John Baldessari, radically influential Conceptual artist, dies at 88
Arguably the most influential Conceptual artist of his era, Baldessari also shaped a generation of talent while teaching at UCLA and ArtCenter. He famously said, "I found that you can’t really teach art, you can just sort of set the stage for it."
"In 1970, Los Angeles artist John Baldessari was ready to take his work in a new direction, so he gathered up paintings he made between 1953 and 1966, brought them to a mortuary and had them cremated — the remains laid to rest in an urn for what would eventually be called “Cremation Project.”
Even in the act of destruction, Baldessari was a man of creation.
Forty-seven years later, when The Times visited the 85-year-old artist in his L.A. studio, Baldessari was in the midst of no fewer than five new series of works, with a survey exhibition of sculptural prints opening soon at the L.A. studio Mixografia and a retrospective on the horizon at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City.
This seemingly tireless spirit — a gentle giant of Conceptual art whose irreverent questions about the nature of art brought him international acclaim and shaped a generation of younger talent — died in his sleep Thursday at 88. The death was confirmed Sunday by Baldessari’s foundation and by Margo Leavin, his former Los Angeles art dealer.
Baldessari was known as a mild-mannered leader who spoke softly but with an abundance of human insight and droll wit. The 6-foot-7-inch artist towered over most of his students at CalArts, UCLA and UC San Diego, as he did over an art movement that valued ideas more than objects. His height enticed writers to describe him in physical terms, including “a cross between Walt Whitman and a redwood tree” (the Christian Science Monitor). But Baldessari was a thinker who called himself “a hybrid between a formalist and a moralist.”
Inspired by the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, who overturned traditional definitions of art in the early 20th century, and by L.A. artist Edward Ruscha’s imaginative combinations of pictures and words, Baldessari explored language and mass media culture in text-and-image paintings and photo compositions derived from film stills, magazines and other sources."— Suzanne Muchnic, Dorany Pineda, and Deborah Vankin; Jan. 5, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Time website.
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