Elaine Sturtevant
| Elaine Sturtevant | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Elaine Frances Horan August 23, 1924 Lakewood, Ohio, United States |
| Died | May 7, 2014 (aged 89) Paris, France |
| Known for | appropriation art, conceptual art |
| Awards | La Biennale di Venezia Golden Lion, 2011 |
Elaine Frances Sturtevant, (née Horan; August 23, 1924 – May 7, 2014), also known simply as "Sturtevant", was an American artist. She achieved recognition for her carefully inexact repetitions of other artists' works, that prefigured appropriation.
Elaine Frances Horan was born on 23 August 1924, in Lakewood, Ohio, near Cleveland. She earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Iowa, followed by a master’s in the field from Teachers College of Columbia University. In New York, she also studied at the Art Students League.
Sturtevant's earliest known paintings were made in New York in the late 1950s. In these works, she sliced open tubes of paint, flattened them, and attached them to canvas. Most of these works contain fragments from tubes of several colors of paint, some have additional pencil scribbles and daubs of paint. Sturtevant was close friends with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, both of whom own paintings from this period. In 1964, by memorization only, she began to manually reproduce paintings and objects created by her contemporaries with results that can immediately be identified with an original, at a point that turned the concept of originality on its head. She initially focused on works by such American artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. Warhol gave Sturtevant one of his silkscreens so she could produce her own versions of his "Flowers" paintings, and when asked about his technique, once said, "I don't know. Ask Elaine." After a Jasper Johns flag painting that was a component of Robert Rauschenberg's combine “Short Circuit” was stolen, Rauschenberg commissioned Sturtevant to paint a reproduction, which was subsequently incorporated into the combine. In the late 1960s, Sturtevant concentrated on replicating works by Joseph Beuys and Duchamp. In a 1967 photograph, she and Rauschenberg pose as a nude Adam and Eve, roles originally played by Marcel Duchamp and Brogna Perlmutter in a 1924 picture shot by Man Ray.
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