John Baldessari Biography

John Baldessari (born John Anthony Baldessari) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture, and photography.

He has created thousands of works that demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His work influenced Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Annette Lemieux, and Barbara Kruger among others.

John Baldessari Age

John Anthony Baldessari was born in National City, California on June 17, 1931. He is 88 years as of 2019. He is of American nationality. Currently, he resides in Los Angeles, California, United States.

John Baldessari Family

He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California.
Baldessari was born to Hedvig Jensen, a Danish nurse, and Antonio Baldessari, an Italian salvage dealer. He and his elder sister were raised in Southern California. He attended Sweetwater High School and San Diego State College.

John Baldessari Wife

He was married to Montessorian teacher Carol Ann Wixom; they have two children; Annamarie Baldessari and Tony Baldessari.

Education
1949-53 B.A., San Diego State College, California.
1954-55 University of California, Berkeley.
1955 University of California, Los Angeles.
1955-57 M.A., San Diego State College, California.
1957-59 Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles.
Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles.

John Baldessari Career

His career began in 1959 when he began teaching art in the San Diego school system. He kept teaching in schools and junior colleges and community colleges, and eventually at the university level for nearly three decades.

When the University of California decided to open up a campus in San Diego, the new head of the Visual Art Department, Paul Brach, asked Baldessari to be part of the originating faculty in 1968. At UCSD he shared an office with David Antin. In 1970, Baldessari moved to Santa Monica, where he met many artists and writers and began teaching at CalArts. His first classes included David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Ken Feingold, Tony Oursler, James Welling, Barbara Bloom, Matt Mullican, and Troy Brauntuch.

While at CalArts, Baldessari taught “the infamous Post Studio class”, which he intended to “indicate people not daubing away at canvases or chipping away at the stone, that there might be some other kind of class situation.”

The class, which operated outside of medium-specificity, was influential in informing the context for addressing a student’s art practice at CalArts and established a tradition of conceptual critique at CalArts that was carried on by artists such as Michael Asher. He quit teaching at CalArts in 1986, moving on to teach at UCLA, which he continued until 2008. At UCLA, his students included Elliott Hundley and Analia Saban.

Early text paintings

By 1966, Baldessari was using photographs and text, or simply text, on canvas. His early major works were canvas paintings that were empty but for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory. An early attempt of his included the hand-painted phrase “Suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN?” (1967) on a heavily worked painted surface. However, this proved personally disappointing because the form and method conflicted with the objective use of language that he preferred to employ.

Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions. The words were then physically lettered by sign painters, in an unornamented black font. The first of this series presented the ironic statement “A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE” (1967).

Another work, Painting for Kubler (1967–68) presented the viewer theoretical instructions on how to view it and on the importance of context and continuity with previous works. This work referenced art historian George Kubler’s seminal book, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. The seemingly legitimate art concerns were intended by Baldessari to become hollow and ridiculous when presented in such a purely self-referential manner.

The Cremation Project
In 1970, Baldessari and five friends burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled The Cremation Project. The ashes from these paintings were baked into cookies and placed into an urn, and the resulting art installation consists of a bronze commemorative plaque with the destroyed paintings’ birth and death dates, as well as the recipe for making the cookies.

Through the ritual of cremation, Baldessari draws a connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle. Thus the act of disavowal becomes generative as with the work of auto-destructive artist Jean Tinguely.

Juxtaposing text with images
Baldessari is best known for works that blend photographic materials (such as film stills), take them out of their original context and rearrange their form, often including the addition of words or sentences.

Arbitrary games
Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (1973), in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results. This work was published in 1973 by a young Italian publisher: Giampaolo Prearo that was one of the first to believe and invest in the work of Baldessari.

He printed two series one in 2000 copies and a second more precious reserved to the publisher in 500 copies. Following Baldessari’s seminal statement “I will not make any more boring art”, he conceived the work The Artist Hitting Various Objects with a Golf Club (1972–73), composed of 30 photographs of the artist swinging and hitting with a golf club objects excavated from a dump, as a parody of cataloging rather than a thorough straight classification.

Dots
A prevailing motif in Baldessari’s work from the mid-1980s onward are circular adhesive dots covering up the faces of photographed and painted portraits. The artist himself suspects that, despite the broad array of approaches he’s taken over the course of his career, he will be best remembered as “the guy who puts dots over people’s faces.”

Collections
Baldessari’s works are part of major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Broad Collection.

Baldessari set a personal auction record when his acrylic-on-canvas piece Quality Material (1966–1968) was sold for $4,408,000 at Christie’s New York in 2007.

In 1972, Ileana Sonnabend agreed to represent him worldwide. In 1999, after twenty-six years with the Sonnabend Gallery, Baldessari went to Marian Goodman. He is also represented by Margo Leavin, Los Angeles (since 1984), and Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London.

John Baldessari Net Worth

As a painter, his wealth is expected to be a good deal. However, his estimated net worth is still under review but will be updated as soon as it is clear.

John Baldessari Quotes

• I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.
• When I went to art school, I was just having fun. I realized that was the last chance I had, and then I would have to get a job.
• It’s a human desire to be understood. And we always feel we’re not understood.
• I guess I get bored easily and thank God. I don’t want all my life to pound only the same key, although some artists do it very effectively. I’m not trying to denigrate anybody.
• That word ‘funny’ always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman – he really tries to be funny. I don’t try to be funny. It’s just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I’m sort of reporting.
• I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.