Early Life
After earning a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Louisville, Watts served as an officer in the United States Navy aboard aircraft carriers. Watts left the Navy and moved to New York in 1948, where he studied art at the Art Students League and later at Columbia University from where he gained a degree in the History of Art, majoring in pre-Columbian and non-Western Art. After becaming Professor of Art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, 1953, he started to exhibit works in a proto-pop style. He participated in Pop Art shows such as New Forms, New Media exhibition in 1960 at Martha Jackson's Gallery; the Popular Image exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Art in 1963; and the 1964 American Supermarket exhibition at New York's Bianchini Gallery, which also featured Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann. After exhibiting at Leo Castelli's Gallery in 1964, Watts turned his back on the gallery system, and concentrated instead on the anti-art of the emerging New York avant-garde centred around George Maciunas.
" work obviously related to that of the Pop artists that I had discovered a few years before...Watts' chromed objects closely related to Johns' cast beer cans and flashlights, for instance. The 1964 exhibition also included Watts' sculpture of plaster cast loaves of bread on shelves. That work, in particular, I think of as one of his most important inventions. I'm also particularly fond of the chrome eggs and egg carton in my own collection which will appear in this show. The public will be surprised that an artist -so promising at such an early date- did not receive through the years the appreciation he deserved." Leo Castelli
Read more about this topic: Robert Watts (artist)
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