A major figure of the Beat Generation of artists working in California during the late 1950s and 1960s, Bruce Conner is a prolific artist who has worked with a variety of media including assemblage, collage, film, sculpture, painting and printmaking. Conner’s assemblages are made from cast-off pieces of furniture, found objects and other unconventional art materials. The narratives of his assemblages are often as raw and jarring as the materials he uses to make them and often incorporate blatant references to challenging social issues such as sexual pathology, war, death and human suffering.
COUCH is among Conner’s notable macabre creations. This disturbing assemblage portrays a severed and decomposing wax figure lying on a decaying, paint-splattered settee. Although Conner stopped making assemblages in 1964, the powerful works he created during his formative years remain greatly influential.
Details
- Artist Name: Bruce Conner (American, 1933-2008)
- Title: COUCH
- Date: 1963
- Medium: Sculpture
- Dimensions: 32 x 70-3/4 x 27 in. (81.3 x 179.7 x 68.6 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Museum, Museum Purchase with funds donated by Mr. David H. Steinmetz III and an Anonymous Foundation
- Accession Number: P.1969.005
- Copyright: © 2008 Bruce Conner
Object Information
Anonymous Foundation, to;
Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, 1969-1975;
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.
American Art of the 1950s and 1960s from the Collection of the Norton Simon Museum
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988-08-11 to 1994-04-03
- Domeraue, Denise, Artists Design Furniture,no. 37 p. 24
- Pasadena Art Museum, Recent Acquisitions 1969,no. 23 p. 18
- Gary Garrels and Rudolf Frieling, It's All True: Bruce Conner,2016, pl. 49 p. 81
- Plagens, Peter, Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, p. 82
- Armory Center for the Arts/Art Center College of Design, Radical Past: Contemporary Art & Music in Pasadena, 1960-1974, p. 41
- Dunham, Judith L., Art Week, p. 1
- Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Poets of the Cities New York and San Francisco, 1950-1965,no. 62 p. 134
- Philips, Lisa, Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965, p. 94
Additional Artwork by Artist
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