5 Artworks by John Baldessari You Should Know

When John Baldessari died in 2020 at the age of 88, he left behind an incredible legacy. The artist held over 200 solo shows and appeared in 1,000 group shows. He was a recipient of the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award in 2009 and in 2014, President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of Arts. The Los Angeles-based artist produced prints, sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations with his signature wit and humor. His work asked big questions in deceptively simple and concise ways.

Baldessari explored how we look at and define art. In Everything is Purged from this Painting the artist makes this explicit. The work questions the traditional rules of artmaking that placed value on the artistic skill of the artist and their ability to replicate reality or capture emotion. In the 1940s and 1950s Abstract Expressionism emphasized painting as an expression of the artist’s personality and passion. In the 1960s, Baldessari questioned these rules and artistic expectations. He commissioned professional sign writers to paint the lettering on his works and often appropriated existing text.

With irony and irreverence, Everything is Purged from this Painting declares itself a painting, devoid of meaning or imagery. This piece also foregrounds Baldessari’s interest in text and image, and how the relationship between the two can create meaning. These ideas were central to new movements in art at this time that prioritized a conceptual understanding over purely aesthetic values.

In 1968, during the year he completed Everything is Purged from this Painting Baldessari was asked to join the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His work ended up being formative in the development of the art school. Baldessari was appointed to teach painting, but he wanted to take a more expansive approach and created a program called Post-Studio, encouraging students to pursue the broadest definition of what art could be. Baldessari’s teaching was an essential part of his artistic practice and it reflected his inventive and inclusive approach to art. Some of his notable former students include Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and David Salle.

In 1970 Baldessari cremated all of the paintings he made between 1953 and 1966. He titled this piece Cremation Project and at the time considered it one of his best works to date. The paintings were incinerated by a local crematorium and the event was documented in photographs. The piece included an affidavit published in the local paper and a jar of cookies baked using the ashes of the cremated artwork. He called the cookies corpus wafers and included a recipe in the documentation of the piece. A bronze plaque detailing the dates the paintings were made memorialized the work. The Cremation Project was playful and theatrical, marking a turning point in the artist’s practice.

The idea for this piece came about after Baldessari became overwhelmed by the paintings in his studio and increasingly unconvinced that only painting constituted art. He considered the cyclical nature of returning all of the elements that comprised the paintings (the canvas, pigments, and materials) to the ground. The artist saw the body of paintings as a body to be cremated.

The Cremation Project was a landmark piece. The work minimized the importance of art as a physical object, instead the idea was central to the meaning of the work. It marked a renouncement of the centrality of painting and the importance of the artist’s hand; ideas that had been prominent in the artistic movements that preceded him. After this point, Baldessari began to incorporate photographs, film stills, and videos in his work.

I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art follows John Baldessarri’s Cremation Project and marks a decisive shift away from gestural painting and traditional ways of making art. In 1971 the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax invited Baldessari to exhibit his work. He responded by sending a letter instructing the students of the art college to repeatedly write I will not make any more boring art on the gallery walls for ten days. The act replicated that of a teacher giving their unruly pupils lines as punishment and called attention to the replication and repetition embodied in traditional models of teaching art. Baldessari recorded himself writing the statement on videotape and sent it to the college, from this page of handwriting the art students produced a print. Baldessari did not attend the exhibition and he was not present at the workshop where the print was made.

I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art is the artist’s first print. Printmaking would become a key part of Baldessari’s artistic practice. This piece embodies Baldessari’s conceptual concerns. Interrogating the idea of authorship, the work is not tied to the hand of the artist. It centers around the creative decision made by the artist rather than the material object itself. Baldessari explored these ideas in other film and performance works in the 1970s. For example, in I Am Making Art the artist makes a series of arm movements, and after each motion he proclaims I am making art.

During the 1980s Baldessari started to use found images in his work, incorporating advertisements, film stills, and photographs. The artist would go on to amass a huge archive of film stills cataloged by subject. This form of appropriation would become a central part of his practice and would inspire future generations of artists, particularly those of the Pictures Movement. For example, acclaimed artist Cindy Sherman cites Baldessari as a key influence on her practice.

In The Fallen Easel, Baldessari selects, arranges, and juxtaposes a series of cinematic images. The piece is lithograph and silkscreen print on paper and photo-sensitized aluminum. The composition is deliberately askew and the images have been cropped. The artist has concealed the faces of some of the figures using his signature primary-colored dots. Meaning is obscured and a clear narrative is deliberately undermined. We are left to create connections between the scenes and characters. At a time when popular culture was increasingly characterized by a glut of mass media imagery, Baldessari asks the viewer to question how we read images by creating gaps in their meaning.

Baldessari’s focus on printmaking and use of appropriated materials and block color lends his work a Pop sensibility while at the same time exploring conceptual concerns surrounding the function of images and the creation of meaning. Baldessari first used price-off stickers he found in his studio to obscure the faces featured in film stills and photographs. His use of brightly colored dots would become a moniker for the artist and a key tool in re-contextualizing images and redirecting the viewer’s attention.

Prima Facie (Fifth State) is the final body of work in Baldessari’s Prima Facie series. In this series, the artist uses film stills, color, and text. In Prima Facie (Fifth State): Marshmallow Bunny, Bunny Grey, Rabbit Brown a close-up of an expressive face is paired with a large description of the paint color used to color the image. The Latin term Prima Facie translates to at first sight. The work explores how we perceive meaning and emotion via language, facial expressions, and color.

In this series, the artist plays with dissonance by combining seemingly discordant words and pictures. For example, a man’s upturned face is imbued with a rose-pink color confoundingly labeled Marshmallow Bunny. The viewer is left to examine their response to the color, facial expression, and text, and to build their own narrative. Both image and text are large, giving them the same weight and significance. By de-contextualizing images and text and recontextualizing them, Baldessari frees them to function in new and often humorous ways.

In an interview with his former art school pupil, David Salle, Baldessari once said, “I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.” Baldessari’s work holds this tension in place. Using deceptively simple means and economical visual language, Baldessari creates aesthetically powerful works that ask questions about the relationships between images, language, and meaning.