork sculpted by physical action. Unlike Allan Kaprow's Happenings in Europe and America--which weren't to emerge for another two years--Gutai artists intended their performances to result in the creation of sculptures and more prominently, paintings. Shozo Shimamoto threw bottles of paint onto paper spread on the floor. Saburo Murakami thrust his body through packing paper stretched over frames, and painted by throwing paint-covered balls at the canvas. In this untitled painting, Shiraga used his bare feet to apply the paint onto a piece of canvas on the floor. Grasping a hanging rope, he dipped and swung himself through the thick, wet oil paint. The finished painting depicts his random spins, swirls, and slips.

When Kazuo Shiraga started to work post-war, too in the 1950s, with the Gutai Group in Japan, in the same way then, the Viennese artists from the Aktionist Movement were considered as one of the first modern movements in Vienna, we can think that Gutai could be considered as the first modern movement in the history of twentieth century art in Japan. It was a group of people in the same way they were willing to challenge painting through action. As you can see in this painting by Kazuo Shiraga, it's something which is related to action. The painting is a trace, is a record, of something which was done live. In the same way that Otto Muehl is no more about representation, it's about a dynamic movement, just to inform you about the way the painting was made, Shiraga was painting with his feet, which can seem funny but it was a statement to show how the painting could ...testify of something which was linked to the body of the artist, which is important in this painting, in this movement in that we are dealing with a group of artists who are offering from a total other part of the world something which was challenging a modern model. It's important for us also to have this painting in the institution, because it's not Pollock but it's something which is challenging Pollock, which is offering an option to Pollock. It's linked to performing art among all the activities that the Gutai Group was doing: performing art, theater, music. People like composer Takehisa Kosugi ... all these people were working together. When we know the history of the Walker with performing art ... we know, for example, that Kosugi is now the official composer for Merce Cunningham. You have an history which is coming together through these different names. I think it's also an important piece for the Walker because the Walker will do, in a few months, a Gutai retrospective and, also, because if we start to look at Gutai, you cannot take away what was the historical situation, what was also literature in Japan, and I think when you look at this kind of painting you cannot not think about someone like Mishima. And when you look at Muehl, for me, it's the same thing, you can think about the same political protest.

I'm going to start by talking about Lucio Fontana. The painting, Concetto Spaziale, that we start out the exhibition with is representative, I think, of an incredibly radical shift in the way that artists approach painting. Since the beginning of the century, artists have been trying to find a way to make paintings that did not deal with space as illusion. The whole history of painting since the beginning of history, when people started marking on things and making paintings, usually involved architecture. The paintings were attached to walls of buildings. They were drawings within churches or private homes. It wasn't until the Renaissance, when oil paint was invented, that artists started to make paintings as objects. To be able to move the paintings from one wall to another within an architectural space was a new thing. At the time that they did this, they began to think about paintings as windows and talked about paintings as windows out into another kind of reality. So, since the middle of the fourteenth century really, artists had been dealing with painting in essentially the same way, which was as a way of looking outside of the reality that they were standing in. What Fontana did and a lot of artists did as well elsewhere, in the United States and Japan and in other parts of Europe, was to try to find a way to challenge that, to allow people to understand that the painting was actually a wall. It was not a window. It was something that you were faced with and that didn't allow you to look out. Artists like Picasso and the surrealists had started to break that down by changing the kind of reality that you were seeing through the so-called window. But, Fontana really did the radical thing, which was to call your attention to the surface and say, "This is actually a flat plane and that's what you're looking at. You're not looking at anything that's an illusion." By slashing it, which was kind of a violent act to perform on the painting, he was trying to bring in the space behind the painting. He was trying to allow that space to become part of the space of the painting. So, in other words, there was no illusion anymore. It's almost like painting as sculpture, painting as an object. It's a very simple gesture that he's made, but I think a very provocative one. It certainly has a lot to do with the time that he started making these, which was immediately post-war in Italy, which had been involved, of course, heavily in all of the destruction and fighting. Artists in Europe and in Japan and the United States were trying to find ways to make paintings responsibly in the wake of this incredible disaster. The ones that were made by Fontana working in Italy and Shiraga working in Japan were more violent than those that were made, let's say, in the United States and, perhaps, there's some contextual reason for that. Fontana's painting as sculpture and painting as gesture, which is what he talked about in terms of the performative aspect, was something very new and something that had a lot of implications for the artists that came after him working for the next few generations here and in Europe. I think Fontana's influence was recognized immediately. It was very early. Fontana started doing these in the late 1940s and this was before Pollock even started doing drip paintings here. It was certainly well before Manzoni and Kline and others started working radically to change the kind of pictures that had been make. So, I think he had a lot of influence on those artists that immediately followed him and his thoughts were incorporated pretty quickly into what was going on in Europe in avant-garde painting.

When I die I don't want to leave any leftovers. I'd like to disappear. People wouldn't say he died today, they'd say he disappeared. But I do like the idea of people turning into dust or sand, and it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a big ring on Elizabeth Taylor's finger.--Andy Warhol, 1975 Though German artist Joseph Beuys' (1921-1986) art is formally and thematically quite different from Andy Warhol's, the two artists are frequently linked by critics who perceive them as possessing an almost alchemical ability to transform ordinary objects into valuable artworks. Both artists made work about the other. They never were close friends, but displayed an elaborate and wily respect for each other. Their first official meeting was in Düsseldorf in 1979; Warhol recorded the event in a snapshot of Beuys' face that would soon materialize in a number of striking portraits, including this negative image flecked with glittery "diamond" dust. Warhol's images of Beuys are among his many portraits of historical figures and celebrities, including Vladimir Lenin, Chairman Mao, Ludwig van Beethoven, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Grace Kelly, Elvis Presley, and Queen Elizabeth II. Walker solo exhibition: Andy Warhol Drawings, 1942-1987, 1999