Stephan von Huene’s Assemblage Paintings should be considered in the context of the mixed elements and methods of presentation characteristic of US-American Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, as practiced among others by Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, and Johns in the so-called combine paintings beginning in the mid-1950s. In ways that invoke in particular to the collage traditions of European Dada and Surrealism, such pictures are shaped with compositional freedom through a variety of media that includes lettering, fabrics, objects, and so forth. Here, von Huene assimilates not so much the North American popular culture found in advertisements, newspapers, and posters, but instead a comics aesthetic that achieved prominence in particular through the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. In 1961, Walt Disney founded the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where Stephan von Huene too lectured. The results were frontal, coarsely-worked, expressively hermetic and withdrawn figural compositions that range between comic and chaos.
