70s Art – Take a Look at the Vibrant Style of 70s Abstract Art
1970s art had no single style. Artists extended Conceptual Art, Minimalism, performance, video, Land Art, feminist practice, installation, photography, and new forms of abstraction while questioning whether art required a permanent object at all. Shaped by civil-rights struggles, women’s and gay liberation, antiwar activism, decolonization, environmental concern, and economic crisis, the decade changed who could claim artistic authority and where art could happen.
1970s Art Styles
The decade’s most influential practices often crossed categories. A single project might involve a body, a landscape, a camera, written instructions, and documentary photographs. Feminist and Black artists challenged exclusion from museums and historical narratives, while artists in many regions tested ordinary, industrial, organic, and time-based materials.
New York remained powerful but was never the world’s sole center. Artists in California, Latin America, Japan, Europe, Africa, and elsewhere worked within different political and institutional conditions. Performance art flourished, video became more accessible, and photography increasingly served both as artwork and as evidence of temporary actions. The late-1970s Pictures Generation also developed from earlier Pop Art, Conceptual Art, film, advertising, and media theory.
Challenges That Influenced the 1970s Art Style
The terms contemporary art and postmodernism have longer, different histories; neither was simply coined to name the 1970s. What did change was the force of institutional critique. Artists formed alternative spaces, collectives, journals, and education programs because museums, galleries, and art schools had excluded many women and artists of color.
Feminist art was plural rather than defined by one “feminine” subject. Artists investigated labor, domestic space, sexuality, language, violence, craft hierarchies, race, and the politics of looking. Body art and performance made duration, risk, consent, and the audience’s conduct part of the work. Documentation was not neutral: a photograph or video could become the principal way a temporary event entered history and the market.
The Most Important 1970s Art Styles
Many key tendencies began in the late 1960s and matured during the 1970s. Conceptual artists prioritized propositions and systems; post-Minimal and process artists emphasized material behavior; Land artists worked with sites and entropy; feminist artists transformed education and institutions; and performance and video made time a core medium. The sections below are representative, not exhaustive.
Land Art
Land Art emerged in the late 1960s as artists treated sites, geology, weather, mapping, and displacement as materials. The work did not descend directly from plein-air painting, and it was not automatically environmentalist: large interventions could themselves alter fragile places. Photographs, films, maps, drawings, and contracts connected remote works back to galleries and collectors.
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) used more than 6,000 tons of basalt and earth to form a 1,500-foot coil at Great Salt Lake. Changing water levels and salt growth alter its visibility. Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, and Richard Long developed different relationships among place, movement, monumentality, and documentation.
Mono-ha in Japan likewise examined how stone, earth, glass, steel, wood, and space meet, but it should not be treated as a regional branch of American Land Art. Its emphasis on arranging rather than transforming materials offered a distinct critique of industrial production and representation.
Feminist Art
Feminist artists worked across consciousness-raising, performance, video, photography, painting, textiles, installation, criticism, and collaborative education. Judy Chicago established the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College in 1970 and developed a second program with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts. Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, and many others showed that gender cannot be separated from race, class, nationality, labor, or sexuality.
Chicago’s collaborative The Dinner Party (1974–1979), Cindy Sherman’s staged photographs, Lynda Benglis’s confrontational 1974 Artforum advertisement, and Saar’s transformation of racist imagery used different means to expose how institutions construct value. Barbara Kruger’s Belief+Doubt above dates to 2012; it is a later example of the text-and-architecture practice she developed after her 1970s design and photographic work.
Mono-ha and the Gutai Precedent
Gutai was founded in Japan in 1954 and dissolved in 1972 after the death of its founder, Jirō Yoshihara. Its most influential experiments in action, matter, and outdoor display largely belong to the 1950s and 1960s, making it a crucial precedent rather than a representative 1970s movement. The group’s name joins words commonly translated as “concreteness” or “embodiment,” not simply “tool” and “body.”
Kazuo Shiraga painted with his feet while suspended from a rope, and Atsuko Tanaka joined electric lights, sound, drawing, and performance. The photograph above demonstrates Shiraga’s method but is not dated as a 1970s action. Mono-ha, which emerged around 1968 through artists including Lee Ufan, Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga, and Susumu Koshimizu, is the more direct Japanese context for the early 1970s.
Performance Art
Performance art drew on Happenings, experimental music, dance, theater, Fluxus, and earlier body-based actions. In the 1970s it became a major way to investigate duration, repetition, gender, spectatorship, labor, danger, and institutional rules. Not every performance used nudity or shock, and a live action could be carefully scripted without becoming conventional theater.
Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) tested audience responsibility by placing 72 objects at viewers’ disposal. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (first performed in 1964) was an earlier touchstone. Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), in which an assistant shot him in the arm, belonged to California performance—not Viennese Actionism. Vito Acconci, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, VALIE EXPORT, and Abramović with Ulay used the body for sharply different political and perceptual questions.
1970s Abstract Art
Abstract art remained diverse despite claims that painting had reached an end. Process art emphasized pouring, folding, staining, and material change; Pattern and Decoration embraced ornament, textiles, and non-Western design sources; and painters continued Color Field, geometric, lyrical, and monochrome approaches. Abstraction coexisted with figuration, performance, and Conceptual Art rather than entering simple stasis.
Important 1970s Artists
The five profiles below explain important US practices but cannot represent the decade globally. Any broader list should also consider Marina Abramović, Ulay, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Lee Ufan, On Kawara, Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, David Hammons, Gordon Matta-Clark, and many others working across performance, Conceptual Art, installation, photography, and sculpture.
Betye Saar (Born 1926)
| Nationality | American |
| Date of Birth | 30 July 1926 |
| Place of Birth | Los Angeles, United States |
Betye Saar is an influential assemblage artist whose boxes, prints, and installations combine found objects, family memory, spirituality, and political critique. Her The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) transformed a racist collectible into an armed figure of resistance and became a landmark of Black feminist art.
The image above advertises a 1989 exhibition and therefore documents Saar’s later reception rather than a 1970s installation.
Judy Chicago (Born 1939)
| Nationality | American |
| Date of Birth | 20 July 1939 |
| Place of Birth | Chicago, United States |
Judy Chicago is an artist, writer, and educator whose 1970s practice connected feminist pedagogy with collaborative installation. She established the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College in 1970 and, with Miriam Schapiro, developed the program at CalArts that produced Womanhouse in 1972.
Created collaboratively from 1974 to 1979, The Dinner Party uses a triangular table with 39 place settings and a Heritage Floor inscribed with 999 additional names, representing 1,038 women in total. It opened in permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in 2007.
Chuck Close (1940 – 2021)
| Nationality | American |
| Date of Birth | 5 July 1940 |
| Date of Death | 19 August 2021 |
| Place of Birth | Monroe, Washington, United States |
Chuck Close built monumental portraits from gridded photographic sources. During the 1970s he used airbrush, graphite, ink, watercolor, mezzotint, and other processes to separate an image into labor-intensive units. The work sits between Photorealism and abstraction: from a distance a face resolves, while close viewing reveals marks and modules.
Close’s 1967–1968 Big Self-Portrait established the severe frontal format that he developed throughout the next decade. His self-imposed technical constraints made method visible and complicated the assumption that a photographically detailed image is simply mechanical.
Lynda Benglis (Born 1941)
| Nationality | American |
| Date of Birth | 25 October 1941 |
| Place of Birth | Louisiana, United States |
Lynda Benglis challenged the gendered language of Post-Minimal sculpture with poured latex and polyurethane works that appear fluid yet occupy the floor or wall. Her self-funded 1974 Artforum advertisement staged an exaggerated nude pin-up with a double-ended dildo, confronting the magazine’s conventions of artist promotion, sexuality, and authorship.
Benglis also used video during the 1970s to examine feedback, gesture, and the artist’s performed identity. These works belong with, rather than outside, her investigation of material and bodily presence.
Barbara Kruger (Born 1945)
| Nationality | American |
| Date of Birth | 26 January 1945 |
| Place of Birth | Newark, United States |
Barbara Kruger, an American artist and former magazine designer, made large woven works before turning toward photography and language in the late 1970s. Her Picture/Readings paired architectural photographs with short texts. The more familiar combinations of appropriated images, bold frames, and declarative pronouns developed around 1980 and after, so they should not define her entire 1970s practice.
The decade’s enduring change was structural as much as visual: artists expanded the medium, site, duration, authorship, and audience of art while exposing the institutions that decide whose work becomes history.
Take a look at our 70s art styles webstory here!
Frequently Asked Questions
Who Were the Most Famous Artists of 1970s Paintings?
Important painters included Chuck Close, Agnes Martin, Lee Krasner, Susan Rothenberg, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Joan Mitchell, Brice Marden, Gerhard Richter, and Frank Bowling. Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol also remained active, although the decade’s history extends far beyond painting.
What Was the Importance of 1970s Art?
1970s artists expanded art beyond a permanent object by using bodies, sites, instructions, video, photographs, sound, and participation. Feminist, Black, queer, postcolonial, and activist practices challenged institutional exclusion, while Land Art, performance, Conceptual Art, and process-based work changed how art could be made, documented, owned, and remembered.
What Art Styles Were Popular in the 1970s?
The decade included Conceptual Art, Minimalism and post-Minimalism, Land Art, feminist art, performance, video, installation, Photorealism, Pattern and Decoration, and many forms of abstraction. Most began before 1970 or continued afterward, so they are better understood as overlapping practices than as a neat sequence.
Why Was Documentation Important to 1970s Art?
Many performances, site works, and temporary installations could not be encountered later in their original form. Photographs, films, video, maps, scores, and written records therefore preserved evidence, circulated the work, and sometimes became collectible objects themselves. Documentation also shapes which actions enter art history and how they are interpreted.
Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.
Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.
Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team.
Cite this Article
Isabella, Meyer, “70s Art – Take a Look at the Vibrant Style of 70s Abstract Art.” Art in Context. June 23, 2022. URL: https://artincontext.org/70s-art/
Meyer, I. (2022, 23 June). 70s Art – Take a Look at the Vibrant Style of 70s Abstract Art. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/70s-art/
Meyer, Isabella. “70s Art – Take a Look at the Vibrant Style of 70s Abstract Art.” Art in Context, June 23, 2022. https://artincontext.org/70s-art/.
