Soul (Rare View)

John Baldessari

1987 · Gelatin silver prints with applied oil tint · Photographs

During the 1960s and 1970s Baldessari was a key figure in Conceptual Art, both as artist and professor at the California Institute of Arts (CalArts), where his students included Jack Goldstein, James Welling, and Matt Mullican. In the mid-1980s he began creating larger, more boldly pictorial works by cropping, rephotographing, and combining generic images-from movie stills to news and magazine photography-into dynamically arranged rebuslike arrangements. Soul: Rare View is one of a handful of works from this transitional period in the artist's career in which extreme emotions rupture the cool veneer of appropriation.

Artist

John Baldessari

Date

1987

Medium

Gelatin silver prints with applied oil tint

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, John B. Turner Fund and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1988