In Focus

Tate’s first acquisition of a work by a contemporary American artist after 1945, Orthodox Boys is charged with the anxieties and aspirations of Jews in post-war New York. Its graffitied wall offers a constellation of names from the artist’s own life, examined here in depth for the first time.

In 1956 Norman Lewis’s Cathedral 1950 became one of the first works by an African American artist to be shown at the Venice Biennale.

The American abstract expressionist artist Barnett Newman considered his painting Adam 1951, 1952 a major achievement in his efforts to visualise what he called the ‘metaphysical content’ of art.

This small model for an unrealised monument was the first work of post-war American sculpture to enter Tate’s collection.

Around the Blues 1957, 1962–3 was painted when Sam Francis was travelling the world and developing a new approach to abstract space.

Pompeii 1959 gained an international reputation in the 1960s, representing Hans Hofmann and his ‘slab’ paintings across the US, Europe and South America.

Tracing the early evolution of Black Wall, this In Focus reveals Nevelson as a collector and scavenger on the streets of New York, and features a newly digitised interview with the artist by critic David Sylvester.

Franz Kline’s late work Meryon 1960–1 calls into question established ideas about abstract expressionism, including its essential ‘Americanness’.

Through analysis of source material, the artist’s creative process and new archival resources, this In Focus investigates new interpretations for this pivotal painting’s reception in Paris at a time of artistic and political turbulence.

Given by the artist to prominent art critic Clement Greenberg, Gift exemplifies Greenberg’s taste for high modernist abstraction. This In Focus offers a new reading of the painting in relation to the social and cultural mores of 1960s America, from the cold war space race to popular psychology.

This In Focus presents Rosenquist’s Silo as a reflection on the image of the female consumer in the 1950s and 1960s, casting its prominent sculptural ‘T-zone’ as a metaphor for taste, consumption and advertising’s persuasive tactics.

Sue Fuller’s String Composition 128 1964 testifies to the often overlooked influence of craft traditions on the development of modernist abstraction.

Blood of a Poet Box 1965–8 was Eleanor Antin’s first conceptual artwork, introducing the themes of identity, originality and genius to her artistic practice.

This In Focus explores Women Singing II – a painting inspired by pop singers that Willem de Kooning saw on television – as the product of a shifting, mutable act of remembering and an iterative creative process involving drawn, traced and recycled imagery.

This In Focus explores Oppenheim’s Salt Flat through the systems aesthetics of critic Jack Burnham, showing how the artist’s seemingly straightforward action of spreading salt on a parking lot and its deadpan documentation are in fact part of a complex system.

Liliana Porter’s Wrinkle 1968 recasts printmaking as a conceptual art form rather than a labour-intensive craft.

This In Focus presents the first in-depth study of this key work of conceptual art from the 1970s, examining Bartlett’s preoccupation with mathematical concepts, systems theory, industrial materials and mechanised processes – as well as with individual craftsmanship and autographical mark marking.

First displayed in a partially dilapidated artist-run space in New York, Walls Paper’s photo-silkscreens of cracking, crumbling urban walls mirrored the site’s own deterioration. This In Focus positions the installation as a multi-dimensional collage that addresses the meaning of ownership, development and decay in the modern city.

Offering the first in-depth study of this key nude portrait by Barkley L. Hendricks, this In Focus is enriched throughout by an interview with the artist conducted several months before his death in April 2017.

Drawing together the history of California, science fiction, technological experimentation and catastrophe, this In Focus examines how Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s Evidence complicates the conventions and assumptions of photographic truth.