File:Robert Bordo Coast Columbus 1987.jpg

Painting by Robert Bordo, Coast (Columbus) (oil and dry pigment on linen, 32" x 48", 1987; Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection). The image illustrates a key early body of work in Robert Bordo's career in the 1980s and 1990s, when he produced his "Map" series, which integrated an abstract painting language with subject matter and metaphors related to landscape, modernism, and personal geographic and social narratives involving emigration, journey, change and loss. The intimate, quasi-minimal works used abstract shapes and irregular contours of landmasses from globes to suggest topographical notions of areas rather than specific place. They often include ghostly graphic forms and other elements (e.g., grids in this case) and were compared likened to the infinite spaces of Edward Ruscha and Vija Celmins. This work was publicly exhibited in prominent exhibitions, discussed in major art journals and daily press publications and acquired by a major museum.

Artist Robert Bordo. Copyright held by the artist.

Robert Bordo

Entire artwork

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a key early body of work in Robert Bordo's career in the 1980s and 1990s: his "Map" paintings, which sought to integrate an abstract painting language with subject matter and metaphors related to landscape, social narratives, modernism, and his personal history as a Canadian and Montrealer living in New York. These modestly scaled, quasi-minimal canvasses employed the abstract shapes and irregular contours of landmasses from globes using glazes to create textured fragments of color that hovered between topographical suggestions of land, water or sky and abstraction, sometimes augmented by camouflage patterns, frames and elements from airmail envelopes, barely visible ledgers and stenciled aircraft forms. His approach to imagery, form and suggestive titling kept this work open to a range of political, historical and physical interpretations. Because the article is about an artist and his work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand this early stage and body of work, which brought Bordo initial recognition through exhibitions and coverage by major critics and publications. Bordo's work of this type and this series is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Robert Bordo, and the work no longer is viewable, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.