Melvin Simon Bochner was born on August 3, 1940, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, earning his BFA in 1962, and moved to New York shortly thereafter.
He emerged in the 1960s during a pivotal period in the art world, when Abstract Expressionism was waning, and Minimalism and Conceptual Art were rising. Bochner became one of the key figures of Conceptual Art.
He died on February 12, 2025, in New York City, at the age of 84.
Bochner's work is varied and intellectual but also playful, rigorous, and often humorous. Key strands of his practice include measurement (space), text and language, color, and materiality.
Early Conceptual Work
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One of his early landmark shows was Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art (1966), organized at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The very title signals questioning what "art" is, what its objecthood is.
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In the late 1960s he made works such as 36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams (1966‑68), and Measurement Room (1969), where he delineated gallery walls or architecture using tape, marking distances and numbers, turning the space into a kind of mapping / schema of itself.
These early works emphasize ideas, structures, spatial relationships, and the way an artwork might be "about" seeing, measurement, language, rather than traditional representation.
A central thread through Bochner's later and mature work is his interest in language as material - that is, not simply writing something to read, but using words, synonyms, phrases, in visual form, to explore how meaning works, how language constrains or releases meaning, how words are objects just like paint, canvas, color, space.
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The Thesaurus series (drawings and paintings) is one of his best known. He often begins with a base word (a generic or simple term) and then lists synonyms, escalating toward colloquial, vulgar or slang, or more emotionally loaded expressions. The path from "formal/academic" to "vernacular/slang" is part of the effect.
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In the In the Tower exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (2011‑12), many of these Thesaurus works were shown spanning decades, showing how Bochner returned to language, synonyms, dictionaries, everyday speech.
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He also made series like Blah, Blah, Blah, where repeated words such as "Blah" emphasize emptiness, repetition, meaninglessness, or perhaps the overflow/saturation of language.
Materiality, Visual Qualities, and Techniques
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Color is integral. In many thesaurus works, background color is chosen beforehand, while the color of words may be spontaneous, improvised, responding to each word. Sometimes words are colored differently, letter by letter. This introduces visual rhythm, texture, and complicates reading.
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Materials and techniques: besides painting on canvas, Bochner has used velvet, oil paint, acrylic, printmaking, monoprints. For example, some works are made on black velvet, with oil paint applied using hydraulic press (e.g. velvet works in the 'Thesaurus Paintings' with runs and blurring outlines) to give letters a kind of physical material presence beyond just flat text.
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Printmaking: in some monoprints, Bochner uses carved Plexiglas plates with thick oil paint, applying hydraulic press: this produces textures, indentation, tactile surfaces. These prints look almost sculptural.
Themes and Philosophical Underpinnings
Some of the central ideas Bochner plays with:
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The opacity and instability of language. He often says that "language is not transparent" - that every word has presuppositions, hidden agendas.
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The difference between content and container, or meaning and medium. Words as objects; painting as more than just support for words. Where does the meaning of the text end and the experience of color, texture, layout begin?
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Humor, irony, overload. He often uses colloquial expressions, exclamations, even insults; repeating words until meaning dilutes; using "empty" or cliché‑language to make you reflect on what we say, how language fails.
Bochner had a long, distinguished career, widely recognized in institutional surveys, retrospectives, museum shows, etc.
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He taught for many years (including at Yale, starting around 1979).
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Major solo museum exhibitions: Jewish Museum (NY, 2014); Whitechapel Gallery (London), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Fundação de Serralves (Porto) around 2012‑13; Carnegie Mellon University; Yale School Gallery; Art Institute of Chicago; etc.
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Retrospectives and key shows: In the Tower: Mel Bochner at National Gallery of Art, Washington (2011‑12) displaying 45 years of thesaurus works.
Bochner's works have done well at auction, particularly his text‑based works. The results show that collectors strongly value his text works, especially those that combine strong visual/material presence (color, texture, scale) with his characteristic linguistic play.
Note: auction prices vary by market, condition, size, rarity, etc., but Bochner's works consistently fetch into six figures in GBP or equivalent in other currencies for major pieces.
Because this is one of the most distinctive elements of his output, here are several dimensions of how Bochner uses words and phrases in his work:
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Synonym Lists/Thesaurus Structure
He often starts with a relatively neutral or generic word, then lists synonyms, moving through more unusual, vivid, or colloquial forms. For example, in his thesaurus‑works connected with Money or Die, synonym lists may run from formal to slang or idiomatic. -
Repetition
Words repeated (e.g. Blah, Blah, Blah) to push meaning toward exhaustion or to highlight how language can become noise when overused. -
Colloquial, Vulgar, Everyday Speech
Later works increasingly include colloquial and even vulgar expressions-slang, idioms, insults, exclamations-often to contrast against more formal words. This juxtaposition reveals layers of meaning, class/register, familiarity/distance. -
Interplay of Visual and Textual
Bochner treats text not merely as content but as a formal/visual element. The layout, color, materiality, texture, scale, even the distortions (blurring, runny paint, varying letter color) all intervene in how we read meaning. At times the words are almost erased or obliterated so that legibility is partial, making the viewer struggle between reading and seeing. -
Irony, Humor, Critical Distance
Many of the phrases are playful, ironic, or critical. The use of "Blah, Blah, Blah" is dismissive. Other works use exclamation ("Amazing!", "Talk Is Cheap") or insults or jokes. There is often tension: between what the words say and what the visual / painterly presence implies; between the claim to meaning and the instability or insufficiency of meaning. -
Exploration of Ideology in Language
Bochner often talks about ideology, hidden agendas, and how language serves power: how words can mislead, shape perception, mask or propagate power relations. "Language is not transparent" is one of his key statements.
Mel Bochner's career spanned more than half a century; he was central to the development of conceptual art, especially in how ideas around language, meaning, and the materiality of text could be made visually powerful. His death in 2025 marks the close of a major chapter in contemporary art, but his works continue to resonate: in museums, in private collections, in the auction market, and in how artists think about text and meaning.
His use of words and phrases - synonyms, repetition, colloquial speech, juxtaposed with painterly color and technique - makes his work richly layered: you read, you see, you feel the gap between what's said and what's shown. That tension is a central source of his success.
