By Jennifer Glickel
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
UPPER EAST SIDE — Artist John Baldessari's first major U.S. exhibition in two decades opens Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition "John Baldessari: Pure Beauty," which spans the last half-century of his work, surveys everything from the artist's early paintings from the 1960s to his more recent conceptual work combining images and text — including two huge photo-compositions that Baldessari created just for the exhibition.
It's lucky the Met had any of the artist's early work to show.
In 1970, Baldessari cremated nearly all of his paintings from between 1953 and 1966 for a work called "Cremation Project." For the piece, he interred the ashes in a bronze urn, and published a paid death notice in the newspaper.
"It was about 1968, and I was getting doubtful that painting equaled art and art equaled painting," Baldessari said in an interview for the exhibition. "I began to suspect that art might be more than that."
In the '80s, he created notable works using otherwise unrelated found film stills that he enlarged and juxtaposed to create his own narratives.
The exhibit also contains some of Baldessari’s most recent pieces combining image and text, including a work where the artist combines a photograph of a woman with wide open eyes with a list of descriptive yet contradictory emotions, like "aghast," "terrified" and "enchanted."
"So what I'm getting at there is that if you look at somebody's face... can you really tell what their emotional state is, what are they thinking about?" he said in the interview.
"John Baldessari: Pure Beauty" opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday and runs through Jan. 9, 2011. The museum is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue at 83rd Street.
