American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1913-1993 3791312618, 3791312405

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COUNTY FREE LIBRfiRY

31111014796690

AMERICAN AI?f Painting and Sculpture "" 1913-1993

20th

-^:^,

^ Prestel

century

American Art

Cennrry

in the 20th

Painting and Sculpture 1913-1993 Edited by Christos

Norman

M. Joachimides and

Rosenthal

Co-ordinating Editor: David Anfam

490 pages with 516 American Art a series of

colour

illustrations, 252 in full

in the 20th

Century

monographs devoted

is

the fourth volume in

and sculp-

to painting

ture in various coimtries since the early years of this century. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at

the Alartin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and the Royal

Academy of .\rts, London,

it

pro\'ides an extensive,

copiously illustrated survey of the subject that to

become

The

a

is

certain

standard work.

history of the \-isual arts in the United States

during

this

century

is

one of assimilation followed by an

explosion of indigenous creativit\' that altered the

course of art.

The Armor\- Show,

1913, introduced

in

held in

Americans to the

European modernism.

Xo

impact of Marcel Duchamp,

less

who

latest

New York in developments

profound was the first

usited

New York

in 1915

and was to acquire cardinal importance

mentor

to several generations of Americans

tioned traditional notions of

art.

The

as a

who

ques-

inter-war years

were marked by American artists coming to terms with European movements - especially Cubism, Dada and Surrealism - yet such outstanding figures as

Edward Hopper and Joseph Cornell were expression to

world.

a quintessentially

The two

Man Ray,

able to give

.American \'iew of the

poles of that \-iew - an espousaJ of the

sublime and a concern with the minutiae of everyday realit}- - have characterized art in the USA ever since. It

was

in the

mid- 1940s, with the genesis of Abstract

Expressionism, that American art achieved through.

The

painting of Jackson Pollock,

its

break-

\Mllem de

Kooning and Bamett Newman shook the very foundations of that art and, together with the work of Ad Reinhardt,

Mark Rothko,

Ch-fford

and others, ensured America's

Still,

artistic

Da\-id

Smith

pre-eminence

in

New York replaced Paris as the centre of the international art world. A reaction against Abstract

the 1950s.

Expressionism became noticeable in the mid-1950s. In the early

work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschen-

berg, for example, Abstract Expressionist techniques

were wedded to objects concern with evervday

ft-om everyday experience.

realit}' lay

This

behind the emergence

when artists such as Roy Andy \\ arhol explored the world pre-

of Pop Art in the early 1960s, Lichtenstein and

sented by the media in a seemingly impersonal manner. continued on back flap

Prestel

CIVIC CEr^TER nil

3 111

il

Hum

01479 6690

American Art in

the 20th Century

'•

Patrons of the Exhibition

Her Majesty The Queen

Dr Richard von Weizsacker President of the Federal Republic of Germany

Wilham

J.

CHnton

President of the United States of America

Advisory Committee Felix

Baumann

Walter Hopps Richard Koshalek

Thomas Krens William S.Lieberman Franz Meyer

David Ross Katharina Schmidt

Wieland Schmied Nicholas Serota

American Art in

the 20th Century Painting and Sculpture

1913-1993

Edited by

Christos

M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal

Co-ordinating Editor

David Anfam

Essays by

Brooks Adams, David Anfam, Richard Armstrong, John Beardsley,

Neal Benezra, Achilla Bonito Oliva, Arthur C. Danto, Abraham A. Da\idson, Wolfgang Max Faust, Mary Emma Harris, Christos M. Joachimides, Thomas Kellein, Donald Kuspit, Mary Lublin, Karal Ann Marling, Barbara Moore, Francis V. O'Connor, Stephen Polcari, Carter Ratcliff, Norman Rosenthal, Irving Sandler, Wieland Schmied, Peter Selz, Gail Stavitsky and Douglas Tallack

Prestel

1

This

is

the fourth

volume

to appear in conjunction with the series

of exhibitions of twentieth-century art

shown

Royal Academy of Arts,

at the

London. Already published: Geiynan Art in the 20th Centinj: Painting and Sailpture igo^-igS^ (1985) British Ait in the 20th Centiny: The Modem Movement (1987)

An in the 20th Centwy: Paintiiig and Sculpture

Italiaji

ip 00 -1^88 (1989)

on the occasion of the exhibition

First published

'American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 191 3-1993', held at the Alartin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 8

May- 2 5 July

1993, and the

Royal Academy of Arts and the Saatchi Gallery, London, 16

September- 1 2 December 1993.

Exhibition organized by Christos

©

1993 by Prestel-Verlag, Munich, Royal

ZEITGEIST-Gesellschaft

e.

M. Joachimides and Norman

Rosenthal.

Academy of Arts, London, and

V., Berlin

© of works illustrated by the artists, their heirs and assigns, except in the following cases: Carl .\ndre, Richard Artschwager, Jean-AIichel Basquiat, Joseph Beuys, .\lexander Calder,

Wlllem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Dan

Stuart Da\TS,

Jasper Johns, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWltt,

Roy

Sam

Flavin,

Lichtenstein,

Man

Francis, Arshile Gorky,

Ray, Robert Mangold,

Andre Masson, Roberto Matta Echaurren, Robert Motherwell, Bruce Nauman, Kenneth Noland, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt,

James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Richard Lawrence VVeiner,

Tom Wesselmann

Joseph Cornell by

The Joseph and Robert

Andy

\\^arhol

Fig. 9, p. 136:

© of

all

Cover

David Smith, Frank

Serra,

and Grant

Wood by VG

Mark

Tobey,

Cornell Memorial Foundation, Houston;

by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual

© Christo

Stella,

Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 1993;

Arts, Inc.,

New York,

1993.

1976

other documents, see Photographic Acknowledgments, pp. 484-5

illustration:

Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959

German: Da\id

Translation frmn the

(detail, Cat.

137)

Britt (Christos iM. Joachimides),

John Brownjohn (Thomas

Kellein),

John \Mlliam Gabriel (Wieland Schmied) and John Ormrod (Wolfgang Max Faust) Translation from the Italian: ]o2ichim

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Bound by MIB Conzella, Aschheim Printed in

ISBN

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3-7913-1261-8 (English edition)

•

ISBN

3-7913-1240-5 (German edition)

3

1

Contents

Sir Roger de Grey

Christos

M. Joachimides

Foreword

7

Wrenching America's Impulse Notes on Art

Norman

Rosenthal

Arthur

C.

Danto

Douglas Tallack

Abraham A. Davidson Wieland Schmied Francis V.

O'' Connor

American

USA A View from

in the

Art:

having Sandler

David Ailfam

Mary Emma

Harris

9

Europe

Philosophizing American Art

Brooks Adams

Neal Benezra

Precisionist

The

1930s:

Early Modernism in America 39 View and American Scene: The 1920s 47 Notes on the Transition from Social to Individual

John Beardsley Wolfgang Max Faust

Beginning

at the

New York Intermedia: The

1960s:

'To Speak Another Language':

Antiform: 1965-1970

Land Art

The

Mai'ling

Peter Selz

Thomas

Kellein

Achille Bonito Oliva

The Energy

Critique of Painting and the

in the

Electric':

in

the Sheer Size:

The Western

The

139

151

From

Stieglitz to Castelli

Erotic Dimension in American Art is it

Art?

171

to

American Art

187

Frontiers of Internationalism: Europe-America

201

203

Biographies of the Artists Selected Bibliography

The Authors

439

478

482

Photographic Acknowledgments Index of Names

165

177

European Responses

Artists in the Exhibition

Catalogue

of Transformation

Twentieth Century:

America: But

Americans Abroad It's

117

145

the Collector

American Galleries

The Media

99

133

Primary and Secondary

'The Body

in the 1960s

107

125

Shattered Orthodoxy:

The Museum and

KaralAnn

77

93

Happenings and Fluxus

Notes on Camelot

Gail Stavitsky

Carter Ratclijf

69

Black Mountain College: European Modernism, the Experimental Spirit

Critics,

Lublin

in the 1940s

The Noise of Traffic on the Way to Walden Pond End: The Extremes of Abstract Expressionism 85

Abstract Expressionism:

Donald Kuspit

Maiy

Scale in the Art

61

Modernist History and Surrealist Imagination: American Art

Beginnings of Minimal and Conceptual Art Richard Armstrong

29

The Armory Show and

and the American Avant-Garde Barbara Moore

1

2

Culture, Politics and Society in Mid-Century America

of the Depression Era Stephen Polcari

into Art:

4H6

484

195

157

Lenders to the Exhibition

Amsterdam,

Museum Museum

Stedelijk

The

Baltimore,

Baltimore

Basle, Offentliche Kunstsammlung Kunstmuseum

Berne,

Pittsburgh,

of Art

Museum

The

Saint Louis .Art

Muzeum Ludwig NT, Albright-Knox Art Gallen* Cambridge, ALA, Fogg Art Museum, Hanard Universit)* Art Museums

Courtesy Galerie Rudolf Kicken, Cologne,

and Galerie

.Art

Art

Llm, Llmer .Museum

Chicago,

Museum

Des

Aloines, L\,

Detroit,

The

Diisseldorf,

CoUection of Richard E. Lang, Jane Da\"is, Aledina,

Utica, NY', .Munson-\Mlliams-Proctor Institute,

Aluseum of .Art

Washington,

Des Moines Art Center

Wichita, KS, ^^lchita

Youngstown,

Detroit Institute of Arts

Kunstsammlung Xordrhein-

DC, The

American

Fort

.\rt

.Museum of

Houston,

OH, The Buder Institute

of

of Alodem Art City",

The

of Iowa .Museum

of.\rt

NE, Sheldon

Lincoln, len,-,

L'niversit}-

.Memorial

.\rt

Gal-

of N ebraska

Thomas .Ammann

Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection .Art

.Mayer, Diisseldorf

der-O'Reilly Galleries, Inc.,

.Muriel Kallis

Norman Braman

Eli

and Ed\-the L. Broad Collection

Eli

Broad Family Foundation. Santa

Leo

Castelli,

Onnasch

New York

S.

Newman

Collection, Berlin

The Pace Galler\-, New York Ron and .Ann Pizzuri Richard and Lois Plehn,

New York

New York

Collection of Kate Rothko Prizel

New York New York

Regis Corporation, .MinneapoHs, .Minnesota

Galler}-,

Collection of Christopher Rothko

Cramer

Andrew J. Crispo

Center

Hans

Patsy R. and Ray-mond D. Nasher, Dallas

Collection Imia und

Douglas

New York

.Art

Honoria Donnelly Alurphy, courtesy Salan-

Zurich

Cohen

Galler\-,

.\driana and Robert .Mnuchin

Paula Cooper,

ary.Art

Walker

Courtesy of .Marlborough

Galerie .Marion Alever, Paris

.Art,

Zurich

Collection

Los Angeles, The .Museum of Contempor-

.Minneapolis,

Fine

.Monica, California

London, Tate Gallery

.Margulies Family Collection

Alarx Collection, BerHn

Courtesv .Marc Blondeau, Paris

L*niversit\'

New York

Gallen,-,

Courtesy Galerie Bruno Bishofberger,

Collection

Humlebaek, Denmark, Louisiana .Museum Iowa

Brice .Marden, courtesy .Matthew Alarks

Marlborough International Fine

.Art

Galerie Bruno Bishofberger, Zurich

The Alenil

Lewis and Susan Alanilow

Galerie

Courtesv

W brth

Collection Loic Malle, Paris

The

.Museum

.Art

Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Stedelijk \ an

Abbemuseum Fort \^brth, TX. .Modern

Bochum, and Richard Serra

Galerie m,

PhiUips Collection

Zurich. Kunsthaus Ziirich

Westfalen

Saatchi Collection,

New York

Collection,

London

Seibu Department Stores, Ltd, Tok\-o

New York

Newark, The Newark Aluseum

Stefan T. Edlis Collection

Sonnabend Collection,

New Haven,

Collection of the Air and Airs Barney

Southwestern Bell Corporation, San

Beinecke Rare Book and

.Manuscript Library-, Yale Lniversitv"

.A.

New Haven, Yale L niversitv" Art Galler\' New York, The Brookly-n Aluseum New York, Solomon R.Guggenheim Aluseum

New York, The .Metropolitan .Museum

of

New York,

Whitney .Museum of .American

Norfolk. \ A,

The

Chrysler

Museum

Pully/Lausanne, F.AE Alusee

d'.Axt

Louis

Richard L. Feigen,

.Antonio,

Lucien Treillard

Allen Alemorial

.Art

S.

Frohlich Collection, Stuttgart

Collection

JW Froehlich L^K, Ltd

Galerie .Michael Werner, Cologne and

A

Collection of .Mrs

Mctor

The

W Ganz

\'elde,

.Antwerp

New

.Mr and .Mrs Bagley \\ right

Gallen,-,

New

Donald A'oung

Gallery, Seattie

York

Aluseum,

Gabriele Henkel Collection, courtesy

Netherlands, Rijksmuseum

Kroller-Aluller

Ronny Aan de

York

2000, Paris

.Mr and .Mrs Ronald Greenberg,

Oberlin College

and J. Vandermolen

Collection FR.AC de Bourgogne, Dijon

St.

Louis

Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne and Paris

OH,

TX

Air Hiroshi Teshigahara

New York

Contem-

porain

Otterlo,

St.

.Mrs Jack .M. Farris

Courtesy Barbara Gladstone

..Art

Oberlin,

Ebsworth Foundation,

Galerie 1900

.-Art

AI.

A\A

Collection AI. and .Mme.A.drien.Maeght, Paris

DC, Hirshhom Aluseum and

Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution

Washington,

of Art

.Alain Pa\-iot, Paris

Collection of Jon and Barbara Landau

Washington, DC, National Galler\- of .Art

Cologne, Aluseum Ludwig Dallas, Dallas

neue Kunst

fiir

Museum

Seattle, Seattle

Buffalo,

The Art Institute of Chicago Musemn of Contemporan- Art

Jasper Johns

Ellsworth Kelly

Budapest,

Chicago,

.Museum

San Francisco, San Francisco Musevim of

Schaffhausen, Hallen

.Arts

Jedermann Collection, N..A

San Diego, Aluseum of Contemporary Art .Modern

Boston, -Museum of Fine

.Audrey and Sidnev Imias, Los .Angeles

Dakis Joannou, .Athens

Louis,

St.

Kunstmuseum Bern

of .Art

gen

Basel,

Bloomington, Indiana Universit}- Art

The Carnegie .Museum

Rotterdam, .Museum Bo\inans-van Beunin-

Strelow, Diisseldorf

The

Estate of Eva Hesse and courtesy

Robert

.Miller Gallerv,

New York

Hans

and lenders

who

wish to remain

anommous

Foreword

'American Art in the 20th Century'

is

the fourth exhibition in a series initiated by the

Royal Academy of Arts which has attempted to survey the most important

developments of

this century^

The

countn^ by country^

'German Art in the 20th Century', followed two years

series

later

by

began

'British

in

artistic

1985 with

Art in the 20th

Centur)'' and, in 1989, by 'Italian Art in the 20th Centun*'.

The

exhibition of American art has been organized jointly by the Royal

of Arts and the Zeitgeist-Gesellschaft in Berlin, where the Martin-Gropius-Bau.

It

it

was seen

Academy

earlier this year at

Norman Rosenthal, Exhibitions M. Joachimides, Secretary General of

has been selected by

Secretan^ of the Royal Academy, and Christos

the Zeitgeist-Gesellschaft. 'American Art in the 20th Centur\'' differs from the pre-

vious sun^eys in two significant ways. First,

it

has not been selected by experts from

the country- in question, but rather is presented from a ly,

this exhibition highlights art created

sors were weighted towards the

first

European point of \aew. Second-

between 1945 and 1970, while

decades of the century.

fear of contradiction that, during those twenty- five years,

ing force behind many,

aim has been

if

It

its

predeces-

can be said with

American

art

little

was the driv-

not most, developments in art throughout the world.

Our

to present the essence of America's contribution to the visual arts.

We are deeply honoured that Her Majesty The Queen, Dr Richard von Weizsacker, President of the Federal Republic of Germany, and

Mr \Mlliam J. Clinton, President

of the United States of .\merica, have graciously accepted to act as Patrons of the exhibition.

Academy were never going to be large enough to represent adequately all the artists we might have wished to include, many of whose works make ven' particular spatial demands. So we are especially grateful to Charles Saatchi, who has made his Galler\' in Boundan,' Road available to us. For years it has been among the finest spaces in London for showing It

was clear from the outset that the

galleries

of the Royal

contemporary^ trends in art and has an international reputation of the highest calibre.

We

Royal Academy

trust that visitors to the

will

not

fail

to

make

the journey to the

Saatchi Galler}- to complete their impression of this ambitious exhibition.

We

whose generous contribution has alare also most grateful for the support of

are greatly indebted to Merrill L\Tich,

lowed us to go ahead with The Daily

Teleg)-aph,

whose

this project.

enthusiastic

We

commitment has given

us

much encourage-

ment. American Airlines have provided valuable help in kind with transport

We

costs.

have benefited greatly from the expertise, advice and constructive suggestions

of a disinguished Ad\isor\' Committee.

Our greatest thanks, however, private collectors

on both

erously agreed to part with so exhibition.

owed

to the lenders, both public institutions

many outstanding works

and Australia,

who

and

have gen-

of art for the duration of the

We would particularly like to mention Mary Keough Lyman and her col-

leagues at the Universit}' of Iowa

Mural of 1943

We

are

sides of the Atlantic, in Japan

to be

shown

are grateful to

Museum

of .\rt,

who

have enabled Jackson Pollock's

in Cireat Britain for the first time.

Da .id Anfam who,

together with Gerti Fietzek, has contribut-

ed profound knowledge of the subject to the editing of this catalogue. C^lose

and constant collaboration berween the Royal Academv and the Zeitgeist-

we wish to thank members of the staff of both institutions, without whose unceasing work and unhesitating commitment it would ha\c iiecn imjK)ssiblc to realize this enterprise. Gesellschaft has enabled us to bring together the e.vhibition and

Sir

Rockr dk

G'ri y

KCA'O

President, Roval Acadciiu ot Arts

Acknowledgments

The Royal Academy and

the Zeitgeist-Gesellschaft wish to extend their warmest

thanks to the following: H. E.

The Honorable Raymond G. H. Seitz, Ambassador of YMlUam Acquavella, the late Thomas Ammann,

the United States of America,

Richard Armstrong, Heiner Bastian, Douglas Baxter, Neal Benezra, Drusilla Beyfus, Irving Blum, Jenny Bl\^, the late Castelli, Betty

Dominique Bozo, Marie-Puck Broodthaers, Leo

Churcher, Michel Cohen, James Corcoran, Jack Cowart, Philippe

Daverio, Susan Da\idson, Jeffrey Deitch, James Demetrion, Lisa Dennison, Anthony d'Offay,

Andrew Fabricant, Richard L. Feigen, Agnes Fielding, Konrad Fischer, MarRobert H. Frankel, Rudi Fuchs, Stephen Gangstead, Kate Ganz, Ivan

cel Fleiss,

Gaskell, Barbara Gladstone, Arnold B. Glimcher, Alichael Govan, Jan and Ronald

Greenberg, Karsten Greve, Anne d'Harnoncourt, Steven Harvxy, Antonio Barbara Jakobson, Hugues Joffre, Jasper Johns, Piet de Jonge,

Bill

Homem,

Katz, Tetsuo

Kawai, Ellsworth Kelly, Christian Klemm, John R. Lane, Tomas Llorens, Jorg Ludwig,

Edward McBride, Loic Malle, Jan van der Marck,

Silvia

Brice Marden,

Matthew Marks,

Menzel, Jorn xMerkert, Samuel Miller, Luc\' Mitchell-Innes, Charles Moffett,

F. Moore, Adriana and Robert Mnuchin, Francis Naumann, Sasha Newman, Ute and Reinhard Onnasch, Lord Palumbo, Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Edmund Pillsbun-, Earl A. Powell III, Maria Price, Stephen Prokopoff, Emily and the late Joseph Pulitzer, Peter Raue, Urs Raussmiiller, Barr\' Rosen, Alark Rosenthal, Lawrence Rubin, Jennifer Russell, Charles Saatchi, Douglas Schultz, Ileana Sonnabend, Theodore Stebbins, Jr, Hans Strelow, Jeremy Strick, Charles Stuckey, Da\id Sylvester, Sarah Taggart, Alain Tarica, Lucien Treillard, Samuel L. Trower, xMaurice Tuchman, Paul Winkler, Daniel Wolf, Charles V\i-ight, Heribert Wuttke, Donald

Anne

Young, Louis A. Zona.

Exhibition Executive Committee Sir

Roger de Grey, President, Royal Academy of Arts

Academy Exhibitions Committee Academy of Arts Exhibitions Secretary, Royal Academy of Arts

Allen Jones, RA, Chairman, Royal Piers Rodgers, Secretar\", Royal

Norman

Rosenthal,

Christos

M. Joachimides,

Secretar\^ General, Zeitgeist-Gesellschaft

Simonetta Fraquelh, Curatorial Assistant, Royal Academy of Arts

Ruth Seabrook, Sponsorship Alanager, Royal Academy of Arts Katherine Jones, Press Officer, Royal

Academy of Arts

Claudia J. Kahn,\ice President, Corporate Public Relations Services, Merrill LvTich

&

Co., Inc.

Richard Spiegelberg, Executive Director of Corporate Communications, iMerrill

Nigel

Lynch Europe Limited Editor, Telegraph Magazine

Home,

Michele Marcus,

Kim

PR Consultant, The

Medhurst, Manager, Marketing Services

Secretatj

to the

,

Daily Telegraph

UK and Ireland, American Airlines

Committee: Annette Bradshaw

Exhibition Organization London:

Simonettta Fraquelli, Curatorial Assistant

Susan Thompson, Administrator Berlin:

Tina Aujesky, Administrator Karin Osbahr, Curatorial Assistant

Thomas

Biisch, Project

Co-ordinator

Jeanne Greenberg, Exhibition Assistant (New York)

Christos M.Joachimides

Wrenching America's Impulse Notes on Art

into Art

USA

in the

These things astonish

me beyond

words.

Wlliam Carlos \Mlliams

Art

is

produced by

a

succession of individuals expressing

themselves;

it is

not

Marcel

'American Art in the 20th Century'

is

an exhibition devised from

on an understanding of art and history

of progress.

a question

a

Duchamp

European

\'iew-

on this side of the Atlantic. It is a view through a telescope: perception is concentrated on essentials, and the result is not a broad panorama but a critical focus. At the same time, it is a retrospect - an attempt to learn lessons, to take up positions, to make value judgments, from the vantage-point of the end of the centurj^ point, based

Rather than to establish exhibition seeks to

open

a

a

that has taken shape

consensus or to achieve encyclopaedic completeness, this

way

debate on the

in

which the

art

of the

USA has

helped

to define both the appearance and the intellectual histor\^ of art in our centurj'. In

European

art all the

major innovative achievements - Cubism, Expressionism, Fauv-

ism, Suprematism, Dada, and

on

to Surrealism

- belong

opening decades of

to the

the century; the evolution of .American art has followed a reverse pattern. First there

lengthy period of incubation and exploration, marked by a

was

a

ing

artistic personalities:

from

Man Ray

Hopper, to Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell. Then, 1940S, there

emerged

prevailing ideas of artistic debate,

a

art.

generation of artists

New

and very soon

number of outstand-

and Georgia O'Keeffe, by way of Edward

who

radically

in

New

York

in the

mid-

expanded and transformed

York now became the focus of it

had taken over from

Paris,

artistic production and which had been the uncon-

tested centre of the art world since the eighteenth centur\^ In a rapid succession of

- Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, Pop Art, New Abstraction, Antiform, Conceptual Art - the art of the USA dominated the interna-

creative explosions

Minimal

Art,

tional art debate for a quarter of a century, until well into the 1970s. It

ments

in

American

art

during that quarter of

a centun,' that

define

is

develop-

its

essential

contribution to the art of our time.

Even before Marcel Duchamp shovel in a

actually arrived in

hardware store and wrote on

he was already

at the centre

Descending a Staircase (1912; Fig.

tions

and

activities, that

The Armory Show sizeable its

is

'In

art,

3, p.

snow-

(Cat. 18),

The enormous

his painting

Nude on

an active partisanship and orchestration of manifesta-

without parallel

kindled the

creative

Armory Show by

a

40) marks the onset of a personal influence

first

in

the entire histor\' of modernism.

public discourse on

group of both American and European

epoch-making

bought

1915,

Advance of the Broken .Arm'

at the 1913

legendary' significance stems wholly frotn

of the

New York in

of discussion there about the avant-garde.

impact - not to say scandal - created the evolution of American

it

developments

its

artists

European

in art since

modernism

in the

USA.

A

organized the exhibition, but section,

which was

a surx'ey

Impressionism. The turn-of-

the-century avant-garde was represented in force, by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi ami

Francis Picabia - and, not

least,

Wilhelm Lehmbruck,

by Duchamp.

\A^assily

Kandinsk}- and

Christ OS

lo

Duchamp's was to lead to

New York in ed the

M. Joachiimdes

a

unique and lifelong

artistic friendship

his first

ready-mades

museum

expressive resource of \isual

art,

of what

art

is

York,

Duchamp found-

of modern art in the USA.

by way of The Large Glass (1915-23; Fig.

(1915),

Duchamp

of this century has done, and

New

and creative collaboration. In

Etant donnes (1946-66), and to the introduction of language as

27), to

which

Ray, directly after his arrival in

1920, together with Katherine S. Dreier and iMan Ray,

Societe Anony?}ie, in effect the first

From

artist

Man

encounter with

first

at the

left his

mark on American

same time

can be. As Craig Adcock has put

radically

'The

it:

2, p.

formal and

art as

no other

changed the conception of the present day,

pluralistic art

characterized by strategies of appropriation and an

a

"amthing goes"

attitude,

would be unthinkable without Duchamp's example.'

The more

closely

we engage with American

polarit}- that exists

tion in the

within

work of

it,

The two

art.

art,

both in attitudes to faces of a

the

art

more

and

clearly

we

perceive the

in their concrete manifesta-

Janus - two phenomena that are funda-

mental to our understanding of America and also to America's understanding of itself- are reflected

One is

art

of this centun'.

of the poles can be described as an inward longing for the transcendental:

what Barnett

its

and formulated in American

Newman described

subhme'.

as 'the abstract

earliest artistic expression in landscape.

The

It is a

this

longing that finds

landscape paintings of the 1850s and

1860S by Frederic E. Church and Albert Bierstadt are surprising in their evocative

power; the formal counterpart of

this

power

lies in

the

artists'

use of large, mostly

horizontal formats. These imposing landscape paintings reflect the experience of an

untouched vastness that cosmos, settlers.

tion

as

acts as a

overwhelming

The

metaphor -

a parable,

landscape

as the real

itself

ideological impact of these paintings

is

even - for an overw^helming

must have been

echoed

to the earliest

in the title of an exhibi-

shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York some years

ican Paradise'. In the early tw^entieth century this pole of the

ago: 'Amer-

American experience

best represented by the formal language of the sublime in the

is

work of Georgia

O'Keeffe. In altered form, this concern with landscape played a part within the radical change to abstraction that took place in the 1940s. In the large canvases of Jackson Pollock,

and

later in the

powerful landscape abstractions of CKfford

Still, it

acquires a heroic,

pagan dimension. At the same time, the sublime, transcendental element resounds through the colour

fields

of Mark Rothko;

Newman and, with yet greater rigour, too, the

message

is

immaterial projection,

ican art

invoked in the stringent austerity of Here,

compellingly reinforced by the use of a large-sized canvas. Grad-

ually, abstraction freed itself

Turrell.

it is

in the 'Black' paintings of Ad Reinhardt.

from the

a light-filled

materialit}' of the painting

space -

as,

and turned into an

for instance, in the

work of James

This marks the conclusion, so far, of a process that has run through Amersince Church, disclosing - in a variety of idioms - the heritage of European

Romanticism.

The streets,

other face of Janus shows

itself in

Coca-Cola and Marlboro, pulp

the

realit\'

literature

of the big

cit\',

the dirt

on the

and sex - 'popular culture' -

or,

equally, in the isolation of human beings in the metropolis, as so tellingly captured in

among The Hopper and

the paintings of Hopper. Catastrophes and disasters, suicides and raw violence

the sk\'scrapers form the opposite pole to the metaphor of landscape as Elysium.

outstanding representatives of this early polarization are, respectively. O'Keeffe.

A minute observation of technological civilization and of the work of industn', a coolly h\^erbolic presentation of objects of use

of the

realists

of the 1920s. However,

of American art fully came into

took a

far

more

its

and united

it

to create highly personal codes

was not

until the 1950s that this

second pole

own, when Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns

painterly approach,

sionist experience,

it

and

and consumption, marked the works

which had developed out of the Abstract Expres-

with elements drawn from the ever\'day emironment

and sjTnbols of urban culture.

Notes on Art

in the

USA

ii

From the early 1960s onwards, with Pop Art, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol took up the theme of city life, along with the fetishized common object, advertising and comic strips - a second-hand reality with which they also confronted

themes of war and violence. Their reality,

ment - the impartiality of and Mike Kelley.

The

strategy, that of a distanced appropriation of

has remained in use to this day, with an added extreme of analytical detachthe chronicler - in the works of, for example, Jeff

longing for an abstract apotheosis of

propriate

two

are the

it,

same

versions of the

faces of Janus.

Nor

reality,

at

and the urge to dissect and ap-

are these restricted to visual art. Parallel

American

polarity are to be found in

WTiitman's hymns to nature

Koons

one extreme and Williams

S.

literature,

with Walt

Burroughs's raw delin-

eations of outcasts and casualties at the other.

one of the purposes of this exhibition to

It is

of innovations.

something as

selection concentrates

essentially new, or at

endows

that

The

a

which he succeeds

Surrealists, but

Gerald

the Figure 5 in Gold

Murphy

are 'icons'

at

which the

artist

invents

in a specific act of concentration

with his pioneering works of the second decade of

Duchamp, he

the century, when, with Picabia and

Saw

the story of American art as a history

work with exemplary character. For instance, we do not show Man Ray

one of the Paris /

tell

on the moment

New York Dada.

initiated

by Charles Demuth (Cat.

45),

Razor or

Villa

America by

and Odol or Lucky Strike by Stuart Davis (Cat. 49, 50) of the 1920s, simultaneously magical and precise; they evoke an American

reality that

is

(Cat. 42, 43)

emblematic

in the extreme.

The New York

cityscapes of O'Keeffe and

Hopper, metaphors of isolation from the same period, complete an 'American Image of Life' that

first

cn^stalHzed at an early stage in American art of this centur\\ Alex-

ander Calder and Joseph Cornell are represented largely by their works of the 1930s,

which bear witness

to an original, creative dialogue with

European Surrealism.

We

of Abstract Expressionism in 1943, in such works as Arshile Gorky's Wateifall (Cat. 81) and Pollock's Mural and Guardians of the Seart (Cat. 86, present the

87),

first stirrings

which mark the

decisive breakthrough to a

de Kooning and Barnett

moment when

Newman

are also represented

own

each found his

new language of expression. Wlllem

unmistakable

by works of the 1940s, the

st\de (see Cat. 95, 107).

Almost

all

the other w^orks that give voice to this historic upheaval stem fi^om the 1950s, the

decade in which their

mark on

Still,

Rothko, Reinhardt, Franz Kline and

is

Francis decisively set

the image of Abstract Expressionism.

new substance

Again, the great shift that infused reality

Sam

moment

captured at the

Robert Rauschenberg,

Ujititled

of

its

into

American

art's

The

genesis: in the 1950s.

dialogue with

early

works of

{Red Painting) or Pink Door {Qzt. 135, 136), like Jasper

Johns's Target and White Numbers (Cat. 146, 147), combine subjective painterliness

with objects from daily

life (a

combination introduces principle,

a

new

conveyed through

a

door, a

window

experience of

frame, a clock,

realit\',

a

cup, a chair). This

based on the Dadaist collage

highly personal artistic language of great evocative

force.

The that of

1950s brought

Cy Twombly,

a

number of different answers

to Action Painting: for example,

with his unique sign language of scripts from

imagination, of ciphers that encode

a

poetic cosmos, as in Free

a journal

that of the new, radical abstraction in Ellsworth Kelly's Black, Tiro Hljites and

Two Blacks (Cat. 130, 131) or Frank and Squalor (Cat. 153, 155).

A

Stella's 'Die

and

lil.vte.

Fahne Hoch!' and Maniage of Reason

decisive turning-point in the evolution oi the

American

came at makes its comments

attitude to art

the onset of the 1960s, with the emergence of Pop Art, an art that --^

of the

IVl.^eeler (C-At. 142);

on everyday events and experiences with a cool detachment and an ostensibly impersonal imager)' marked by an alienating appropriation of the formal principles of commercial design. lere, again, we have tried to capture the w ;n it all began, through works by Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Richard Artschwa1

ger,

almost everv one ot which dates from

this earl\- period.

12

Christos

From of their

the first

M. Joach'nnides

same decade, we show two

different artistic approaches at the

moment

appearance: the sculptures of Minimal Art, in which Donald Judd, Carl

Andre and Dan Flavin were developing an art that took over and redefined space, and the work of such artists as Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, who worked with the spontaneous, unmediated human reaction to materials, objects and visions and put their own

existential experiences into

senting developments since the the

moment of their genesis.

In

throughout, been to trace the

late 1970s fact,

new, radical forms of sculpture. In pre-

we have, once

again, attempted to pinpoint

the guiding principle behind this exhibition has,

artistic

process to

its

inception.

Norman

Rosenthal

American

A View From Europe

Art:

Max Ernst, arts

around 1950, speaking

New York City said

Street in

at the Arts

Club on Eighth

that significant changes in the

formerly occurred every three hundred years whereas

now

they take place even,' twent)' minutes. John Cage'

The

evidence

lies in

the paintings and sculptures produced in America during this

century: 1943 was the year of parthenogenesis. In a

works of the European

artists in

be threatening to take over the

many

America,

New

York

way

it

was

a

art world.

response to the

who

of them refugees,

appeared to

They were on show

at Pegg\'

end of 1942 - Picasso, Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miro, Kasimir Malevich,

Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery

at the

Alexander Archipenko, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Jacques Lipchitz, Amedee Ozenfant, Yves Tanguy, Ben Nicholson.

The

exhibition excluded Americans, with the

exception of the virtually honorary European, Alexander Calder. There were other big

names

in

New

York

With

Salvador Dali, Fernand Leger, Andre Masson, Andre Breton, the high priest of Surrealist orthodoxy.

at the time:

Roberto Matta and, above

all,

the exception of Matta, they generally kept to themselves, partiy for linguistic

reasons and partiy because they regarded most American

artists as provincial cousins.

art had had many previous injections from Europe, most famously the Armory Show, but America in 1943 still felt like a young country^ in ever\' cul-

American 1913

tural sense; ambitious certainly, but deeply conscious of its provinciality and, in the

Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, defiantiy so. The possibilopened up by the Armory Show were immediately curtailed by the First World

case of artists like ities

War, but

a

major impact was made

from

Paris,

where

York, where

it

it

had been

in the

person of Duchamp.

by sending Nude Descending a

as a significant cultural figure

a little-noticed,

Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse, collectors, little attention

all

invented himself

marginal Cubo-Futurist work, to

became the modernist painting par

bringing of news from Europe to

He

Staircase (Fig. 3, p. 40)

New York in whom were

of

was paid to indigenous

excellence.

Ultimately,

the form of

New

beyond the

work by Van Gogh,

avidly acquired

by the discerning

artists.

Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer, working in a field in which .\merica had always

been highly innovative, even extraordinary, and in which

own

with

its

it

could effordessly hold

its

transatlantic counterparts, for a short time ran a gallerv^ called 291 that

showed such painters

as

Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and, above

Georgia O'Keeffe

(see Cat. 1-3, 33-41).

York, and none at

all

in

But

artists like

these had few oudets in

Europe, where reputations had to be made. Only

all,

New

Man Ray

and Calder were to integrate themselves successfully into the contemporary' Euro-

pean

art world, the hierarchy

of which in the 1920s was largely determined on the

Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris. In 1928 the

New

York Times announced, presum-

ably having received the press release from Stieglitz himself: 'Artist love, gets

$25,000 tor

six panels.' It

apparently bought by

a

involving 'the biggest

sum

French

was referring to

collector. It

of furdicr works by the 1

2

A

London, 1968, p. 30. (TKeeffc anJ Sticglitz: An

Year from Monday,

See Benita F.isler, American Ro?nancc,

New

York, 1991, p. 370.

place in the

was not

ever paid for so small

present day American', was revealed as artist.'

a

hoax on

O'Keeffe 's work

European consciousness of

six

art; as

a

paints for

until 1991 that this purchase,

group of

modem

Stieglitz's part to

at its best it is,

who

flower paintings by O'Keeffe,

paintings by a

encourage the

might have found

a

sale

proper

c\en today there are practically

no works by her or her contemporaries - Dove, Stuart Davis, Charles Dennith.

Noivnaii Rosenthal

14

Charles Sheeler (see Cat. 44-54) -in the leading museums and collections in Europe. The career of John Covert, whose few surviving works show him to have

been

at least as imaginative

an

years' involvement in the circle of

abandoned

art in 1923 to

become

more famous Dove,

the far

artist as

paradigm of the situation in America

is

perhaps

in the first decades of this century. After a

Duchamp, Man Ray and a travelling

New York Dada,

a

few

Covert

salesman in California, where he died

in obscurit}' in i960.

After Stieglitz, the next heroic attempt to invent an American art was

made by

Franklin D. Roosevelt's government as part of its New^ Deal polic}' in response to the

The WTA (V^'orks Progress Administration) was established to patronize - hundreds of them - by providing them with commissions for, among other things, murals in schools, aerodromes, post offices, railway stations and any number Depression.

artists

of other public buildings. WTien, in 1942, the United States entered the war, Roose-

Many of the

murals

were covered up and thousands of easel paintings were removed from public

institu-

\^TA,

velt gave the

own

in his

words, 'an honorable discharge'.

many to be destroyed. Most were paintings that illustrated aspects of the American way of life, though abstract works had also been commissioned. It was an tions,

extraordinary episode in the histor\^ of American art - the United States potentially imitating the early years of Russian Soviet society but,

El

Lissitzk)^,

lasting

no sense of innovation except

and most worthwhile legacy of the

alas,

there was

no AIale\ach or

in the field of photography, ultimately the

WTA.

By the end of 1942 the predicament of art in America must have seemed desperate. Europe was destroyed, and artistically exhausted, yet the 'degenerate' artists fi"om that continent were arrogandy asserting their moral and artistic superiority in the happened that it was at this very moment, just when all seemed lost, that Jackson Pollock produced his first real masterpieces, destined to reopen the territor\' of l^'estern art. In 1943 he created such epoch-making paintings as The SheUnited

States. It just

IVolf (Fig.

i),

Pasiphae (iMetropolitan

Museum

of Art,

New

York), Guardians of the

Secret (Cat. 87) and Mural (Cat. 86) - works that were to suggest endless possibilities for the language of the visual arts, as he himself undoubtedly believed they would.

These amazing

pictures, beautiful in their aggressive crudity; at

once primitive and

culturally highly informed, with their totemic references to Egyptian,

American Indian cultures heavily encrusted ;

like a

Roman and

Byzantine iconostasis, were unlike

an\T:hing seen in painting since Picasso's Demioiselles d'Avignon of 1907 (in

New York's

Museum

of Alodern art since 1934), and the great 1913 compositions of W^assily Kandinsk}'^, on show in New York at Solomon Guggenheim's Museum of Non-Objec-

where Pollock had worked for a short time as a security guard. These works by the American went beyond the innovations of Picasso and Kandinsky in a very profound sense. If Picasso fractured the figure, making it visible from a number of different viewpoints, and Kandinsky attempted in a Utopian manner to enter the spirit. Pollock contrived with his painting to get under his own skin, inside

tive Painting,

his

own

brain,

and attempted to describe

his

own

personal and cultural anguish, even

Fig.

I

Jackson Pollock, The She-Wolf, 1943. of Modem Art, New York;

The Museum

Purchase, 82.44

Roberto Matta, Invasion of the Night, 194 1. San Francisco Museum of Art; Bequest of Jacqueline-Marie Onslow Ford Fig. 2

A \^ew

to celebrate a personal abyss in a

way

that art since the Renaissance had, in

to describe the outside world, consciously avoided.

of the 1950s

who was

countless American

Remus - the Romulus

metaphor

virgins. It

search

and the feasting that in great secrecy to

these festivals, perhaps, that Guardiaiis of

is

which

celebrating, a painting

its

New York poet

myth of Romulus and

New York,

for

honor of the god Consus, held

established there 'in

is

a

if

of Modern Art and the friend of

describes Pollock's interest in the

Rome, perhaps

which were borne kidnapped the Secret

Frank O'Hara, the

The Museum

also a curator at

artists,

birth of

from Europe

a

is

marvel of spatial confinement and pas-

sionate formalism, formalism brought to the point of Expressionistic defensiveness.''

Mural, Pollock's largest canvas, painted for Peggy Guggenheim's apartment in one

months of staring at the empt\' canvas, was interpreted by O'Hara bacchanalian festival attending this resolution, imbued as it is with the abstract ardor of the images in the other paintings of this group'.-* But Mural can equally confrenzied night after as 'the

vincingly be read as an endless, wide-screened forest of Indian totem poles or a heavy

No

stampede of buffalo driving across the plains of middle America. created in America could compare with

it

veritable Rite of Spring of American

even

ence either to cheer

it

art,'

on or to drown

in

if at

it is

the

no public audipeer group - W^il-

that time there was

But Pollock's

in catcalls.

it

painting ever

raw energy. As has been noted,

lem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and the others - knew, and they could do nothing but accept It was too large by eight inches to fit into Peggy Guggenheim's apartment; under Duchamp's supervision eight inches were cut off

the challenge of the painting itself

one end, and shortly after the war the work was given to the University of Iowa Art Museum, far fi-om the madding art crowd. From 1943 through to the early 1950s the Action Painters, as they were christened by Harold Rosenberg, or Abstract Expressionists, Greenberg, each in

his

own way and

at his

own

were called by Clement

as they

made

pace

a significant

contribution

Without a trace of irony, except perhaps in the case of de Kooning, and responding in no small part to the political realities of the time - the War, the Holocaust in Europe, the apparent threat of imminent world destruction by the atomic bomb, the conservative reaction in America (McCarthy), even the intensified hurly-burly of city life - each retreated into contemporary language of

to the reinvention of the

a

hermetic

stylistic

cosmos

to

make

a

statement of his

art.

own

in painting

about

this

new

world. At this time any sense of banality in art was rejected; in the cases of Pollock

and Rothko

art

it led ultimately to more or less premedwhose paintings became translations of the subabstract forms - rocky landscapes, with metamorphic

was so deadly serious that

itated self-destruction.

By 1952

Still,

American space into as if by a prehistoric race of giants - was able to write how 'we are now committed to an unqualified act not illustrating outworn myths or contemporary- alilimity of

forms created

bis.

Each must accept

ment of each of

total responsibility for

the abstract painters.

Ad

what he

executes'.''

This was the achieve-

Reinhardt, who, with his black square

paintings of the late 1950s and their conscious reference to Malevich and Suprematism, arrived at

what he termed

anticipated 'painting that

is

'timeless' art (see Cat. 125),

not illustration, not pictures of fat

premonition of the late Philip Guston] or pictures at a 3

O'llnri, jfiickson Pollock,

New York,

man

p. 18.

his

Ibid.

5

David Anfani, Abstract Expression Lmi, London,

1990, p. 100. 6 Quoted in Alfred H. Barr Jr.s introduction to

The Neu^ Arnerican Pahitmg, the catalog'ue of the international travelling exhibition of that

name organized by /Vrt in

he

Museum

of

Modern

New

CJallery,

7

1

York and shown at the Tate London, in I-'ebruary and March

with scenery, but

a

man

in love

own

1943 already

An artist said:

a painter

is

[a

not

with painting.'" F.ach artist had

agenda, or rather subject-matter. Rothko arrived at his mature st\de around

1949-50 with

his translucent veils

cosmic experiences that

relate

of thinly applied colour suggestive of quite specific

both to dissolution and death but which none the

less

require from the viewer a conscious empathetic effort to complete the effect (see Cat. 1

13-18).

Not for nothing were his final

Seagram Building,

New

cycles of paintings

-

for example, those for the

York, and in the Rothko (>hapel in

meditative environments in which the beholder nuist

1959.

him- or herself Rothko's paintings,

Reinhardt, lecture of 194?, in Barbara Rose, Ait-as-An: The Selected Writings of Ad

periences, yet always relevant to his time.

Reinhiirdt, Berkeley, 1991, p. 47.

ings-

ed.,

in

with big cigars

A formalist interpretation of the painting ot this time is not helpful.

1959,

4

in love

all.

had

men

Oru'/nent, Cathi-dni,

like

those ol

The

first

lose

Newman, titles

Houston - conceived

as

and then rediscover

are quasi-religious ex-

of Newman's

own

paint-

Shinnncr Bright, The Promise, Oiitciy and, fmalK', Stations of

Norman

i6

Rosenthal

P>w>..y>tfn'to.*

- translate metaphors of Judeo-Christian belief into

Croj-j-

/^/7f

contemporan,' painting.

bound

They were intended

the works into the

between

modern

w

European

new

kind

of

to act as an aid to the \iewer, but also

art tradition, so

long concerned with conflicts

Newman

believed that the evolution of

the sublime and renewal.

reality,

a

Fig. 3

Jackson Pollock, Xumbe?-

The Museum of Modem

Europe

art

1948.

Fig.

4

Robert Rauschenberg, Charlene, 1954.

Museum,

.•\msterdam

had been so preoccupied with questions

in previous centuries

of beaut}' that the essence of

1,

New York;

Purchase, 77.50

Stedelijk

art in

Art,

was somehow demeaned. As he wrote

famous

in a

essay in the magazine The Tigers Eye in 1948, just as he was about to find his true st\4e

with the Here

first

of his One?nent paintings (see Fig.

in America,

some of

us, free

8, p. 90):

from the weight of European

culture, are finding the answer,

completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find

by

We are

it

freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you,

European

that have been the devices of \\'estem

man or

'life',

we

are

painting. Instead of

making [them] out of ourselves, out of our own

making

feelings.

cathedrals out of Christ,

The image we produce

is

who

at

the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone it

vnll

look

without the nostalgic glasses of historv."

This

effort of

Newman's, and indeed of

all

his great contemporaries, to

from the European tradition was heroic but like

in part, as indicated

break away

by the ethos of titles

those quoted above, ultimately doomed.

It

was incredibly hard for these

artists to

break free of Europe, dependant

had been for so long on Cubist or Surrealist modes of making

art.

as

they

Gorky, born in

1904, was almost fort\^ years old before he found his authentic voice during the last five years

of his

with works

life

like Watetfall (Cat. 81), after

having progressed

through Fau\asm and variations on Picasso's themes. Arguably, he never emancipated himself completely from Surrealism, though largely with the help of xVIatta (see Eig.

from Paris

in 1939,

the end of his

he created

life finally

European models. With until

1949-50

we have

his

own

first

who came

to

New York

transcendent, technique that at

feeling rather than reliance

de Kooning, Rothko,

argued,

American contemporaries,

the Chilean artist

a personal, ultimately

demonstrated

Still,

his

Newman

that they succeeded in jettisoning their

Pollock, who, as lighter, less

2),

among

and others

it

upon

was not

European baggage; even

achieved maturity around 1943, developed a

anguished freedom with the legendary works of 1948-50, such as

Num-

3), Autumn Rhythm (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Lavender Mist (National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Number 2 (Cat. 89). For most critics,

ber I (Fig.

these paintings represent the pinnacle of Pollock's achievement, and they are indeed extraordinarv^, strangely elusive, highly individual

and with the utmost

authenticit}'

works that render

in great detail,

and refinement, states of mind and nervous spatial body - filigree-Hke X-rays of the mind, body,

energies both within and without the

psyche and

sex, free

be with these works

of inhibition yet totally precise in their delineation of mood. To is

to be in the presence of the artist in a ver\" particular way.

8 Xev\-man, 'The Sublime

is

Now'

(1948),

reprinted in David and Cecile Shapiro, eds.. Abstract Kxpressionisvi:

A

Cntical Record,

Cambridge, AL\, 1990, p. 328. 9 Rosenberg, 'The .\merican Action Painters' (1952), reprinted in Shapiro, op.

cit.,

pp.

75-85ID O'Hara, 'Cy Twombly at Stable Gallery', ^rf7;eii'5, January 1955, p-57-

A Mew from Europe If

1943 was the

first

Rosenberg described "Marxists"

it

moment

big

in

American

art,

1950 was the second. Harold

in an article published in 1952:

(WPA unions,

artists

'many of the painters were

congresses) - they had been trying to paint Society.

Others had been trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism) the same thing

The

— The

moment came when it was decided to paint.

big

on the canvas was

gesture

17

.

of liberation, fi-om Value -

a gesture

amounts

it

to

.Just To Paint.

.

political, aes-

thetic, moral.'" It

had taken

tween

just

seven years for

existential anxiety that

and

artists

critics to

reach this point. Caught be-

dominated aesthetic thinking on both

sides of the

Atlantic and attitudes of an almost pragmatic matter-of-factness in the face of the

complexities of the American predicament, the American painters worked alone,

whether

in

New York or elsewhere, yet bound to one another by affinity as well as by

the critical context. Their philosophy tied

them

to Europe; the originality of their

matter-of-fact attitudes and sense of scale, appropriate to their situation, was uniquely

American. This

latter,

Newman claimed, was

their first priority,

of American art

lay. It

was certainly not long

in

It

was, in

artists

fact,

and there the future

coming.

almost simultaneously invoked by the next generation of American

- figures such

as Ellsworth Kelly,

Robert Rauschenberg,

Cy Tw'ombly and Jas-

per Johns (see Cat. 132-52). As early as 1951 Kelly, living in Paris after having been

Europe

stationed in

as a

young GI, produced

mature works, and Rau-

his first

schenberg, born in 1925, just two years later than Kelly, created his

own radical

black-

and-white paintings and exhibited them

at the Betty Parsons Gallery, where only

three seasons earlier Pollock had held his

first

epoch-making exhibition.

Nineteen-forty-nine to 1952 were the legendary years of Black Mountain College,

where John Cage, Rauschenberg and Twombly came together. Rauschenberg was

to

Museum of of Newman,

create seemingly anarchic works, such as Charlene (Fig. 4) and Bed (1955;

Modern

Art,

New York),

at a

when many of the

time

greatest canvases

Rothko and even Pollock himself had either just been, or were about to be, painted. Twombly invented his own graphic and painterly methods which, as early as 1955, were described by Frank O'Hara as 'drawn, scratched and crayoned over and under the surface with as much attention to aesthetic tremors as to artistic excitement'. " Johns's earliest visual statements of fact date from around 1954, the time of Still,

his first Flag.

The

reaction to Abstract Expressionism was fast and furious, and might almost be

regarded

as the

other side of the same coin: one generation pitting

other in the same boxing ring, as activity in

artists

such as

itself against

were. This untidy concurrence of diverse

America continued throughout the

which period well as

it

an-

artistic

1950s and early 1960s, during

late

Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg,

as

Jim Dine, Edward Kienholz, James Rosenquist and George Segal, quickly own canons of factuality, which Newman had so precisely defined as

established their

the

way forward

for

American

art.

But by now it was not only the facts of the sublime, - its mountains and endless plains, as well

abstract definitions of the space of America as its skyscrapers

street

life,

looking up towards infinity - but rather the facts of the trash of

blatant sexuality, instantaneous imagery

and advertising that became part of the time perceived, perhaps even by the

reality

The spite

in the

The

resulting works, for a short

artists, as a rebellion,

the language of Abstract Expressionism,

seemed capable of reaching

drawn from comics, newspapers

of art.

it

United

political threats to the nation's well-being,

New York in

particular, in

from Korea to Metnam, encour-

first

time the development ot

duction and the entire infrastructure of the art world industr\' centred on

''

to

a real market lor contemporar\' art. Dozens sprang up by the 1980s there were hundreds - and the artists, their pro-

aged for the of galleries

homage

States.

increasing prosperity of post-war America, and of

of

ultimately paid

only by virtue of the grand scale that art

servicing an apparently insatiable

demand. WTiereas

there had been virtually no

contemporary American

call for

in the first half art

of

New

this

York,

centuiy

(throughout the 1920s

and 193US Old Masters and Impressionist works of art had poured into American collections from Europe), suddenly the countr\' opened itself to a new perspective in

1

8

Nonnan

Rosenthal

which the past counted

for ven- Httle

and contemporaneit\- was

Abstract Expressionism seemed old-fashioned and, ten years

could be regarded as Old Masters belonging to a myiJiical ever, that

they were ver\'

much

part of the present,

further transformation in the works of both the

all.

By

the mid-1960s

later, its

past.

The

practitioners

truth was,

which was about

to

\\o\\--

undergo

a

Minimal and the post-Minimal

artists.

This new group worked without

of irony -

a trace

if

anything, with an increased

seriousness, and a heightened awareness of the sublime effects that could be achieved

through simple matter-of-factness. cast metal or

welded assemblage

Xow using transformed sculptural material - not

(as in

the case of David Smith and

Mark di

Suvero),

but rather simple everyday, industrial materials often presented serially - they redis-

covered in a decisive way the potential of sculptural space. Ultimately, a further

this

was only

consequence of the moves that had been made in the second half of the

1940s and were still being made, in particular, by Newman and Rothko, who in the meantime had \-irtually become Minimahst artists themselves. Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol Le\Mtt, Dan Flavin and Walter De Maria ignored painting (see Cat. 201-10), but within a given area, using steel, bricks, glass, light tubes, their also

works evoke spaces defined not only by

by Reinhardt

(see Cat. 123-5).

^^^

abandoned, and Agnes Martin, Frank

Robert Mangold

(see Cat. 153-5,

artists is to

fluorescent

and Rothko, but

canvas as a field for action was by no means Stella,

193-200)

all

Robert R}Tnan, Brice Marden and contributed in their different ways to

extending the language invented barely two decades

Each of these

ph^ood and

Newman

earlier.

be understood as part of

kaleidoscope of strategies

a

which, born in 1943, achieved their first artistic expression around 1950. Suddenly, there was scope for endless invention, a struggle for ever greater purity based on an

on the materialit}' of the ever\^day. By this time similar movements were springing up in Europe, where, on the whole, Minimal Art received a more favourable public response than in America; but in Europe such strategies were surrounded by more complex and ambiguous cosmologies, as in the case of, say, Joseph Beuys, Jannis Koimellis, Richard Long and Mario Merz. It could certainly be maintained, however, that an American sense of scale had been absorbed fully by the European avant-garde. -Another related group of sculptors, including Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra (see Cat. 211-20), followed two seasons later on the heels of the Alinapparent formalism

imalists

that, nevertheless, justified itself

by

and turned the aesthetic upside-down, advancing

tions first adopted

by Pollock and Newman

in the 1940s

its

still

intense focus

further aspects of posi-

and 1950s. Serra, even to

this

day, can be appreciated as an Abstract Expressionist sculptor of heroic ambition (see

Fig. 5)-

Fig. 5

Richard Serra, Running Arcs (For John

Cage). Installation in the

Kunstsammlung

Xordrhein-W'estfalen, Diisseldorf, 1992

A Mew from Recent theories of

19

at some time in the mid-1970s in the breakdown in modernism occurred, perhaps similar to which almost took place in Europe at the end of the 1930s, resulting in a kalei-

United States and that

Europe

have suggested that

art

Europe

in

a

doscopic, multi-layered attitude to st\de.

The

essence of this

tened 'post-modernism', was held to be appropriation

nothing similar had happened before in the

history^

new approach,

(st\ listic theft)

of art.

-

as

chris-

though

The unprecedented

extent

of the appropriation has admittedly made post-modernism fundamentally different

from comparable phenomena in the history of art. The explosion of the art market on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1970s surpassed amTdiing experienced even in the 1960s and found

rendering

difficult to

tional outsider, appeared to

almost became the

New York. It caused immense confusion, make aesthetic judgments. The artist, the tradihave moved to the centre; the sub-culture position

perfect expression in

its

more

ever

it

norm

;

the poHtics of deconstruction affected not only art

but also the consumers of that

art.

sibly anti-elitist positions, with

market mechanisms alone (certainly not

The 'new

determining hierarchies. critics as

art that

painting' of the early 1980s, perceived by

attempted to decode - or rather re-code, for

relating to race, gender, sexuality

saw - and sees -

remains

art at its best

hermetic

a

arts.

Problems

and dispossessed groups became the subject-matter

itself as

an equal partner in the dialogue. (That

the swift communication permitted by

and those involved with

ago should not be forgotten.) larly

some

Discussion no longer centred exclusively on America: Western Europe

art.

artists

art criticism)

anti-modernist, was rapidly replaced by post-modernist, media-orientated

language - patterns of creativity within the various areas of the \asual of

itself,

Aesthetics were increasingly informed by osten-

art cross the ^Atlantic

The

That America, and

is

partly the result of

the ease with which

compared

to even tw'enty years

stock exchange of art ideas and art goods, particu-

during the 1980s, was almost

where easy money was

modern technologv:

ever\'A\^here

certainly in those areas of the world

;

hand.

at

New York in

particular,

is

the focus for the culture of our last

WTien Leo and Gertrude Stein, John Quinn, the Arensbergs, Katherine Dreier and any number of other committed modernist collectors - far more committed, incidentally, than their European contemporaries - made their way to Europe they were preparing the ground for the future success of American art. Gertrude Stein, writing about Picasso in France just before the Second \\brld War and not really in touch with the New York art scene, remarked: half-centur\' cannot be disputed.

I

knew

that a creator

do not yet know as

it,

is

contemporar\', he understands what

but he

no one has ever seen

it,

in the twentieth centur)' its

own and

Picasso

is

is

the earth has a splendor that

it

when

the contemporaries

a centun,-

which sees the earth

contemporan,-

contemporar\- and as the twentieth centun,-

is

is

never has had, and as ever\thing destroys

and nothing continues, so then the twentieth cenmr\- has

of this century, he has that strange

qualit\-

a

itself

splendor which

is

of an earth that one has never seen and

of things destroyed as they have never been destroyed."

Whether Gertrude Stein would have understood Pollock is perhaps beside the point, but there were a number of Americans on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in New York, who did comprehend the liberating possibilities of that new art. Ultimately, Pollock freed art

itself,

rather than

appreciation, from purely local con-

its

he was going against the grain and, unhke the

cerns. In this

Stieglitz circle,

earlier artists

of the

he did so successfully. In one of his rare public statements Pollock said

that 'the idea of an isolated .American painting, so popular in this countr\' during the thirties,

atics

or

seems absurd to

me

just as the idea

of creating

if it did, it

would solve

itself:

an American

is

Selden Rodman, Conversations with

New

contemporary

New York, 193% p. 50.

Stein, Picasso,

12

\'ork, 1957,

quoted

Artists,

New

1967. P- 73-

York,

Museum

of Modern

painting are independent of any

Shortly before he died in

May

all

it

one

or not, but the basic problems of country'.'"

1956 Pollock gave an inten-iew.

He

cared

little

for

the term Abstract Expressionism and even less for the terms non-objective and non-

in Francis

v. (.y Connor, Jackson Pollock, exhibition cata-

logue.

American mathem-

an American and his painting would

naturally be qualified by that fact whether he wills 11

a purely

or physics would seem absurd... in another sense the problem doesn't exist at

.\rt,

representational. time... but

when

'I

am

vcr\-

representational

\'ou are painting

some of

the time and a

little all

the

out of your unconscious, figures arc bound to

Norman

20

Rosenthal

emerge... painting paints

what he

is

a state

of being... painting

is

self-discovery.

Every good

artist

13

14

Of course,

artists, but with Pollock there is a difference. His where things became possible that were not possible before. Pollock's paintings have sculptural, emironmental, theatrical and temporal implications that no previous painting had possessed. The ideas of chance, of inherent self-destruction and of art occupying areas of real life were extended way

art

Pollock, radio interview with William

Wright, is.'"

this is true

broke through into

of all great

a

new

in

O'Connor, op. cit.,

De Kooning on Autumn

1967, reprinted in Shapiro, op.

15

Grohmarm, 'Die neue amerikanische Da- Tagesspiegel September 1958.

Malerei', 7

attitude as

much as an}^ing else art

from

scious of the fact that

The

quickly.

that enabled Pollock, at the age of thirty-one, to cut

European shackles and run loose. He was more or less conthis was an act of will on his part his own generation followed

its

;

time was right, the market was right, and

after 1945 the

American way should become the

tecture, popular music, advertising

and the manner of his death, but

became

ever\' bit as

much

a role

and

role

it was perhaps inevitable that model in art as much as in archi-

film. Pollock,

not only because of his

life st\de

also because of the aesthetic qualities of his painting,

model

as James

Dean

or Jack Kerouac, and

it

did not

take long for that message to reach Europe. In 1958 and 1959 an exhibition entitied

'The New^ American Painting' made International Council of the

German

a

Museum

triumphant tour of Europe, organized by the of Modern Art. W^ll Grohmann, the doyen of

more than the originator of the movement. Standing in front of his tremendous canvases one does not think of styles and slogans, but only of talent and singularity. Here is reality not of yesterday but of art critics,

wrote

at the time: 'Pollock is

tomorrow... an exuberance of the continent, the oceans and the

forests, the

con-

when

ceiving of an undiscovered world comparable to the time 300 years ago

the

pioneers came to his country.''' In 1958 memories of the horrors of the Second \\'orld

Europe,

as

years that

was the optimism of the American Dream

dream has become

to earth again.

War were

in the

United

tarnished, to say the least, and

The development

period reflects that process as well

still

ver\" real in

States.

Over the

America brought down

of the country's art over a comparatively short as, if

not better than, any other branch of cultural

Rauschenberg's Canyon of 1959 (Cat. 137), showing the American eagle with a weight suspended from it, demonstrates how quickly this self-critical awareness activity.

evolved.

By the

mid-sLxties an acutely self-referential process was already taking place

within the \isual

arts,

assuming

a

Holzer exhorts us with 'Truisms' want', she

is

thousand different shapes and

styles.

(see Cat. 240), such as 'Protect

giving expression to Pollock's

own

ambition for modern

'nothing more than the contemporary^ aims of the age that we're living

per Johns's Target (Cat. 147) to Keith Haring's

de Kooning's

Woman F(Cat.

graffiti

V\Tien Jenny

me from what

I

art,

which was

in'.'*

From Jas-

paintings (Cat. 235, 236); from

98) and Warhol's car crash paintings (Cat. 189) to Julian

Schnabel's Hospital Patio (Cat. 231); from Frank Stella's Marriage of Reason and Squalor (Cat. 155)

and Bruce Nauman's Green Light Cotridor (Cat. 216) to Robert Gober's

Untitled, Closet (Cat. 251)

and Cindy Sherman's

self-portraits (Cat. 242-5), there

be no doubt about the contemporaneity of American the here and now.

The

art, its

can

endless obsession with

selection of works presented in this exhibition

and the accom-

panying catalogue attempts to document some of the more exalted expressions of that

most legitimate concern of art. Viewed from Europe panting for breath.

this perspective,

America

still

has art in

(Berlin),

and February 1944, reprinted in

16 Pollock, inter\iew published in Arts

Architecture,

American

cit.,

pp. 372-4.

field

beyond Dada and Surrealism. Pollock, noted de Kooning, was like a cowboy,'^ and indeed his Clint Eastwood-like behaviour is amply documented. Perhaps it was this

p. 79.

Pollock, Partisan Rrcieiv,

O'Cormor, op. cit.,

p. 33.

Aithiir C. Danto

Philosophizing American Art

The Triumph of the Nrcv York School (i^S^; Fig. i), by the post-modern American masMark Tansey, is a droll and wily allegory^ of a shift in the cultural geography of

ter

modern

whereby New York replaced

art,

Paris as the artistic centre of the world. Tan-

sey shows the leaders of both schools in battle garb, taking the term 'avant-garde' in

monochrome, rotogravoire took place. Andre Breton, for

military sense, and depicts the surrender in a

its literal

document something

style that appears to

the French,

is

that really

ceding victory to Clement Greenberg, leader of the American forces.

Each signatory is flanked by his own set of champions: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro and others for the Parisians; Jackson Pollock, V^^llem de Kooning, Robert Motherw^ell and others for the Yanks. The work becomes richly comical when we observe the French in vintage uniforms of the First World War, while the Americans

wear those of the Second World War. Picasso swaggers

in the fur coat of a flying ace,

doubtless alluding to the fact that he and Georges Braque addressed one another as

Wilbur and thought of the invention of Cubism as parallel to the conquest of the air in those rickety planes that Tansey once said reminded him of nothOrville and

much as

ing so

details. cally,

Cubist compositions.

The painting is dense with sly jokes and pungent

But the sharpest comment of

everything for which the

New

all is

the

way

the painting subverts, systemati-

York School stood:

it is

representational rather

upon by Greenberg

mark of

than abstract;

it

modernism

has nothing to do with the physicalit}' of paint or the urgenc}' of the

drip;

it is

lectual

-

;

it

repudiates the 'flatness' seized

witt)' instead

a label

as the

of grandiose; and Tansey clearly presents himself as an intel-

with which Motherwell was so imcomfortable that he had to apolo-

gize for not being

what he described

York School turned out to be ism, rather than the st\4e

war

a local

to

end

as 'a feeling imbecile'.

engagement all style

The triumph

of the

in the sinuous histor\' of

wars.

And

the fact that Tansey 's paint-

ing was even possible suggests that the doctrines and ideologies of the

School had long been overridden. Ever\thmg

is

New

modern-

New

put in a distant historical

York

light,

one

which the art of Paris and that of New York were far less opposed than may have seemed the case - a light so distant that the two world wars become a single confused

in

event.

^M ^^^mmmgl^^^^^

i^l

'^^^s*-«H

^^^'

/

WBt^^ -^^ZJ ^^^^x^^A*

?^

^ff^ommunist Party and many fellow-travellers was, in part, politically determined:

a'

recognition of the dire threat of fascism (particularly to the USSR, the ideal

against which the failings of American capitalism could be set) ami an acknowleilg-

Douglas Tallack

32

ment of the poor

electoral

CPUSA and

perfonnance of the

the Socialist Part}- in spite

of the visible collapse of capitalism. Alhances had to be made with other left-wing

New Deal.

groupings and even with liberals supporting Roosevelt's

In part, though,

merged with a rapprochement with what was perceived as the 'real' America. American writers, painters and photographers left their educational and publishing institutions and bohemian 'villages' to travel west and south. The greatest works of the 1930s are those that evoke the economic and social the polic}' of the Popular Front

decade while respecting the differences

disasters of the

among

those written about,

painted or photographed. In the narrative and photographs that constitute a book like

James Agee and W^alker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) there is also a painful acknow ledgment of the differences between the observing artists and the observed share-crop farmers (see Figs.

This distance

4, 5).

is

largely missing in the

sentimentalized realism of Holl\"vvood's response to the Depression: notably in the populist films of a director such as Frank Capra, in which a folksy togetherness,

underpinned by

a

manner

culated

strong nationalist message, triumphs over

adversitv'.

In a

the Popular Front also sought to tap the enduring,

more

cal-

if politically

ambiguous, tradition of American populism. SvTnbols had to be mobilized (the

who might

farmer rather than the urban worker,

too easily be confused with

a

Furo-

pean proletarian; the small town communitv'; and even 'The Star-Spangled Banner'); prejudices had to be exploited (against

folk music.

became

modernists as well as

elitist

communications had to be opened through

bankers); and

cit\-

literature, the visual arts

and especially

The sphere of culture became central, rather than peripheral.

political, rather

argued that

it

was losing

than merely aesthetic

;

Culture also

but the Pnitisan RevieTV intellectuals

edge.

its critical

Clement Greenberg, later to champion the Abstract Fxpressionists, took up the theme of mass culture in his essay 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch', published in Paitisan

He

Revie-d' in 1939.

attacks a

cosv-^,

representationalist art that could

all

too easily be

co-opted by both the Soviet and the American versions of mass culture. Also in the pages of Paitisan Rroim- in the

1930s and the 1940s

late

we

find parallels to

Greenberg's argument in essays on literature and cinema by Philip Rahv (one of the editors),

Dwight Alacdonald, Lionel

are not the ordinar\- people

often the most

who

Trilling,

Fred Dupee and others. Their 'heroes'

populate the novels of Steinbeck, but the

unlikely artist - the cosmopolitan

Henry James

with conservative political views. These writers took on ical

a

or

artist,

heroic and a politically rad-

character precisely because - according to the Paitisan Revieii- critics - the

cult}'

and

T S. Eliot, writers diffi-

of their work resisted the incorporating logic of capitalism and communism.

It

James or the austere Eliot into the man in the street so Although we can glimpse here the reasoning that was to permit many American intellectuals to abandon politics and become entangled with the High Art apostles disdainful of mass culture who dominated the 1950s, it is

would be hard

to turn 'late'

central to Popular Front thinking.

important to note that for Greenberg, could be,

it

who was

tr}ing to define

what

a socialist art

was the kind of polic}' espoused by the Popular Front that represented an

abandonment of political

radicalism. Similarly,

Dwight Alacdonald

cited the films of

the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein as political cinema that was true to the specificit}'

of its medium. Montage, Mcdonald explained, drew attention to the construct-

edness of a film and so was quite different from the seamless product perfected by the

HolK^vood studio system in the 1930s. Thus, the Partisan Review editors and contributors - later more generally known as the New York Intellectuals - had their Left credentials enhanced by their anti-Stalinism. It was in 1938 that Paitisan Review courted and defended Leon Trotsk}- for his opposition to Stalin and for his advocacy of an art that was revolutionan- by being experimental and avant-garde rather than by toeing the Part}'

The

line.

events of the late 1930s help us to understand

culture, politics

and society changed

War was the cause of the the role the

decade, yet

Communists had

for

American

ended

the relationship between

The

Spanish Civil

and with suspicions aroused at news of the Moscow Trials - those Philip Rahv - led to painful divisions. Dwight it

in defeat

played. Meanwhile,

'ferocious surprises', according to

how

intellectuals.

Culture, Politics and SocieU' in Mid-Centun' -America

Figs. 4, 5

Walker Evans, cotton farmers

33

in

Alabama, 1941

Macdonald and Malcolm Cowley

USSR had

(the

to be

abandoning the

Part}'

out sharply, the latter offering only expedience as

an explanation for not

over the executions and imprisonments ordered by Stalin. But

argument was undercut

this

fell

defended against the threat of Hitler)

in

1939 with the Xazi-So\iet Non-Aggression Pact, and

the disillusion completed by subsequent revelations about the So\-iet labour camps.

The Second World

W^ar -

at least after Pearl

Harbor

the Holocaust in 1942 - did not divide intellectuals ald maintained the tradition of

Thoreau

in his 1939 essay

in 1941

and the

as the first had,

first

reports of

though Macdon-

independent thinking associated with Bourne and

'War and the

Intellectuals:

Act U', published in Pnnisau

Review.

Post- War Years: Pliiralisvi, Consensus

The

The

intellectual inheritance of the 1930s was, then, twofold. First, left-wing thinkers

felt a

strong sense of betrayal. In the subsequent reaction against extremism, com-

munism seemed ism,

and Critique

the other end of the spectrum from fascism, while Hegelian iMarx-

according to another radical about to turn awav -James

'totalitarianism in philosophy'.

The

Burnham-was

shocks of the 1930s sent American intellectuals

a toughened liberalism which, for Burnham, Irving Kristol and Sydney Hook, modulated towards an even tougher neoconservatism. The other leitmotiv to resurface from the 1930s was modernism itself,

in a

determined search for centrist positions,

in a variet)' of guises, but usually crisis versions that signalled the end. or loss, of long-

standing narrative and aesthetic forms. B\ tracing the conjunction of these t\vo

themes, ist

be made in

we can

society.

better grasp the tension between .\merican intellectuals and capital-

There was

also a

geography to

this tension.

for the diversity of mid-centur)- intellectual

While the strongest case can

life, it

had become concentrated

New York at a time when the

ferent places, mostly In The

fabric of eveiyday life was being woven in many difnew suburbs and expanding Western and Southwestern cities.

End of Ideologs' (i960), a collection ot essays written during the 1950s, the documents the loss of faith in grand designs, Marxism being

sociologist Daniel Bell

the closest to his

own

personal history and to that of his contemporaries and (lid Left

Douglas Tallack

34

Xew

mentors among the

communism

York

These 'twice-born'

Intellectuals.

intellectuals (born

They were what would replace absolute historical explanations. The glib answer is 'America' or 'Americanism': Dwight Alacdonald's remark that, 'Reluctantly, I chose America' is usually interpreted as the final proof of de-radicalization and of acquiesinto

and born again out of

were not simply

it)

in reaction.

also asking

cence. But this

too simple an answer

is

How New

baut, in

(as is

the parallel explanation, by Serge Guil-

York Stole the Idea ofModem Ait, 1983, for the triumph of Abstract

CLA-funded s}Tnbol of .\merican freedom). It underplays both the betrayals of the 1930s - intellectuals with the benefit of hindsight really ought to ask what they would have done if faced with a similar switchback of events and choices - and the difficult}' then - and perhaps even now - of locating 'actually existExpressionism

ing socialism',

embrace

as a

let

centrist

alone

communism. This

is

not to say that some intellectuals did not

and even neo-conser\-ative positions with unseemly

haste, gi'ving

credence to McCarthyism and attending government-sponsored congresses and s\Tnposia

on

\^"arriors in the 1950s. But, for others,

1930S and the

made some of

most rigorous Cold the rethinking that went on between the mid-

cultural freedom. Ex-radicals

the

1950s was not just painful but thoughtful and offered important

late

non-Mandst redefinitions of politics and

culture, as well as

ways out of the consensus

of the 1950s.

politics

In The Lonely Croi:'^ (1950) Da\id Riesman shares, with Daniel Bell, the con\iction that only a structured political pluralism could keep at bay the feared messianic drive

towards

total

power. Post-war intellectuals looked back to Alexis de Tocqueville's

American primer on the coming of mass

society-,

the two-volume Demoa-acy in

(1835 and 1840), for the value of free associations

ica

interest or veto groups. gical blocks,

These created

a shifting set

Amer-

they came to be called,

or, as

of alliances rather than ideolo-

encouraged the dispersal of power into issue-based groups and therefore

functioned as a bulwark against a homogenized and manipulatable mass society. Nevertheless,

The Lonely Crowd hardly reads

and Tocqueville's

societ}-

like a celebration

about mass

fears

of America as the ideal

societ\- are translated into cultural terms.

As Riesman's title suggests, the amorphousness that made American politics infertile ground for totalitarianism also resulted in uncertainties and a loss of direction. Sociologically, there

is

an

anxietv"

about personal

alhed to a superficialit}' that was

man

identit)" in

an 'other-directed'

societ\^,

too plain in the world of advertising, which Ries-

all

describes in certain sections of his book.

Riesman's misgi\ings about mass culture appear fully formed in the essays of

Dwight Alacdonald and other

New

Yorkers. This suggests that cultural anxieties

about the pre-digested products of the media industr\^ were the residue of radicalism over after these intellectuals' political reconciliation with -\merican

left

link

between

politics

became side-tracked

and culture that had been so productive

societ\'.

The work

in their 1930s

into a stale elitism. Alacdonald's best-known essay, 'Alasscult

and Alidcult' (1962), could well be his least perceptive. However, the gulf between the New Yorkers and American culture was never so wide as in the work of exiled Frankfurt

School theorists. For Theodor

exerted

a quasi-totalitarian

W! Adorno and

control over .\merican

dence in the working classes

as

so effectively that even resistance could be

political critique

New

York

its

accommodated

Intellectuals

were

in the typical in

German

can observe in other key post-war American books

On

a

the one hand, a celebration of political plur-

lack of apparent ideological strife;

Men Who Made

It

totalitarianism.

tension comparable to

on the

other, a recognition of certain

shortcomings in American society and history. In The Americaii

tempestuous

Holh-wood

danger of losing their

problem with the Frankfurt School was that they interpreted Amer-

that in Riesman's The Lonely Crowd.

the

confi-

message of democrac\- and abundance

ican society through the lens of their experiences with

ahsm and

little

of mass culture, this being the legacy of Bourne and Partisan Revirw

in the 1930s, the

We

with

an agent of change, Adorno and Horkheimer dis-

sected a 'culture industr)^' that disseminated

or soap opera ending. If the

Alax Horkheimer, Holh'wood

societ}*. Alarxists

Political Tradition

and

(1948) Richard Hofstadter observes how, underhnng an often

political history^, there

is a

reassuring commonalit)- of vision across the

Culture, Politics and Society in Mid-Century- America

35

spectrum. Ever since the constitutional debates of the 1780s there has been

political

an unquestioning acceptance of the value of private propert}^, economic individualism

and competition. With another leading historian, Daniel Boorstin, the tension appears in betw^een two of his books. In The Genius of American

United States

intellectualism in the

is

almost lauded because, in Boorstin's reasoning,

more acute and wide-ranging the

the

(1953) anti-

Politics

political analysis (the

more

jMarx, the

more

Rousseau, and so forth), the more unhealthy the political climate. Fortunately, in The

bnage

{i()6i)

power

own injunctions and analyses the American media's news and spread self-deception - an approach that undermines the

Boorstin ignores his

to create

complacent nationalism of his

As already remarked,

earlier study.

of post-war thinking was the surprising

a characteristic

coalescence in the social sciences of theorizing about what

should be and outlook, the

a

modernist

latter, if

sensibility.

Where

not pessimistic, was

a non-totalitarian societv'

the former was cautiously optimistic in

at least beset

by

(in

Daniel

Bell's

words)

and complexity'. Perhaps more accurately, these former late modernist outlook because - despite certain traits famil-

'irony, paradox, ambiguity,

radicals iar

were drawn to

from the

'classic'

a

modernism of the 1880s

to the 1920s (ahenation; fear of,

cination with, the new; antipathy towards mass culture) -

by the double shock of the collapse of capitahsm and the

when reading

we

up short by the language of aesthetics and a someyet always experienced, voice warning against the tragic limitations of

and

realities.

some progress could come out of the tension between

The voice is

that of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,

Center (1949), wrote: 'By making choices,

own moral

personality.

This

is

man makes

men

weak

to the point

who,

in

The

Vital

himself: creates or destroys his

brave and bleak dilemma. But such a philosophy

a

The

imposes an unendurable burden on most men. drive the

of sociahsm. Often,

economic works of mid-

are brought

rationality, while asserting that

possibilities

fas-

was an outlook revived

failures

the canonical political, historical, social and

centur)^ America,

times wear\^,

this

and

eternal awareness of choice can

where the simplest decision becomes

a

nightmare. Most

prefer to flee choice, to flee anxiet\', to flee freedom.'

Schlesinger's

modernism has

a

decidedly Existentialist

feel.

At times, the philo-

sophical rhetoric seems intended to give a tautness to a position - liberalism - that

has not generally been associated with risks or commitments. Moreover, the Existentialist

idea of the

freedom to make oneself could, and

did,

become merely a gloss for A more generous inter-

a self-interested choice in favour of American individualism.

pretation of Schlesinger's rhetoric, however,

of the post-Second World

War

is

that

it

reflected the pervasive anxiety

years (Riesman's image of a lonely

resonance for the period), together with the need to define

a

crowd has

a real

position without the

props of established ideologies. With no credible templates to place upon existence, the modernist indeterminac}^ of intellectuals. In hrational Man: rett, a

meaning became an

available

mode of thought

A Study in Existentialist Philosophy (1958) \Mlliam

post-war editor of Paitisan Review, acknowledges a certain sombre

to

Bar-

qualit)-

'which went against the grain of our native youthfulness and optimism'. Nevertheless,

Barrett sees in Existentialism both a necessary check

upon

that optimism,

which

had been powerless to prevent totalitarianism, and an encouragement to those who had come through the

American

illusions of the 1930s,

liberalism', as Schlesinger puts

discussed by Barrett in hrational

it.

reborn on the dangerous 'tightrope of

Hemingway

Man, though

is

the only American writer

there was an E.xistentialist strain in

post-war American literatuie, notably in Dangling

Man

(1944) and Seize the

Day

(1956) by Saul Bellow, himself a contributor to Paitisan Review, and in 'The WTiite

Negro' (1957) by Norman Mailer, though Mailer eschews European favour of 'the American existentialist - the hipster'.

social t^pcs in

Although social and political scientists may be bemused, one way to distinguish between the important non-aesthetic texts under discussion is to look at the versions of modernism to which they directly or indirectly here by the

drawn

art critic

Harold Rosenberg.

to' the reconciliatory, tragic

intellectuals because

it

seemed

He

also

modernism

sufficiently

reler.

Appropriately,

came out of the

we

are helped

1930s, but was less

that had attracted

many post-war

comprehensive to contain

all

points of

Douglas Tallack

^^6

enough

yet experienced

\ne\v,

to recognize the dangers of totahzing ideologies.

Instead, Rosenberg, while sharing his contemporaries' acute sense of historical crisis,

found in his contact with those he

calls

the 'American action painters' the impetus to

break out of the enclosed consensual spaces of post-war thought. WTiere Riesman and Bell,

recommended negotiated

writing about mid-centur\' interest-group politics,

responses (progress 'on the diagonal'. Bell called

it),

Rosenberg, writing about the

Abstract Expressionists, evokes a radical, participatory politics which would not

moment the canvas an arena in which to act -

(re)appear until the street protests of the 1960s: 'At a certain

began

to appear to

one American painter

after

another

as

rather than as a space in which to re-produce, re-design, analyze or "express" an

\Miat was to go on the canvas was not

object, actual or imagined.

WTiere Clement Greenberg, the other great

event.'

but an

a picture

of z\bstract Expressionism,

critic

defined an avant-garde according to the degree of attention to the form and medium,

Rosenberg's experiential, phenomenological modernism was more dynamic, 'an event' potentially capable of being activated

by events other than those contained

within art history.

Up from

To

the

ip^os

appreciate the social and political importance of Harold Rosenberg's notion of

'action'

we may turn

text of hers that

mitment

to the exiled

German

thinker

Hannah Arendt

(Fig. 6)

and to

a

probably did most to confirm American intellectuals in their com-

Origms of Totalitarianism

to non-ideological politics. Yet Arendt, in The

(1951), amazingly, did not allow her experiences of totalitarianism to create blanket

judgments on the value of mass movements. For

her, the genealog;^ of totalitarianism

included, crucially, the loss of public political space in the nineteenth centur\\

empty arena had then been

filled

by ideolog\^ and terror and by masses of people,

whether victimizers or victims. Those post-war American standably,

saw totalitarianism

That

as the antithesis

of private

intellectuals

life

who

and

who, under-

latched

on

to

only the consequences of 'massification' found themselves intellectually caged -

unable to interpret political participation other than in the shadow of totalitarian regimes.

It

was hardly surprising that many of the

New Yorkers found it hard to sup-

port whole-heartedly the kinds of political action that became widespread with the Civil Rights

Alovement, the new Women's iMovement, the Counter-Culture and the

protest marches against the

Vietnam War. To propose

a generation

gap

is

to miss the

intellectual explanation for their suspicion of public action.

However,

a

few post-Second World

War

intellectuals can be singled out because Fig. 6

they continued to ask the (i960),

difficult questions:

Paul

Goodman

Absurd

in Groiving up

Dwight Macdonald

Michael Harrington

in his editorship of Politics between 1944 and 1949, The Other America (1962) and C.Wright Mills. Replying to

in

David Riesman's sympathetic account of interest-group

politics, iMills raises, in

The

Power Elite (1956), the old questions of power. Who decides on the limits of political action and under what circumstances (asking this during the Cold War echoed Bourne's statement that 'war

is

alesce along ideological lines, since Mills's

book is devoted

\Miy should did within the power

the health of the State')? it

clearly

politics elite?

not co-

Much

of

to arguing that, in spite of the busyness of day-to-day politics,

the lobbying and shifting alliances,

power has continued

to be concentrated at the

and a bottom - Harrington's 'other America'. Against what he

top, with an illusion of democratic decision-making at intermediate levels,

growing underclass

at the

sees as a structural, rather than personal, conspiracy in for the participator)' politics advocated his 'Letter to the

New-

had seemed so dead realistically

in

American society Mills opts

The

Human

Condition (1958). In

Left' (i960) Mills also revives the idea of utopianism,

in the

which

post-war years. Thinking other than responsibly and

could be emancipatorv^

Having claimed much lining

by Arendt

some of its

for the intellectual

legacies.

The

life

of the 1950s,

it is

worth

briefly out-

'break-out' of the 1960s and 1970s, although often

Hannah

.\rendt

Culture, Politics and Society^ in Mid-Centun,- .America

attributed to

demographic and sociological

intellectual in

its

of consensus politics by Mills, Arendt, ever, the

factors

and sometimes dismissed

drug and generational dimensions, was

at least

37

as anti-

informed by critiques

Goodman, Macdonald and Harrington. How-

subsequent disappointments and defeats experienced by 1960s radicalism

(which actually date back to 1968, but gathered pace in the 1980s) have,

as in the

1950s, produced a certain amorphousness in contemporar)' political culture. This has

worked

to the advantage of those in power. Since 1979

and Christopher Lasch's The

Culture of Narcissism there have been a series of cultural jeremiads, the most recent

being J. K. Galbraith's despairing The Culture ofConteiir?}ieiit{iggi). idea of micro-politics has energized

many marginal

not acknowledge the

link, there are

some

1950s interest-group

politics,

of history' again

(to

made

some

with

extent Francis

its

It is

true that the

groups, and while radicals would

similarities to the

more

positive aspects of

notion of incremental gain. But talk of 'the end

Fukuyama is recapitulating Daniel Bell) has once power difficult to ask. Intellectuals have reduced

the big questions about

ambitions and mostly seek productive ways to inhabit and (another 1950s echo) negotiate the institutions

demics, with their this

of

own

a

post-modern

society.

battles over curricula

That many

intellectuals are

and funding to

fight,

turning inwards. However, since the mid-1980s there has been

est in broader, ethical questions

now

a

renewed

concerning rights and the motivation of

action. After the shift of intellectual authority to

Europe,

it is

aca-

has accentuated inter-

political

noticeable that Ameri-

can intellectuals have been looking for productive ways to link their

own concerns

with those of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Frangois Lyotard and others.

The

philosopher Richard Bernstein has given an important lead.

that in his is

at stake

1950s:

most recent book, The New

'It is

form of the

action which

vita activa

is

analysis of action

We

is

condition of plurality and

part of this essay

last

owes

a great deal to

Richard King's advice and to two essays by him in particular:

'Endings and Beginnings: Politics in

Arendt's Early Thought', Political Theoij, vol.

12

and 'The Rosenberg Case', Over Here: Revieirs in American Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (Winter 1991), pp. 85-103. For more general accoimts of America and American intellectual Hfe (1984), pp. 235-51,

at

mid-century, readers

may

consult the following:

Paul A. Carter, Another Pait of the Fifties, New York, 1983; Carl N. Degler, Affluence and Anxiety:

American

John

P.

Society Since 194^, Glenview, IL, 1968; Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in

War and

Peace,

/p^x-z^^o,

New York,

1988;

Rochelie Gzi\\n, A?nerican Wo?nen Since i(J4),

London, 1987; Geoffrey Hodgson, America in Our Time From World War II to S'ixon: What Happened and Why, London, 1976; William E. Leuchtenberg,

A

Troubled Feast: ATfterican Society Since 194^, Miller and

Glenview, IL, 1979; Douglas

T

Marion Novak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Garden City, >JY, 1977; Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a ConsetTative Age: American Intellectuals in the k^^os and kj^os. New York, 1985; .Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Spectre, (Cambridge, SW, 1977; Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, London, 1989; Douglas Taiiack, Td-enticth Centuiy A?nerica, London, 1991; .Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Leftfi-om the k^^os to the ujHos, Chapel Hill, NC, 1987.

natalit)^ that is

have become blind and forgetful of what a

"laboring

intended as an act of retrieval, to reveal

be completely obliterated.'

The

significant

in the

exhibited in the public space of political debate, action

human

about action, and are on the verge of becoming

Note

it is

by summarizing an important lesson taught by Hannah Arendt

that presupposes the

Bibliographical

And

he chooses to explain what

Constellation (i 991),

societ}-."

the highest

is

distinctive

But [Arendt's]

a possibilit)' that

can never

i

;

39

AWahavi A. Davidson

The Armory Show and in

Early

Modernism

America

The International Exhibition of Modern Art of 191 3, popularly known as the .\rmory Show because it was held from 17 February to 15 March at the 69th Infantn^ Regiment Armory

in

New

York,'

was far-reaching

in

its

impact. Bet\\'een 62,102 and

75,620 people' paid to see some 1,300 European and American works, beginning chronologically with a miniature by

Show was an

Goya and extending

extravaganza (see Figs,

i,

Futurists as a group excluded themselves

2).

to the present.

Thus, the

Although there were large gaps -the

- the Show represented many of the major

artists

and most adventurous positions from the end of the nineteenth century up to

19 1

Of

3.

the Europeans, for example, there were fourteen Cezannes; nine Henri

Rousseaus; eighteen Van Goghs; eight Picassos, including three drawings or paint-

INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION

Of

MODERN

ART

ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS 69»f

INFTY REOT ARMORY. NEW YORK CITY FEBRUARY IS"' TO MARCH i^^ 1Q13 AMERICAN & FOREIGN ART. IHE OUtSTS VklU BE — INGRES. DEIACROIX. DEGAS,

AMONG CE'zANNE. REDON. RENOIR. MONET SEURAT VAN GOCH. HODIER. 5LEVOGT JOHN. PRYDE. 5ICKERT. MAILLOT, BRANCUM. lEHMBRUCK. BERNARD, MAT1.S:>E, MANET MGNAQLAUTREC.tONDER, DENIS. RUSiELL. DUFY, BRAQUE.HERBIN. GlElZts.

SOUZA-CARDOZO.

ZA.V..

DU CHAMP-VILLON,

GAUGUIN, ARCHIPENkO, BOURDELLE.

Fig.

191

DE SEGONZAC.

Poster for the .\rinor\- Show,

I

3.

C.

Xew

York,

Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden,

Smithsonian Institution, Washington,

DC

ings from a

i9ioto 1912 (and

a

1909 bronze head),

all

in the 'anah^cal'

Cubist

st}'le;

non-objective Improvisation by Wassily Kandinsky; and four Marcel Duchamps,

including Nude Descending a Staircase (Fig.

3),

which became the most censured of all

the pieces. Of the late-nineteenth and twentieth-centur)^ Americans, there were many works by the Ashcan group and of the modernists, there were ten watercolours ;

by John Marin, four of them showing the newly erected Woolworth Building; three pieces, including tu^o

Fauve landscapes, by Alfred Maurer (who was

still

in France);

Andrew Dasburg; eight landscapes and an interior in a ver\' manner by the Philadelphian Arthur B. Carles four still-lifes by Patrick Henr\^ Bruce; five watercolours by Stuart Da\is, still painting in an Ashcan mode; and a nearly non-objective piece by the Chicagoan Manierre Dawson, added to the Show when it was held in Chicago from 24 March to 16 April. Other American modernists, or modernists-to-be, included Marsden TTartle\^ Joseph Stella, Albert Ryder, Oscar Bluemner, Alorton L. Schamberg, Charles R. Sheeler, and William and Marthree oils and a plaster by

free-flowing

;

guerite Zorach.

The Show was would

collections of modernist art.

Lillie P. Bliss,

Vtcw of the

.•\rmor\-

Show,

Xew York,

1913

1.

I

he most complete account,

e.\hihition the 2.

is

Anno)y

Ibid., p. 95.

Milton

\\.

TTy far, ot

Shon', (irecnwich, C.'\\ 1963.

As Brown points out, compli-

cating factors, such as free admissions, it

the

Brown, The Story of

make

impossii)le to determine the exact figure.

made by

private collectors,

which

domain and form the beginnings of prominent These collectors included Dr. Albert C. Barnes; who bought works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Redon, Renoir, and X'^uillard

later pass into the public

museum

Fig. 2

also important for the purchases

Ah-aha?/i A. Davidson

4°

John Quinn and Arthur J. Eddy, who acquired, respectively, thirty-one and tw^entythree pieces; and \\ aher C. Arensberg. (The American modernists or modernists-tobe were not then considered purchase-worthy, and only

a

191

2

landscape by

Schamberg was sold.) Finally, the Show converted two American painters - Stuart Da\as and Henry Fitch Taylor -to modernism. It is instructive, in this regard, to compare a picture such as Davis's 191 3 saloon scene The Back Room (WTiitney Museum of American Art, New York), in a dark Ashcan style in which the atmosphere of the time and place

which

is

is

wonderfully evoked, with his 191 7 The President (Fig. 4), without the subtie oscillation,

in an 'anahndcal' Cubist style, although

merged planes and triangular scaffolding found in the corresponding work of Picasso and Georges Braque. There were some three dozen /Vmerican modernists, painters and sculptors working in the second decade of the centur\', and each has far as is

known, Davis and Taylor

w^ere the only ones

his,

or her,

who

own

stor}\ But, so

converted expressly as a

result of the

Show.

We do not know for sure which of the modernists actually walked

through the

aisles

and/or read some of the

surmise that

all

those in or near

New York,

tion was held there, did one of the two.

(who

many

reports

on the Show, but we may

or Boston or Chicago,

Some

when

the exhibi-

of the modernists were in France

at the

from 1903 to 1936 except for a \dsit to America in 1905), John Covert, xMaurer and H. LjTnan Sayen, while Hartiey was in Munich and Berlin; they, of course, could not attend. Yet even in Europe, time, such as Bruce

lived there continuously

American painters would have known something of the Show. Generally, either experience or even merely knowledge of the Armor)' Show would have encouraged and assured those

artists in

Europe and America who had already committed themhad not embarked on some solitary venture.

selves to avant-gardism that they

Pre-dating the

Armory Show,

Fig. 3

Alarcci

1

JiiLp.inip, \'iidc

Descending a

Museum

of Art; Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection Staircase, 191 2.

Philadelphia

The

the earliest American modernists included the

S\Tichromists-to-be, then in Paris: Stanton Macdonald-WTight, from Charlottesville,

\^rginia, and

Morgan

Russell from

New York.

Having worked

his

way through Fig. 4 Stuart Da\is, The President, 191 7. Alunson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica,

X\

Gail Le\'in, Synchromism and American Color New York, 1978,

Abstraction igio-igz^,

pp. 10-27. Also .Maril\Ti S. Kushner, Russell, Alontclair, >sji

Levin, op.

cit., p.

Morgan

1990.

43, suggests Kandinsk\''s

influence.

6.

See Anne Lee Morgan, Aithur Dove: Life and Work, With a Catalogue R/iisonne, Newark, N7, n.d., pp. 40-3. See Man,' Gedo, Maniare Daivson, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, Museum of ContemporArt, 1976. In 1908, because of a rise in the rent, Stieglitz moved from 291 Fifth Avenue across the hall ar\-

7-

to 293. The wall was removed, and one elevator was used for the two buildings. Stieglitz,

though, continued to use the

name

which he found more euphonious. William I. Homer, Alfi-ed Stieglitz. and the American Avant-Garde, New York, 1977, '291',

8.

p. 165. 9.

10.

See Brown, op.cit.,

Alfred

268.

Stieglitz-:

A

Collective Pottrait,

NT, 1934, pp. 126-7. Quoted ibid., p. 137. Cit\-,

11.

p.

See Dorothy Xorman, '.\n .American Place', in Waldo D. Frank et al., eds., America and

Garden

The .^rmon- Show and

dependence on Cezanne and declaring that balance of forms around a center as sculpture', a

Modernism

Early

41

and depth - not

'light is projection

a

Le\in and others have

Russell, as Gail

shown,' was by 19 12 basing his painting on sculptures, specifically on plaster casts of Michelangelo's Pietas and Slaves, which he broke up into a series of flattened,

making the sources

abstracted areas,

virtually unrecognizable (see Fig. 5). In 191 2,

New York, Max Weber painted

probably in

of brown, blue, green

a pastel consisting

and yellow swirling shapes which he called

Nor was

this the first

non-

objective painting by an American. Tu^o years earlier, Arthur Garfield Dove,

from

New York, produced a number of non-objective pieces meant to be seen

rural upstate as parts

of a

Music.''

series.'

In paintings of the next year, going back to childhood memories,

he used biomorphic shapes vaguely suggestive of horses, of leaves and of trees in a

meadow. In 19 10,

too,

Manierre Dawson,

designer and architectural draughtsman

a

in Chicago, probably derived the arcs, squares

and protruding

hill

forms in

non-

his

objective Prognostic (Fig. 6) from devices used in his profession." Thus, a great deal

was going on even before the Armory Show. Contributing more directly than the Armory tain at

Show

work of cer-

to the unfolding

New York 'salons':

American modernists were two

Alfred Stieghtz's galler}' 291

at 33 West 67th Street, in moved from Boston. Arensberg wished to be had stimulated him when he \isited the Armory Show

293 Fifth Avenue" and Walter C. Arensberg's apartment

which he near the

on

settled in early 19 14, having artists

and ideas that

day in

its last

New York.

photographer, at first devoted his efforts to his own work and promotion of other photographers. By 1907, however, six years before the Armory Show, he had also begim to show paintings and drawings by European and Stieglitz, a leading

to the

American modernists. Noteworthy exhibitions of the former included those of Rodin's drawings in 1908 and his drawings and watercolours in 1910; Cezanne's watercolours and Picasso's first one-man show in 191 1; and Henri Rousseau's paintings and drawings in 19 10.

man shows were

Among

Abraham Walkowitz and Dove Stieglitz

Morgan

Russell, Study after Michelangelo V

Museum, Morgan

Russell Archives

he gave one-

and Carles,

1;

in 191 2.

drawings by Matisse, only one of which was hung)

it.

Also,

some of the

artists

that

it

a great deal

He

it.

its

size

one was capable or even worthy of absorbing the wonderful secrets 291 the

air

of a mystical shrine.

phone directory, and would Neither did he ask for

a

tell

did

and

appeal

its

of ballyhoo) to a mass, largely uninformed public.

Rather than 'push' modernism, Stieglitz often held back, presuming that not

He gave

five

xdndicated what he had been

doing - but temperamentally he was not comfortable with

(accompanied by

may

and purchased

"-

he was promoting were presented in

Show - he knew

not, of course, oppose the 191 2. Montclair Art

191

was not invited to help with the organization of the Armory Show, as has pointed out,** although he lent three pieces to it - the Picasso

six

items from

'Pieta',

in

charcoal drawing of 19 10 by the same artist and a Matisse drawing (he

a

have lent

Fig. 5

Weber

Homer

William bronze,

whom

the ^American modernists to

Hartley in 1909; iVIarin in 19 10;

He

it

had

ever\'-

to impart.

did not have his galler)' listed in the tele-

those he did not favour that he had nothing for

standard commission, and even helped support his

own funds or with funds that he solicited. Though Stieglitz did not proscribe specific st}ies, he was

sale."'

artists

with his

artist's

should not be

would

«$^

clear in insisting that the

authentic personality be revealed through his work.

set

up

like another's.

He

opposed

st)iistic categories: 'It

is

as

One

classifications ol art, scoffing at those

there were

if

a

fall

kill

each other.'"

I

who

great Noah's ark in which

every species must be separated honi e\en- other species, so that finalK

upon one another and

work, then,

artist's

lence, the goal of 291, the

the\- would enhancement

.

.

.

and promotion of individualism, was dianietricalU' opposed to that of the Armory Show, which was to trace the overall development of Kuropean and ^American art over a

span of about one hundred and ten \ears. Yet varied as the styles ot Stieglitz's American modernists were, certain general

approaches were apjiroved. These included biomorphic lig. 6

Ahuiierrc D.nvson, I'mgixistic, lyio.

Milwaukee Art

Museum

motifs (Dove, Cieorgia O'Keeffe), Cubist passages witz,

Weber), l^une-like landscajies (Maurer),

\\

st\ li/.ations

of lanilscape

ithin city scenes (Marin,

Walko-

still-lifes in a 'syiubciic' (Cubist

man-

Abiiiham A. Dmicbon

4^

Fi?. 7

Max Weber, Chinese Restaurant, 1915. Museum of .American .\rt. New York

WTiitnev

ner (Hartley) and non-objective configurations evoking landscapes (O'Keeffe), music in general

(Dove, O'Keeffe) or specific musical compositions (Dove; see Cat.

Stieglitz, in the

the throbbing nature.

main, favoured work which was

activit}-

What was

of the

cit\'

lyrical,

as well as to the fecundit}'

not tolerated were the

strictiy

34).

expressive and responsive to

and expansiveness of

conceptual approaches nurtured in

the Arensberg circle.

In a small format, O'Keeffe, through mere cun'es and arcs, could suggest rain,

something

in the

around the place of her birth the Plains No.

II,

in

Sun

Prairie,

191 7; Anion Carter

Wisconsin

(for

Museum, Fort Worth).

looming presence. Yet the flowing cunes,

make

known

example. Light Coitiingon

would push present them

Later, she

flowers to the frontal plane and, by eliminating their landscape context, as a

a vast ter-

order of the seemingly endless plains she must have

as in Black Iris /// (1926; Fig.

i,

p. 47),

for distinct allusions to female sexual organs, allusions that O'Keeffe herself

adamantly denied. xMarin moved from decade of the centur\- to

tiltings

/7///.V

his tiltings

ture the excitement and, perhaps, the vertigo one

would then have felt among, or Loive?- Manhattan [Com-

Xew York (see

even above, the skyscrapers being erected in posing Derived from Top of Wooluorth], igii;

Weber

of structures early in the second

Cubist-like interpenetrations of buildings to cap-

Museum

Modern

of

Art,

New

York).

depicted the interiors as well as the exteriors of buildings, as in his 191 5 Chi-

nese Restaurant (Fig. 7),

by using kaleidoscopic arrangements of flattened planes that

represent parts of the architecture, and pressed together figures or fragments of

fig-

manner suggesting the influence of Italian Futurism. However, as L. D. Henderson has convincingly argued, Weber was here responding to the then wideures in a

spread theoretical discourse about the fourth dimension." Hartley, interested in the mystical significance of numbers, used numerals in his PoJTrait of a

Gennan

Ojficer

painting of flags, epaulets and other accoutrements of a Junker officer.

The

objects alluded to the heroic Cierman aviator and Hartley's probable lover, Karl

von

(Cat.

i), a

Freyburg, whose

initials are

numbers and the

triangular form at the top relate to the friendship of the

with .Arnold Ronnebeck,

Arensberg,

who

who

displayed at the lower

also

sened

in the

graduated from Harvard

left.

German

in 1900,

Levin discovered that the

two men

militar\- forces."

was interested

in the

Linda DaIr\Tnple Henderson. The Fourth Dime/islon and Xon-Euclidean Gemnetry in

hidden

meanings of Dante's Divine Comedy, and ters in general. It

of

artists,

in mental games, puzzles and esoteric matwas not surprising, then, that Duchamp - one of the most cerebral

who wanted

to 'put painting at the senice of

Modem Art. IV

Ciail I

mind' - and that French

Princeton, 1983, pp. 175-8. Levin, ilidden S\Tnbolism in .Marsden

lartley

s .\Iilitan,-

vol.54, no.

adventurer, the iconoclastic Francis Picabia (who had four oils in the

and whose sixteen Srd' York studies were shown by

from 17 March to

They

15 .\pril 1913),

became,

directed their .\merican followers to

Stieglitz

Armory Show

in art.

See William

.A.

Camfield, 'The Machinist

St\le of Francis Picabia', .Art Bulletin, vol. 48, nos. 3/4. 1966, p. 314.

immediately afterwards,

in effect, the 'high priests' of his salon.

new departures

14

Pictures', Arts .Magazine,

1979, pp. 154-8.

2,

K

.See .Michael Klein,

John Cozen, 1882-1960, Washington, DC, 1976.

The Armory Show and

Man

Fig. 8

West

Ra\',

6'jth Street,

c.

Early

Modernism

43

Marcel Diichamp V Studio, 55 191 7-1

33 West 67 New-York

ih

(191718

f,

2l

£

^

-J

Both Duchamp and Picabia passed from Cubist had become clearly Dadaist portraits', in ICI.

CEST FOI

1CI

which

in flavour.

fantastic or real

st\'les

to a vision which,

That year Picabia did

machines

a series

by 19 15,

of 'machine

portable lamp, a sparking plug, and

(a

STIEGLITZ

so forth) alluded to specific people through the appropriateness of the machine to

ET AMOUB

their personalit}' or vocation. In

one of these

(Fig. 9)

he 'portrayed' Stieglitz

as a

camera-automobile, in which the twisted bellows was flaccid and the gear-lever and brake were in the parked position, an indication that the proprietor of 291 had to a standstill as a leader of the avant-garde.'^

up painting

By 1915 Duchamp had

come

entirely given

for the production of ready-mades, unaltered facton^-made products - a

urinal (Cat. 22), a bicycle wheel, a hat-rack (see Fig. 8)

- that shocked by being pre-

sented as art objects, and of various assemblages, the most ambitious of which was the so-called Large Glass (see Fig. 2, p. 27). This consisted of tw^o ver\" large panes of glass split

by

a

horizontal sash; between

them were mechanomorphic

below the sash comprising the animus frustrated

ma

above

It

its

collages, with those

attempt to impregnate the ani-

it.

should be kept in mind that the American followers of

comprised ists.

in

a small

And some

contingent within the

much

Duchamp and

larger assembly of American

Picabia

modern-

of them created only a few pieces that were truly conceptual in

approach. Early in the decade Schamberg painted bright, Fauve-like landscapes, then icy, flattened, Fig. 9

Francis Picabia, Id,

The xMetropoHtan Museum .•\Jfred Stieglitz

Collection

c'est

id Stieglitz,

of Art,

1

915

New York;

abstracted machine parts, which eschewed the animistic overtones of

Duchamp. But

his

plumbing trap

in a mitre box, entitled God,

made

ciirn

191 8, just

before his death in the influenza epidemic in Philadelphia, was surely inspired by

Duchamp's ready-mades. John Covert, a cousin of Arensberg, took over certain stylaspects of Duchamp's work while avoiding its deeper meaning. In B?-ass Band of

istic

19 1 9 (Cat. 32) he derived the patterning, the outward thrust of circular forms and the

Duchamp's Chocolate Grinder, a version of which was incorporated within The Large Glass. But in place of a psychosexual drama, idea for the use of applied string from

Covert substituted

as his subject the

outward thrust of such brass instruments

as

The disturbing aspects of Duchamp's erotically charged Compared to the work of Duchamp and certain other Euro-

trumpets and trombones." art

were thus eliminated.

peans, there was often an innocence to American It

was of a kind perhaps most

tx'pically associated

modernism before the Depression.

with

a

newly assimilated

st\listic

and

ideological discourse.

The most consistent Dadaist America produced was Man Ray (see

Cat. 4-18),

who

based some of his paintings, ready-mades and assemblages on Duchamp's protot)'pes.

The

convey movement) of the performer at the top The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself -with HerShadoii's (Fig. lo), for instance, |>robably derived from 13uchamp's by then infamous Nude Descending a tiny multiple figure (multiple to

of Man Ray's 19 16

oil

44

Abruhiirn A. Davidson

Fig. lo

Man

Herself -dith

Modem

/

Staircase.

A few of the

assemblages have an impUcidy pernicious quahn,

as

Ray, The Rope Dancer Accompanies

Her ShadooLS,

.\rt,

191 6.

The Museum

of

New York

does the

ironically titled Gift (Fig. 6. p. 199), a flat-iron with protruding carpenters nails

Man Ray also made camera-less photographs, placing various darkroom on the hght-sensitive surface of photographic paper. Duchamp was especially fond of America because it seemed to him to value tradition less than any other country- (he obsen'ed admiringly that buildings were torn attached at the bottom.

objects in a

down

ever}' generation)

tral to his art,

and because

it

venerated machines.

The

latter

became cen-

but he saw them not as things of power and smooth functioning, but

objects denoting frustration and scepticism.

a Staircase appear partially as free will of human beings

circumscribed. This public, but also

Dadaist stance.

a

by suggesting that

work

in a

By making

machine, rather

Cubist

st}'le

the figure in

like a Slink}' toy,

their

\ude Descending

he questioned the

movements were programmed and

was maligned not only by the general

by the French Cubists themselves, who were not prepared

Duchamp was

as

to adopt a

eager to produce images that conflated sexual and

Fig.

1 1

Francis Picabia, / See Again in Mernxny

My Dear Ldnie, Art, New York

19 14.

The Museum

of Modem

The

mechanical

energ\^. In

Bare by Her Bachelors,

.\nnon'

The Large Glass -xhe full Even - the nine bachelors

Show and

title

Early

of which

lower

at the

is

Modernism

45

The Bride Stripped

left

appear simply

metalhc receptacles of their masculinity, while the bride, in the upper

half, is a

as

kind

of engine.

As indicated, Duchamp's friend Picabia and

used

in the realization of their subjects; but they

work was more hermetic than Dear Udnie

(Fig. 11), created a

it

also turned to the

somewhat

experience in his

art.

who managed

In / See Again in

year before his 'machine portraits' and

call to

mind

in a Cubist

petal

Alan

on occasion, came

paratuses a malicious qualit}^ His Object a

still

The

Ra\^ the American who,

ronome with

to

Memoij My

uplifted skirts, the forms like sparking plugs, erect phalluses.

idiom, he drew on memories of an exotic dancer he had met on a boat

shapes

machine

Duchamp's

differently.

that of the rather reckless Picabia,

own

incorporate something of his

Man Ray

paper eye attached to

to

closest to nihilism, lent

trip.

some of his ap-

be Destroyed (Fig. 12) consisted of a

arm; the \iewer, following

its

its

met-

swinging

motion, could conceivably go mad.

The importance histor\'

of Duchamp's arrival in

New York in June

1

9 1 5 for the subsequent

of twentieth-century American art cannot be overestimated.

not only on

a coterie

of early modernists; the whole tenor of art from i960 to 1980,

including Pop, Minimal and Earth

and much

else, issued

He left his mark

from

his

art,

Post-Painterly Abstraction, Photo-Realism

dictum of 'putting

art at the service

of the mind'.

By

on the primac}' of the idea over the image - or at least on an equal emphasis between the two - he became the godfather of everything conceptual in American art. Some artists - Dove, for example - felt no compunction about being exhibited at insisting

Fig. 12

Original

Alan Ray, Object to be Destroyed, 1923. photograph by the artist

lost;

291 and also attending Arensberg's salon. Dove's side

and

its

The

'Arensberg' side.

art,

accordingly, had

latter featured collages

wherein

its

'Stieghtz'

specific indi\'iduals

or types of individual were 'portrayed' by objects suggesting their character. Grand-

mother (Fig. 13) consisted of weather-beaten shingles, pressed leaves, embroider)^ and a page from a Bible concordance to denote a grandmother's fragiHty and religious scrupulousness.

Another salon promoting modernism during the second decade of the held at the apartment of iMabel ture for

New Mexico

in 191

Although she did not exhibit era Work,

and Arensberg,

7.

Dodge

at 23 Fifth

Avenue from 191 2

financed such

littie

magazines

with his periodical as Others,

iMg. 13

Arthur Dove,

Gra;7i of Modem Art, Xew York, 1992, p. 23, notes how East Coker T.S.E. translates a temiinal situation: the painter/

poet grins, wide-eyed, into the void. An/ speech forestalls ends by facing and representing them. Cf. .Michel Foucault, quoted in Telotte, op. cit., p. 198: '\\'riting so as

to die

die

is

...

not

or perhaps even speaking so as not to

a task

undoubtedly

as old as the world.'

The Extremes

In retrospect, this rhetoric of active vision

of Abstract Expressionism

may sound wishful

guage always modify perception. Nevertheless,

it

since culture

91

and lan-

nurtured vivid and complex

art, as

Truman and Eisenhower epochs could not. Furthermore, if immediacy is another fable of the time-struck mind, some subsequent developments in Abstract Expressionism show that outlook itself under scrutiny. Apocahqsse was, somehow or other, delayed."" De Kooning's 1950s Woman paintings (see Cat. 97, 98) confound previous terrors banalit)' in the

with humour. Simultaneously, figure and surroundings blur: extremes can no longer

remain feline,

intact.

Though

During the 1950s

how Fig. 9

Philip Guston, East Coker T.S.E., igjg.

The Museum of Modem Musa Guston

Art,

New York;

Gift of

Wo?}imi II (1952;

Museum

of

Modern

with something of Blake's Tyger about her, she

the

Art,

New York)

looks

comic rather than sublime.

his brushstroke swells to erase boundaries.

titles also

Rosy-Fingered

is

blend Culture's traces and Nature: Door

Often unremarked

to the Rive?-

Dawn at Louse Poijit (note the Homeric epithet) and

. . .

is

(Cat. loi),

Whose Name was

Writ in Water. To be a 'slipping glimpser'- as de Kooning saw himself and as his mercurial

paintwork

still

confirms - thwarts

finalities.'"

Others went on to reprise old themes. Yet the outcome could be Portrait

and a Dreani

(Cat. 92) straddles this ambivalence.

that Pollock had once sought to unite:

the

The

self.

tives

pairings evoke, as

of time'. ^^ Parallels

Nothing

exist

it

fresh. Pollock's

Now divided are antipodes

image and abstraction, unconscious tumult and

were, 'the shape of

life

in relation to the perspec-

with Rothko's 1969-70 'black and greys' (see Cat.

118).

Rothko favoured after 1957 (see Cat. 114, 115), those preceding works still beckon the viewer. An alienating device, white borders, instead keeps these apart. Far from melodrama, they make closure and finalities their subject. That ultimately engaged Guston, too. Returning to a virulent representationalism around 1967, he scattered emblems of time and quite anticipates them. Despite the darkness

termination ever\n\'here in his paintings. Clocks, stark walls, lights soon to go out,

horseshoes parodying the (Fig. 9),

whose poetry was

parable here

may

figure the 'brute

"^^

final a

Greek

letter

'omega' and even,

in extremis,

TS. Eliot

long meditation on apocalypse and temporality. Guston's

then pinpoint Abstract Expressionism's broadest design: to recon-

enigma of ending'.'"

93

Mary Emma

Han'is

Black Mountain College:

European Modernism, the Experimental and the American Avant-Garde

Spirit

The summer of 1952 was not unlike pre\aous summers at Black Mountain The guest facult}' was exceptional, although, at that time, without critical was taught by Jack Tw'orkov

tion. Painting

in July

and Franz Kline

College.

recogni-

in August,

music

by John Cage and dance by Merce Cunningham. Karen Karnes and Da\dd Weinrib came from Alfred University to teach ceramics. Of the regular faculty, Charles Olson

Wolpe music, The composer Lou

taught literature, Stefan

Katherine Litz dance and Hazel Larsen

Archer photography.

Harrison,

remained

work on

to

M. C. Richards, came

his

who had

resigned in the spring,

opera Rnpunzel, and David Tudor, accompanied by

to give a concert of the

man, Henr\^ Cowell, Cage and Wolpe.

music of Pierre Boulez, Morton Feld-

Among

the forty-three students were

Nick

Cernovich, Fielding Dawson, Viola Farber, Harvey Lichtenstein, Joel Oppenheimer,

Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne and Besides the

Tudor

Cy Tvombly. on Thilosophical

concert, scheduled events included lectures

Foundations of India' by Nataraj Vashi, on the world hunger problem by Edgar Taschdjian and on contemporary^ music by Wolpe, as well as dance concerts by Jean

Erdman and

Litz. Yet, as

was often the case

at

Black Mountain, the most significant

events were spontaneous, an outgrowth of the atmosphere of intensive intellectual interaction.

Mealtime conversations would undoubtedly have included discussion of

the writings of Carl Sauer, Gestalt theor\^, Dada, the / Chhig,

Columbian

carvings. Abstract Expressionism, jazz,

Noh

Zen Buddhism,

theatre,

projective verse and the prevailing conservative political climate.

Huang Po

Doctrine of Universal

a single sitting,

and

same evening,

that

On

was

one afternoon Cage organized

later designated the first

Cage read The

to end, including notes, in

a theatrical farce, Occupe-toi de Briinhilde !

staged by the community. that

Mind from beginning

pre-

Antonin Artaud,

a

,

was written and

performance, given

'Happening'. Since teaching at

summer of 1948, Cage had begun to use chance procedures and a way of divorcing his own taste and ego from his work, and for this

the college in the

indeterminacy

as

event chance procedures were employed to create time brackets for the performers.

Fig.

I

theatre

Black Mountain College, dining on Lake Eden

i)>

MM

tM pinoa act«p>iii( I&e Mat danectlK!! aMa^iftn; a

[i

(fttUb to

words to possess

no it

different

just

his

work had

by knowing

This marked

it.'"'

a clear

to

buy

it

to have

artists

" ^

'

it

- they can have

by introduc-

;

sought, and largely achieved,

independence from the traditional market-based practice of the

most responsible

o^

oc dSn^ i^ rliaitctefacf: • OKtal bl

a •x'"

departure from convention

ing an unsaleable form of expression, Conceptual

laub, the individual

Mcvc

As he noted, collectors were

additional implications.

from other \iewers: 'They don't have

tcppon asd

for presenting the early

art world.

As Siege-

work of Kosuth, W'einer

and their colleagues Robert Barry and Douglas Huebler, has noted: 'Behind the socalled "dematerialization" there

was an attitude of general mistrust toward the

seen as a necessar\' finalization of the art work, and consequently towards existence and

its

market

its

object,

physical

value.''"

Particularly in their early phase, Conceptual artists emphasized the sitelessness of their art, One sheet

of

plywood secured to the

and exhibitions could take place without

galleries or dealers in the tradi-

tional sense. Catalogues often sufficed in presenting

new

formulations, and

floor or wall

when

actual exhibitions did take place these often consisted of photographs, diagrams,

words and books,

as well as

other forms of documentation relevant to

Perhaps the most important and,

in the

a

given idea.

long run, the most influential form of Con-

ceptual Art assumed photographic form. Indeed, the recent explosion of interest in

non-traditional photography dates to the advent of Conceptualism, with artists such as

John

Baldessari,

Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman and Ed Ruscha

all

employing the

camera, not in the production of refined aesthetic objects, but rather as

documenting This tion,

Fig. 10

1967.

Lawrence Weiner, Page from Statements,

The Louis

Siegclaub,

New

Kellner Foundation/Seth

last

many

their activities

point artists

is a

Beginning

in the late 1960s, artists

approach;

if a

With

means of

the critique of the formalist tradi-

characterization according to

def\'

a

ideas.

rather important one.

have come to

st\'le

tound that they need not master

a

or medium.

single formal

particular idea merited or required realization in a particular form,

they obtained the means to that end. As a result, determinations of quality are today increasingly based not

York

and their

on

as expressed in a variety-

can creative culture

st\'listic

grounds, but rather on the

of media. In part, this

in the 1960s,

with

a

is

qualit\-

of an

artist's

ideas

testimon\- to the richness of Ameri-

remarkable cross-fertilization occurring

in all

the arts, including music, dance, video, literature and film. WTiilc an artist such as •^4«-

Baldessari began by working with strongly conceptual content, he has since evolved into a leading figure in the manipulation of pre-existing photographic images.

Graham's work hovers,

tantalizingly,

between architecture, .Minimalism and C^oncep-

124

y^eal Benezra

tualism (see Cat. 223). Ruscha has ularly \\\xxy

form of conceptual and

film, \ddeo, dance,

imbued

his paintings (see Cat. 190) with a partic-

pictorial content.

Xauman has

used photography,

performance, neon and sculpture - evervthing, seemingly, except

painting -in his reconsideration of the meaning of art in contemporan,' societ\- (see

them and numerous others maturing in the 1960s, the advances made by Minimal and Conceptual artists throughout the decade proved both fertile Cat. 214-17). For

and

decisive.

125

Richard Aiyjistrong

Antiform: 1965- 1970

summer of

After lecturing on the idea during the

assembled

a

1966, the critic Luc\^ Lippard

group exhibition that autumn which she called 'Eccentric Abstraction'.

She used the same show's contents.

title

for an article published in

A wide-ranging

pard ascribed to their work

a

Art International describing the

selection, the exhibition featured ten artists.' Lip-

non-sculptural impulse that freely adapted aspects of

painting to three dimensions, joining Surrealist ploys with the

more formal

strategies

of so-called 'primary^ structures'. \Mth characteristic prescience, she identified crucial factor

Pop

Art's legac\' of accepting materials and attitudes previously

too Mjlgar or ugly to

work, with

its

ser\'e aesthetic

ends. Lippard singled out Claes Oldenburg's

penchant for manipulated shapes and surfaces and

physical metamorphosis, as an influence.

Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Bruce

attempt

at analysing a

new

The show

Nauman and

attitude that

human

as well as the vertical

body. WTiile at least

sculptors, the generally

some of

younger

artists

celebration of

its

work by Louise and marked the first

included recent

Keith Sonnier,

was shortly to be dubbed 'process

iVIinimalism' and 'antiform'. Its characteristics

of the horizontal

and

were

a taste for

a sense

art',

new media,

a

'post-

valuing

of scale closely related to the

these traits were shared by the Alinimalist

represented in 'Eccentric Abstraction' infused

their eccentrically fashioned pieces with telling signs of the creative process.

revived credibility in facture, which had been largely ignored by the deliberately eschewed

as a

deemed

Pop

They

artists

and

by the Minimalists.

In 1966 Minimalism was itself a recent arrival: cated metal and plastic forms in the

Donald Judd had begun his fabrifirst one-man show

summer of 1964; Dan Flavin's

of fluorescent lights had been held later that year; Carl Andre's stacked St\Tofoam

oblongs had

Fig.

I

Felt pieces by Robert Morris

his exhibition at the

Leo

on show

Castelli Gallery,

in

New

York, 1968

'Eccentric Abstraction' was seen at the Fisch-

New York, from 20 September October 1966. It included work by Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Ciar\' Kuehn, Bruce Xauinan, Don Potts, Keith Sonnier and Frank LincoIlT\'iner. Lippani s 'Eccentric Abstraction' article was published \nAii Iiitcniatioiial, vol. 10, no. 9, November 1966, pp. 28-40. bach Gallery, to 8

first

been seen in 1965. Judd's

call for 'specific objects' in

the 1965 Arts

12

6

Richai'd

Annstiwig

Yearbook defined the painting/sculpture hybridization which he saw taking place: 'In

the

new work

tered.

There

. . .

the shape, image, color, and surface are single and not partial or scat-

aren't

tional areas.''

any central or moderate areas of parts, any connections or

Robert Morris's 'unitan-

shown

objects',

as

an ensemble

at the

transi-

Green

Galleiy in 1963, were prime examples of Judd's dicta and represented the apogee of Morris's reductivism. Involved in performances by

way of

his contacts

with young

choreographers and dancers throughout the early 1960s, Morris was temperamentally

attuned to the emerging interest in process, as

is

e\'idenced by his

second half of the decade. Certainly, by the time he published

a series

Aitfomni during 1966-67, Morris's position had evolved into

work of

the

of articles in

a re\asionist one.

Codifying practices of the pre\nous few years, he mentioned investigations of tools

and materials, noting the frequent absence of the figure in favour of a focus upon the force of gravity. ial.

Chance

is

'Random

piling, loose stacking,

accepted and indeterminacy

is

hanging, give passing form to mater-

implied since replacing will result in

another configuration.'' Compositional attributes of this kind had become an integral part of Morris

s

own work by this time (see Fig. i), and were almost ubiquitous in that artists as Nauman, Richard Tuttle and Barr\' Le Va. Lippard's

of such younger

'Eccentric Abstraction' had included pieces of cut burlap by to be seen either hung on the wall or tossed into

the result as 'not-work

It

has

a corner.

Xauman that were meant One critic characterized

no formal character and yet no

The idea of working something really sibilities.'^ Nauman consciously embraced this either

particular content

inconsequential seems to have pos-

nascent anti-monumental concept.

Speaking of another fibreglass piece of about the same time, he said that to

do with trying to make

a less

important thing to look

his

work 'has

at'.'

A parallel motive lay behind Richard Turtle's work from the moment of its earliest appearance, in 1965. Convinced of the irrefutable logic of xMinimalist sculpture, Tuttle addressed the larger context of site in quirky presentations of modestly scaled,

imperfectly

made and

evocatively coloured objects (see Fig.

2).

floor or the wall (and there at unexpected heights), his pieces

Seen variously on the

embodied

a

personal

allusiveness that further contravened the deliberate impersonalit}" of the t}'pical imalist object.

Min-

Formal playfulness of conception and casual composition continue to

distinguish his oeuvre, as does an essential pictorialness: always modest, Tuttle's

painted objects or relief paintings insist on

a

symbiosis between two and three dimen-

sions.

Fig.

2

Bett}'

Mew of the exhibition 'Richard Tuttle' Parsons Gallen", Xew York, 1965

Antiform: 1965-1970

127

Robert Smithson's Mnror Displaceiiicnt: Cayuga Salt Mine Project (1968-69) on show in the exhibition 'Earth Art' at the Andrew Dickson WTiite Art Museum, Cornell Universit)', Ithaca, Fig. 3

ISr\',

1969

The

anti-art inferences

ticulated in

common

to both

Nauman

and Tuttle were more

Robert Smithson's mature work, dating from the

six

fully ar-

years preceding his

death in an accident in 1975. Smithson invented the category 'non-sites' for

much

of

what he did, arbitrarily reconstituting landscape - most often industrial rather than natural - indoors. His preoccupation with developing social and aesthetic theories to support such Art and the

activities

new

underscores his crucial position as

sculptors.

betu een Conceptual

His fascination with the industrially disfigured no man's

New Jersey indicates

land of suburban

a link

that his was a pioneering role in the develop-

With Gordon Matta-Clark, he was the first to interpret the post-modern landscape. Beginning with the Cayuga salt mine non-sites that he made for the exhibition 'Earth Art' at Cornell University' in 1969 (see Fig. 3), Smithson elaborated on a series of displaced earthworks that embodied entropy. ment of environmental

ethics.

Smithson's recreation of

ity-bound nature of

a

controlled field was but one manifestation of the grav-

much post-Minimal

plored process-derived

field situations

these ideas since 1966 while

still

production.

No

than Barr)' Le Va,

one more

insistently ex-

who had worked

alone with

attending graduate school in Los Angeles. During

the next four years he produced a series of complex 'scatter' pieces. Their critical

them appeared on the cover of the which contained an article on Le Va's work. The

influence and visibility increased after one of 2.

Donald Judd,

'Specific Objects', Aits Yearbook,

vol. 8, 1965, reprinted in

Donald Judd:

Complete Writings ig^^-ic)"^.

New

1975, pp. 181-9. 3.

on

Robert Morris, 'Antiform',

on Sculptures', published in February- and October 1966, and

three-part 'Notes

Summer 4.

1967.

Mel Bochner, 'Eccentric

Abstraction', Arts

Magazine,

November

1966,

p. 58. Bochner's own work was initial!)- allied with 'process' art, but soon assumed an

empirical, investigative form that located

it

within Conceptualism. 5.

Quoted

in

Anierican Sculpture of the Sixties,

Los Angeles County iMuseum of Art, 1967, p. 49. exhibition catalogue,

6.

W'iiloughby Sharp and Liza Bear, 'Interview with Barry Le \

a'.

Avalanche, no.

3,

Autumn

1974, P-^>^>- I his short-li\1?d underground tabloid was the house organ of \arious down-

town avant-gardes and therefore concerns of the moment.

refiects the

down

internal chronology.

its

a specific process, time'.''

Although

,

the material manifestations of his work, focusing instead

As he explained,

sophy of

its

is

work was

his

his large-scale

Le Va with

accumulations of felt,

much

glass,

indication of

wood and metal appeared

were organized by

his Conceptualist peers. All the

evident in his willing incorporation in

component

'not so

of what had been done to the material, as of marking off stages in

to be at the outer limits of anti-formalism, they

that allied

vol. 41, no. i,

1968 issue of Aitforin/i

himself played

Artforut?/, vol. 6,

no. 8, April 1968, p. 35. The title was the editor's, not the author's. See also Morris's

Artforu?fi in

November artist

\'ork,

a

a determinist logic

same. La Va's distinctive philo-

work of the random

disintegration

parts, their physically altered nature functioning as a record

of his

actual activity.

Another, more metaphysical, exemplar of aleatoric composition was Alan Saret, whose conglomerations of wire mesh and rubber were meant as carriers of poetic meaning. Saret's abiding interest in spiritual quests, often announced in the titles he chose, prompted his move to India in 1969. That year, two young curators at the Wliitnc}- Museum of American .\rt, Jim

Monte and Marcia the new aesthetic. ings, sculpture

Tucker, organized an exhibition sun'e)ing the rapid evolution of F^ntitled 'Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials',

and performances by twent)-one

artists,

it

featured paint-

including Hesse, Le \

a,

Mor-

12

8

Richard Annstrong

Fig.

4

Mew of the

exhibition 'Eva Ilesse: Chain

Pohniers', Fischbach Ciallen',

Xew

York, 1966.

Acnetiou (1968; Rijksmuseum Kroller-AIiiller, Otterlo)

is

Museum

ris,

Nauman,

new

express a

left,

Repetition \'iueteeu /// (1968;

.\rt,

Xew York)

at the rear

Sonnier, Turtle and Richard Serra (Saret withdrew at the last moment).

In her catalogue text, Tucker proposed that the things

use

on the

of Modem

on

^^e^v

were 'not attempts to

materials to express old ideas or evoke old emotional associations, but to

new content

that

is

with material'.'

totally integrated

Hesse's contributions to the 1969 show, including Expanded Expansion (at ten by thirty feet, the largest resin piece she

her central position within

this

had created) and Untitled {Ice Piece), underscored

group of

artists

who, though

intellectually unallied,

were on friendly terms with each other. Hesse's work had become more ambitious her principal

medium

after she

turned to fibreglass

showing

in Lippard's exhibition three years before, her sculpture

as

earlier that year. Since its first

three stages: Surrealist wall-reliefs occupied her for rather

ning in early 1965; there followed tures

on

a grid structure (an

[Cat. 212],

came with the

was included

I

begin-

body of work comprised of anthropomorphic

fea-

unusually gestural example, Metronomic hregiilarity 11

in 'Eccentric Abstraction'); and, lastly, the culminating

works

1968. In such serialized

as

phase

Acartion and Repetition Nineteen III

Hesse successfully embodied her ideas about new formal

summer can know

to herself written that

she stated:

know and what I It is go.'" Her adaption of gesture

want to

a year,

the fibreglass and/or polyester resin works that she started producing in

summer of

(see Fig. 4)

a

had gone through

more than

the in

'It is

my main

unknown

values. In notes

concern to go beyond what

quantit}" fi-om

which and where

such hanging works as Right After (Fig.

5)

I

and

Fig. 5

Art

7.

Eva Hesse, Right After, 1969. Milwaukee Gift of the Friends of Art

Museum;

Marcia Tucker,

in Anti-Illiisioii: Pivceditres/

Materitils, exhibition catalogue,

Xew York,

Whitney Museum of .American .Art, 1969, p. ^o. The show also included works or performances by Carl .\ndre, Michael Asher, Bill Bollinger,

John Duff, Rafael

Ferrer,

Robert Fiore, Philip Glass, Xeil Jenney, Robert Lobe, Robert Morris, Steve Reich, Robert Rohm, Robert R\Tnan, Joel Shapiro and .Michael Snow. L\Tida Benglis's work could not be accommodated physically, S.

though

it is

Quoted

in

discussed in the catalogue.

Eia

tion catalogue, .\rt Galler}-,

Hesse:

Xew

A

Retrospective, exhibi-

Haven, Yale University-

1992, p. 45.

Antiform: 1965-1970

Fig. 6

'First

Papers of Surrealism', exhibition

organized by Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp - whose string iab\Tinth' invaded the entire space

New York,

-

129

at the

\Miitelaw Reid Mansion,

1942

^rai Untitled {Rope Piece) (1970; WTiitney

Aluseum of i^\merican

Art,

profound link with the freedoms of Abstract Expressionism

reahsm and only

(see Fig. 6).

Her

abiht}', late in life, to

irrational fluidity elevated her

woman

work

to

to be included in a variety of

teUi' (Castelli

Warehouse,

New

New York)

as

accommodate both

its

present status as

rational structure

a well-spring.

'When

Attitude

The

Leo CasBecomes Form'

group shows, including

York, 1968) and

e\'inces a

negotiated \da Sur-

'9 at

(Kunsthalle, Berne, 1969), Hesse was admitted at an early date to the male bastion of

sculpture - a signal event, the consequences of which were cut short by her untimely death.

The VVTiitney and Castelli shows underscored the forcefalness of Richard Serra's new metal work; his acclaimed 'process' piece Splashing, done at the Castelli Warehouse, involved the repeated tossing of molten lead into a floor/wall joint. The hardened free-form castings futable

dominance of

attest

gra\it)^.

both to the defining role of

site

and to the

irre-

In turning to lead and then steel, as in One Ton Prop

(House of Cards) (Cat. 220), Serra deliberately overthrew the compositional primacy

of pre-welded Constructivist-derived sculpture in favour of leaning or balancing structures. insisted

His Prop

on the

series (see Fig. 7),

role of process

phenomenological drama.

Hg.

Works

7

1)\-

Richard Serra on shov\

in the

Nine Young (lUggenheim Museum,

exhibition 'Thcodoran Awards: Artists' at the

New

Solomon

York, 1969. I'Voni

R.

left to right:

Shovel Plate

Prop, Clothes Pill Prop, Wall Plate Prop, Right Angle

Prop

(all

1969)

-

by dint of the works' implied

in effect incorporating the \dewer in

Serra's earliest pieces (see Cat. 218),

instabilit}',

an ongoing

had employed rubber,

1 ^

Richard A nnstrong

o

and neon

fibreglass ing.

as

His famous 'verb

materials,

from

list'

of 1967-68 became

a projection

of his actions vis-a-vis his

the concluding 'to continue'.' Although

'to roll, to crease, to fold' to

among

they are

he defined for himself the significance of composition to mean-

the largest examples of the process genre, Serra's works nevertheless

Form

retain a structural clarit}- that elucidates his intentions.

simplified and mass

is

exaggerated in a reprise of the elemental, carved and cast shapes of Constantin Bran-

became an icon of the

cusi. Serra's sculptures

and have retained that status

era,

throughout the succeeding quarter of a century.

Even among anomaly.

for

one thing, the only one not to

and profound indebtedness to Marcel Duchamp,

live in

his

work

ished fi"om the beginning. WTiile livdng in California, tic

group of works that gave various forms both to

body

Nauman was

so heterogeneous a group of artists as this, Bruce

He was,

New York.

Nauman produced

Platfoiy?i

Made Up

(both 1966; Collection of Linda and

occupy

Nauman

many

human

as Collection of

My

Waist

of the Space Between Tivo Rectilinear Boxes on the Floor

Henry Macklowe, and Rijksmuseum

former

Miiller, Otterlo, respectively), the

the latter one of his

an eclec-

his abiding interest in the

Various Flexible Materials Separated by Layers of Grease with Holes the Size of

and Wrists and

an

its variet}-

(see Cat. 214-17) aston-

gauge of measurement and to negative space. Such pieces

as the

In

a 'soft sculpture' structured

on

Kroller-

were indicative of concerns that

plastic casts,

The

for another fifteen years.

long

titles

Dadaist strain underlying his creative impulse as well

as a

of felt,

a roll

w^ere to

Duchampian-

reveal the

preoccupation with lan-

guage. Nauman's numerous videotapes and films of the late

1960s show him

exploring perception as generated by speech and action, most often in sequences that

confound narrative expectations. Video has remained artist. Similarly, his

work with neon has been

a

medium

a favoured

cern, beginning with the disarming spiral Windozv or Wall Sign (1967; Galler\",

New York), which reads

truths'. Characteristically, this

Exaggerated Fomteeji Times

'The true

artist

Museum

European

evince an exaggerated self- awareness.

Wx&i

Hand

to

As

a

such as

Mouth

From

(see Fig. 8)

galleries

was thus widely

felt

in 1972 the

Museum

self-depictions

activities

Whitney

of Art co-organized

almost from the

new, inexpensive and flexible medium, video offered these

recording their

Nauman

1969 on, he presented

and museums, and

of American Art and the Los Angeles Count)'

a large retrospectiv^e; his influence

My

Name

pieces,

demonstrated the protean magnitude of his imagination. regularly at

Castelli

Last

such anatomical casts as the punning Fro?n recent work

Leo

helps the world by revealing mystic

and subsequent neon

Vertically,

for the

constant and constantly evolving con-

outset.'"

artists a

way of

and of structuring both behaviour and space. Narcissistic

predominated

in the tapes

L)Tida Benglis and Keith Sonnier.

With

produced by two young Louisiana

artists,

their flamboyant sensibilities, they explored

poured pigment and

the possibilities of 'process'

art. Benglis's

were deliberate

monumentalize the sacred gesture of 1950s American and it

efforts to

large-scale

latex pieces

painting. Studio photographs of her echo shots of Jackson Pollock in action,

was

tv^ical of Benglis that she should have confronted the heroics of Abstract

pressionism. Both wall and floor-bound, her

enormous

With her

later

works and

config-

adoption of such materials as beeswax and

plaster,

fluiditv^,

inventing

Benglis emphasized tactility and finish in a consciously feminist manner,

even more dominant in her

their cast

new

metal successors exchanged malleability for arrested urations of mass.

plastic

Ex-

an attitude

many videotapes.

Sonnier, no less experimental with his materials, sought to incorporate the audi-

ence in his work, often by physical evocations of

a stage-like space. After

1967 his

constructions of neon and incandescent light, latex, rags and an additive, synthetic

which he mixed with liquid medium, became overtly paintColour seemed more important to him than to most of his fellow sculptors,

texture called 'flocking', erly.

while his use of both audio and video tape enabled him to create free adaptions of

9.

last

of the

artists to

Richard Seira: Interviews, Etc.

Hudson River Museum,

be considered here, Joel Shapiro,

weakening of the process ethos that

in

ig~o-So, exhibition catalogue, Yonkers, XY,

theatrical environments.

The

Quoted

after 1970.

were presented in 'Anti-Illusion'

The

at the

is a

case study in the

tangled nylon filament reliefs of his

Whitney Museum were

typical of the

10.

1980, pp. lo-ii.

See Jane Li\-ingstr»n and Marcia Tucker, Bruce NamniDr. Works from 196^ to K)"!, exhibition catalogue, Los .\ngeles Count}" Museum of Art, 1972.

Antiform: 1965-1970

131

\lew of the exhibition 'Bruce Nauman', Leo Castelh Gallcn', New York, 1966. My Last Fig. 8

Name

Exaggerated Foititecn Times

Veitically (1967;

Sonnabend Collection) is in the centre, From Hand to Month (1967; Collection of Joseph A. Helman) at far left

underlying pictorialism evident in

him

to a

were

much

of that exhibition's contents. Shapiro's rapid

sequence of autodidactic, hand-shaped works around 1970, led group of 'signature pieces', including the bird, bridge and coffin shapes that

development,

first

via a

shown

New York's

at

Clocktower in 1973. Small

in scale (the bird, for ex-

ample, was roughly two by four by three inches) and simply rendered, these pieces

marked a turning away from the generally abstract forms preferred by his peers. These miniatures were harbingers of a new representationalism that was about to manifest itself in the work of such American painters as Elizabeth xMurray and Susan Rothenberg,

as well as in that

of a host of Europeans

still

unknown

in the

time. Shapiro's tentativeness hardened - metaphorically and physically

-

as

US

at the

he began

casting simplified 'houses' in 1973. In pursuing such quasi-architectural and, later, figural forms,

he embraced subjects that superseded post-xVIinimalism.

duction of recognizable subject-matter in

much

The

reintro-

painting of the early 1970s was but

the opening volley in that medium's successful bid for supremacy over sculpture, and

marked

a

gradual shift in interest that reached

wide flowering of Neo-Expressionism. In

a

apex ten years later in the world-

its

way

that recalled the ossification of

Abstract Expressionism in the second half of the 1950s, 'process' art had

too familiar and lost the potency of genuine spontaneity.

moved

on, adapting to the exigencies of careers and to their

artists.

Eva Hesse died

years

later.

The

With

artistic

most sahent ted so

in 1970;

Robert Smithson was

new

become

all

practitioners

roles as established

killed in a plane crash three

their loss, 'process' art entered another, secondar)' phase.

and

social legacy

feature

much of the

is

of the

late

1960s

is

rich

and

far fi-om exhausted. Its

the greatly expanded sense of the permissible, which

era's

promp-

disruption and exhilaration, and which remains capable of

unleashing comparable forces today.

-*¥•

Its original

133

John Benrdsley

Land Art

Americans ness, so

live

on hallowed ground: consecrated to equalitv' and freedom, and witheld, to a special covenant between a people and their Creator.

many have

'God has promised

us a

Brooks proclaimed

in

renowned

The Knickerbocker Magazine

the sublimit}' of Nature.

It

resounds

The

tered in the roar of Niagara loft)'

Beyond

purposes.'"

existence, if we will but deserve

blood of fratricidal war; etched with the figures of

tropes of landscape

still

'He speaks

TEMPLE in which we been sanctified by

this

promise in It is

ut-

dwell was built for

steeped in the

sacrifice:

of dispossessed Native Americans; and

trails

runaway

slaves,

following the pole star north.

They were heard

resound.

the writer James

along the crags of the Alleghanies.

all

august

that, the land has

shadowed with the

in 1835.

it',

in

The

one of Alartin Luther King's

most eloquent exhortations, delivered during the 1963 xMarch on Washington, which pressed the cause of equalitv' and justice for

freedom ring from the prodigious

all

hilltops of

America: 'Let

in a racially segregated

New

Hamsphire

Let freedom ring

from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado fi-om Stone

nessee. Let ever)'

But not only that, let freedom ring Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Ten-

freedom ring from

mountainside,

It is little

sistent

and even' molehill of Mississippi. From

ever\' hill

freedom

ring.'

wonder, then, that the landscape has been one of the most

metaphors

emerged

let

in

American

in the late 1960s

art;

and

httle

and early 1970s

as a focus

iXmerican art of the late twentieth centur)-. I.

James Brooks, quoted in Pern- Miller, 'Nature and the National Ego', in Enaiid into the Wilderness,

New York,

1964

(first

published

1956), p. 210.

Heizer, \^'alter

De

wonder

It

that, after

\'i\'id

and per-

decades of eclipse,

it

of some of the most compelling

was then that

artists

such

Maria, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Christo,

as

Michael

Nancy

Holt,

James Turrell, Charles Simonds, Ana Mendieta and literally dozens of others began making art of the landscape itself, using it both as the source of material and of

meaning

for their work.

\Mth

hindsight,

it

does not seem coincidental that Land Art

now most commonly known) emerged

at the same time as the movement; indeed, notions of environmental stewardship have played an ever-increasing role in recent American culture, as thev have in global politics. At the time, however, the motivations for Earth Art were somewhat more parochial: manv

(or Earth Art, as

it is

ecolog)'

artists

of the

late 1960s, joining in a

from the network of museums and Michael Heizer, Double Xegative, 1969-70. Alormon Mesa, near Overton, Nevada. Photos Gianfranco Gorgoni

Figs.

I,

2

©

They were traditional

also dissatisfied with

- read formalist -

art.

wider revolt against convention, were alienated

galleries

with their

ties to

what they perceived .-Vs

Heizer told

it:

money and

social status.

to be the limited concerns of

'The

intrusive,

opaque object

Jo^^" Beardsley

134

Fig. 3 Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty, 1970. Great Salt Lake, Utah. Photo Gianfranco

©

Gorffoni

refers to itself. ...It

is

rigid

and blocks space.

It is a target.

An

incorporative

work

is

beyond itself' making in 1967 and which is most familiar from his Double Negative (Figs. 1,2) -would be composed of space itself, carved out of the material of its place. Double Negative is formed of two cuts, each and

aerated, part of the material of its place

refers

Heizer's 'incorporative' art - which he began

thirt}- feet

wide and

Mormon Mesa It

fift)^

feet

in southern

affirmed numerous

deep

it

;

reaches across

a scallop in

Nevada and measures over

new possibilities

the escarpment of the

quarter of

a

for sculpture: not only

a

mile in length.

form determined

is it a

by space rather than by surface and volume, an environment rather than than

a horizontal rather

a vertical

;

but

also a

it is

a

monolith,

phenomenon

to be experienced in

beyond

Double Negative

time rather than apprehended in an instant.

Heizer was

less successful at ha%'ing his

work

refer

itself

is

curiously self-contained, a space into which to withdraw in solitar)^ contemplation.

who followed him into the western deserts were to make more of the connecWalter De Maria, who executed his first landscape work in Heizer's company in the spring of 1968, and Robert Smithson and Nana,' Holt, who joined

Others

tion with place:

Heizer that summer in Nevada, where he was working on called

told

Nine Nevada

by the

artist in

a series

of small excavations

The Spiral Jetty (1,500 x

Depressions. Smithson's

an essay of the same name, w^as

generated by

15 feet; Fig. 3), as

his reactions to the

landscape on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the curving shore

ringed by distant mountains: 'As

I

looked

at the site, it

is

reverberated out to the hori-

zons only to suggest an immobile c)xlone....The shore of the lake became the edge of the sun, Jetty

a boiling cur\'e,

was thus

microcosmic: the spiral. tice,

an explosion rising into

a reaction to the salt crystals

'The Spiral Jetty could be considered one

magnified

trillions

fier\'

prominence.' If

macrocosmic landscape, then it wa'^ that grew on the jetty were formed

77.7^

Spiral

also linked to the in the

shape of

a

layer within the spiraling cr\^stal lat-

of times', Smithson observ^ed. 'So

it is

that

one ceases to con-

sider art in terms of an "object". '-

The

references to place at

multiple.

Formed of

a grid

De

xMaria's

The Lightning Field

of 400 stainless

steel poles

Lightning Field stretches out a mile on an east-w- est

axis,

north-south one, in an isolated area of w est-central arrayed in such a

under twent\'-one to

way feet.

mapping, especially

that their tips

The

form

allusions at

to the

way

a level

(Figs. 4, 5) are likewise

spaced 220 feet apart. The

and nearly

New

a

Mexico.

kilometre on

The

2.

poles are

3.

plane at an average height of just

The Lightning Field are to measurement and

the bulk of the nation was divided into an ortho-

gonal grid of mile-square sections by the so-called Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

Michael Heizer, 'The Art of Michael Heizer'. Aitfonan, vol.

a

New York, 4.

8,

no. 4,

December

1969, p. 37.

Robert Smithson, 'The Spiral Jett\', in The Writings ofRohat Sriiithsou, ed. Xancy Holt, Walter

De

1979, pp. iii, 112.

Maria, 'The Lightning Field',

Airforimi, vo\. 18, no. 8, April 1980, p. 52. 5.

Xancy no.

8,

Holt, 'Sun Tunnels',

April 1977, p. 36.

Artforii?//, vol. 15,

Land Art

Figs. 4, 5

Walter

De Alaria,

1974-77. Near Quemado, Dia Center for the Arts

The Lightning

Field,

New Mexico.

©

Most

explicitly,

lightning,

De Maria

southwest. As the piece

De

however,

Maria's

which occurs with

is

work makes reference

relative

insists,

frequency in

however, 'the light

a perceptual puzzle, virtually

to the

awesome power of

this high-altitude is

as

135

important

region of the

as the lightning':

disappearing in the brilliant midday sun and

only becoming fully visible in the raking light of dawn and

dusk."*

Nancy Holt executed her first major work of Land Art during these years. Her Sini Tunnels (Figs.

four concrete cylinders eighteen feet long and nine feet in dia-

6, 7),

meter, were set out in the

Utah

desert in the shape of an X, with each cylinder orient-

ated to the position of the rising or the setting sun at the

The upper surface

of each cylinder

is

constellations; these star patterns are cast

the tunnels. 'Day

Holt nicely

tells

is

it.

or winter solstice.

by day on to the lower inside surfaces of

turned into night, and an inversion of the sky takes place', 'Stars are cast

down

While Sun Tunnels might thus be seen also functions as

summer

cut with holes in the configurations of various

to earth, spots of

as

warmth

as

in cool tunnels.''

an exercise in astronomical orientation,

something of an earthly camera, framing views into

it

a disturbingly

vast landscape. Figs. 6, 7

Nana.' Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76.

Near Lucin, Utah

James

Turrell, an artist

known

almost palpable (see Cat. 224),

way that it becomes upon framing views -in his case, into

for manipulating light in such a

is

also intent

John Beardsky

136

Fig. 8

James

Turrell, Roden Crater Project,

begun

1974. San Francisco Peaks, near Flagstaff, Arizona

infinity. Turrell

began work

Crater Project (Fig.

8),

in the

mid- 1970s on an undertaking known

so ambitious and so expensive that

around the tawny-red cinder cone of

a

it is

dormant volcano

in

as the

as yet unfinished.

Roden In and

northern Arizona he

is

fashioning a series of spaces that will function as obsenatories for various celestial lighting events: the yearly, northernmost rising of the sun, for example, or the south-

ernmost rising of the moon, which occurs

The main ing:

over even- eighteen-and-a-half years.

phenomenon known

from the bottom of the interior of the cone one

fectly recontoured, ehiptical

may

will

fit

with some

sk\^ like

By the mid- 1970s the

an arcing roof,

subtlet}* into its

thus escape the criticism that has been levelled at other

ventions in the landscape.

as celestial vault-

look up beyond the per-

rim of the volcano to see the

composed of light but implausibly sohd. Although grand, Turrell's work should it

just

incident will be the experience of a

en\ironment;

monumental

critique of Earth Art

inter-

was increasingly

being framed in ecological terms, with Heizer taking the most serious blows.

A writer

complained oi Double Negative that 'it proceeds by marring the ver\" land, what we have just learned to stop doing'; another critic, referring to Heizer's

in Aitformn

which

is

Fig. 9

weeks)

Fe?ice, Sonoma and Marin 1972-76 (removed after two

Christo, Rimuiug

Counties, California,

Land Art

137

.,^_

r"-*-

i*^^'.%

^^ t^:^"^-

^m:S.-llprX'^--;

.%

* !W1S" -••W»L;.'As-.-:-'^-S-.'.^V^V;i.C/.'. ^i^j'TlA^.^S^

Fig. 10

Fig. II

work

Charles Simonds,

Landscape
-Bodyi-^Dzi'elliiig,

Ana

1970

in AjTiveek, insisted that 'earth art, with ver\^

improve upon

Alendieta, Untitled (Fetish series),

1977; Old Alan's Creek, Iowa Cit)'. Photograph, Collection of Raquel Alendieta

its

natural environment,

criticism, alternatives to the

it

destroys

monumental

.

few exceptions, not only doesn't

it'.*

w^estern

:

By then,

in a spirit akin to this

works of Land Art had already

Europe and in the United States. In Europe the countenailing sensibility was typified by the work of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton in the L^nited States by such artists as Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Singer and Alan Sonfist. In the late 1960s Oppenheim opted for impermanent projects - drawings in snow or wheat - while Singer made permanent but very modest works in wood and stone and Sonfist worked with growing plants. Christo, meanwhile, continued his series, begun emerged, both

in

;

in 1961,

of flamboyant, theatrical projects, such

Running Fence that

it

(Fig. 9),

as the 24-mile-long, i8-foot-high

which, though temporar\-, elicited criticism on the grounds

disrupted an ecologically sensitive stretch of California coastline."

Among the most

abiding images of the less

monumental

sort

from the 1970s were

those that explored the connection between body and landscape. Artists such as

Charles Simonds and Ana Alendieta, from very different points of view, managed to

convey an awareness of landscape

which we 6.

Joseph Alasheck, 'The Panama Canal and Some Other VVbrLs of V\brk', Aitjonini, \o\. 9. no. 9, Alay 1971, p-4i; Michael Auping, 'Alichacl Heizer: The F.colog\- and Kconomics of "Earth .\rt"',.'i;rz:Tfjt, vol. H, iHJune 1977, p.

7.

^

I.

See .\]fred PVankenstein, Beaut)' or Betrayal?', Ait no. 6,

as a

system

we

inhabit, rather than as a surface

upon

Simonds buried himself in

a clav

1970, in a private ritual called Bhth,

New Jersey and was filmed enacting his metaphorical creation from the earth. He followed this with a series called Landscape Dv:elUng (Fig. 10), in which he

pit in

lay

naked

in the clay, fashioned a

landscape upon himself, then constructed upon that

the dwellings of an imaginarx' civilization of little people.

Simonds was suggesting not

only comparisons between the bodx- and earth, but between bodv/earth and architec-

'C^hristo's

"Fence":

in Anicriai, vol. 64,

Novemher/Decemher

act. In

1976, pp. 5H-61.

ture as well:

all

are different forms of dwellings.

tecture by natural analog}', in which forms

He

emerged

developed

like

a

growing

language of archiplants, then faulted

138

John Benrdsley

and crumbled characteristics

like earth.

- were

people subsequently

At the same time,

the

- replete with sexual

The

and cracked with age.

flesh that w^ithered

like

left

his landscapes

body of their creator and appeared on the

little

walls of build-

ings in inner cities around the world, a potent reminder of the alienation of

most

urban dwellers from natural cycles and systems.

Ana Mendieta's work had a series

of temporary,

once

at

a

more personal and

ritualistic pieces

more

a

political cast to

from the middle of the 1970s variously

Fetish (see Fig. 11), Tree of Life or Silhouette, she inscribed the Hfe-size

own body on rock, as

the ground. Sometimes

sometimes delineated

photographs. There

at the

is

in

was

built out of

gunpow der and

a sense

age of thirteen from

it

Cuba

set

to the

United

Some

sticks or spattered

is

a feeling

;

all

first

if to

in

of these sculptures were exe-

assuage her feelings of exile. At

of anger to them: variously scorched, pierced with

with blood, they seem to decr\' the violence done to

on numerous

oppositions - male and female,

culture and nature.

mind and body,

some important ways the dichotomy between

the

much common ground. Smithson,

for example,

between the ecologist and the

his death in 1973, several projects that

came

is

to see his

industrialist',

would use

women

and to

typically hierarchical

monumental works of Earth

Art and the more restrained, ecologically determined works

that mediates

in

these pieces survive only

the landscape, while provoking meditation

In

image of her

mud, sometimes etched

where she was brought up

States,

of the

cuted on tree trunks and river-banks in Iowa, as

same time, there

fire

In

of longing in these works: A'lendieta was sent alone

orphanages and foster homes in Iowa.

the

on

it.

titled

a false one: there is

work

as 'a resource

and proposed,

art to reclaim surface

just before

mines

in

Ohio

and Colorado.** Heizer was recently involved in such a project, incorporating five Effigy Tumuli Sculpttires - the huge abstracted shapes of a frog, a water-strider, a snake, a turtle and a catfish - into the reclamation of a two-hundred-acre surface coal

mine

in Illinois. Regardless of the ecological stance of the various artists.

Earth Art

has helped define landscape as one of the chief cultural battlegrounds of our time, in

which we are beginning while

still

to address the future health of our species

struggling to enact the promises of the past.

and our planet,

*^-

Smithson, op.cit./Untitled, 1971',

p.

220.

139

Max Faust

Wolfgang

Shattered Orthodoxy:

The Energy

of Transformation

a new millenium about economic conModern mildly absurd.

At present, with the twentieth century drawing to dawn, the ver\^ idea of 'national' art appears

and the technical

ditions

to a close

and

by the mass media have long since is accorded - at best - a peripheral

possibilities offered

created a global civilization in which the national status.

marked by catastrophes arising from national, ethnic These are signs of the panic which typically emerges in times

Nevertheless, the present

and religious

conflict.

is

new can

of radical change and innovation. Before the

institute its

own

of stable

set

conventions, long-established patterns of thought and behaviour which oppose the

dynamic of change are given

The

aspects to this.

past

endowed with an

is

those elements are revealed within Fig.

I

Edward

Philip CiUston, lii/kiug, 1979. R. Broida Trust, Los Angeles

do so

to

emphasis. There are, however, two

a fresh, radical

it

same time

illusory grandeur, but at the

which engendered the new and

will

continue

in future.

We are

new

currently living at a historical watershed, in a state where the

has not

no longer holds good- ours is an age of transition in which the parameters of the future are perceptible only as dim outlines. That the new will

yet emerged but the old

suddenly reveal

itself at a single

merely happen:

it is

a

vain hope. History does not

It is a

process involving conflicting

dramatic stroke

made by men and women.

is

with points of condensation and concentration,

fields offeree,

and moments of transformation.

part of the

x\

new element

moments of regression

infiltrating into the

mak-

ing of history consists in the disturbing realization that the future can only be planned

The more

in bare outline.

the wider they

detailed our blueprints and predictions for the future are,

of the mark. Historical projections have to be open, leaving space

fall

for the unpredictable, for things that shape themselves of their

Fig.

Jonathan

2

Borofslcy,

RumiingMan,

1982.

Painted on the Berlin Wall on the occasion of the

we

angle that

are able to discern

exhibition 'Zeitgeist' at the Martin-Gropius-Bau,

prospective elements,

Berlin

own

accord. This

means that the present is not to be taken as a given fact but seen, instead, as a d\Tiamic whole whose primary quality is energy. It is only by looking at the present from this its

contradictions and conflicts,

its

moments of consen-ation and

its

retrospective and

transformation. This calls for

an open form of thinking that does not seek to presence the status quo but willingly accepts insecurit}' - placing

An

interpretation of

throws

its

trust in the configuration

American

art since the

the parameters of this subject into sharp

all

the art of the

USA, and

of the quest.

end of the 1970s relief.

this fact has historical, political

cept that was redefined by narrowing there

is a

hankering for

identity'

which

it

is

down

on

a

of energ\^

here,

means

The

simplif\ang label

loose geographical con-

into national terms.

rooted in the

art,

and cultural implications that

are closely connected with the issues of nationalit}- and power.

'Ainerican' refers back to a traditional self-image based

as a field

'American'

Underlying

modern W'estern

thinking in the categories shaped by the nation-state. In the

USA

this

this

tradition of

concept was

burdened fi-om the outset with irreconcilable internal contradictions. The USA is a European invention, created through the displacement of Europe's geopolitical dominion.

Identit)'

could onh' develop via negation. WTiereas in Europe the relative

congruence of geographical configuration, ethnic distribution and national boundaries

and

could be taken for granted, the justify

it

in missionarv' terms.

USA

had to manufacture

The attempted

a

sense of nationhood

extermination of the Indians and

the brutal denial of their rights form the background on which this desire for identity inscribes Fig. 3

Pace

Julian Scimahcl, Ohitz

Clallcrv,

New

\orV

niirii,

1991.

itself.

As

ever\'

remnant of contact with the aboriginal population was

severed, the quest lor identit)' created a

ttibiihi iiisii,

beginning, the dream ol innocence

midst of guilt. Thus, the visions

in the

the illusion of an cntircl\t)f

new

paradise

Wolfgang

140

Max Faust

that continue to surtace in

American societ)' are not only designs for the future; they which they strive to repress. The identity of the

are also directed towards the past,

USA evolved, of the phrase

in relation to the nation's histor)-,

if

'as

peans conquered the

new

it,

if the region had had

'as

:

'as

by thinking

in the subjunctive

terms

no histon' of its own before the Euro-

if this were a divinely ordained path to world salvation,

'as

if

nation were the true chosen people. In this view of history two perspectives

converge: the one referring to

a

geographical space and

historical prefiguration

its

USA), and the other

(the countr}' itself, as the 'ground' of the

to an imaginan' space,

the severing of the umbilical cord linking America with Europe. Identit)'\ia negation is

based on the fantasy of otherness.

ture

is

the notion that

thereby forging

a new^ identit)'

that in

is

all its

its

of the comictions fundamental to itself through

US

cul-

contact with an alien world,

and leaxing the past behind.

This also apphes to 'American' parades

One

Europe rediscovered art.

The

pathos of independence that

it

continually

closely connected with the yearning for identit}', in the latent awareness

paradigms derive from European tradition.

capacit}' for assimilation

in the experimental

extent, by 'world

and transformation,

Its singularit)' consists, rather,

in curiosity

and open-mindedness,

redrawing of the parameters defined by Europe and, to

art'. If

one wishes to probe

a lesser

farther, refusing to content oneself with

identifving variants, extensions and reinterpretations, one has to seek out the meta-

and substructures of American

art,

the specific element in which the radicalization of

Fig.

4

Jean-Michel Basquiat,

Flexible, 1984.

Estate of Jean -Michel Basquiat

European attitudes generates a new kind of energ\'. There are numerous aspects to which one might point: the experiences of space, of the frontier, of unit}' in diversit}'; the national sense of missionary' purpose; the periodic disillusionment induced by the failure

of the American dream. Although

ness' in

American

this essay singles

out the element of

'as-if-

bound up with the other aspects: it constiBy accepting the condition of 'as-ifhess', by which tradition sets such store, and takes on an

art, this is intrinsically

tutes the ver}' basis of America's identit)'. identit}^ departs

from the

'nature'

complex

artificial character, as a

tissue of desires

and longings which

is

essentially

d^-namic rather than fixed.

Looking

at

American

art

from

this angle, it is possible to identity' a

nificant characteristics that diverge fi"om the

variations art, to

on the same theme, American

the fabricated character of

work of

art

by the context

in

its

which

art has called attention to the artificialit}' of

it

on the

actual process of execution,

of 'making'

is

which

is

effect,

it

forces

is

w ork,

its facilit}^

meaning

an emphasis on craftsmanship,

seen as ha\'ing

inscribed directly in the

greatness of American art consists in

ing for immediate

on the

appears. Artists themselves are regarded as

'makers' rather than natural 'creators': there

fact

series of

products, to the significance bestowed

human

The The

number of sig-

European model. In an endless

for

to surface

its

own

specific dignit}'.

meaning in its own making things \asible.

as a

and reveal

right.

Striv-

Fig. 5

Keith Haring, Silence = Death, 1989.

Private collection

itself.

The reasons for this lie in American society'. American artists have to cater for a relatively mixed audience whose constituent sections have their own traditions of perception. In order to address the public as a whole, the artist has to step outside the

where the art world is the work is perceived, there is also the issue of the socio-economic conditions under which it is produced. To a greater extent than in Europe, art in the USA has always been bound up with commerce. The work of art is a commodit)^ that is expected to prove its worth in the framework of expectations shaped by conditions

in Europe,

comparatively homogeneous. As well as the question of

how

market-place. Commercial success not only confers economic status;

it is

also a sign

of cultural legitimation.

The international art scene

of the 1980s and 1990s

is

characterized by the interplay

of conflicting- European and .Anerican - mentalities. At the end of the 1970s Min-

imalism and Conceptualism, the innovative movements of the previous two decades,

were largely played out. Especially in the

USA art was

in the

^

doldrums and showing

However, the vacuum was promptiy filled by new trends in whose impact was tremendous. The return to painting began in Italy, with artists such as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino, who were follow^ed by a large group, spanning two generations, of definite signs of lethargy.

European

painting,

Fig. 6

Robert Gober,

Paula Cooper Gallery,

Untitled, Caudle, 1991.

New York

Shattered Orthodox}'

141

West German painters, including Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Liipertz, Jorg Immendorf, A. R. Penck, Walter Dahn, Georg Jiri Dokoupil, Rainer Fatting and Salome. Both these European movements were eagerly hailed in the USA, where their sensational success, coupled with the general financial euphoria of the Reagan era, led the art market to boom: the link between art and commerce grew closer than ever before. With the work of Philip Guston, Jonathan Borofsky, David (see Figs. 1-5), the

tern,

adding

Salle, Julian

Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring

American school of 'New Image' painting followed a similar patnational touch but refusing to deny its European origins. These

a certain

new developments

in art

were promoted with the

aid of industrial

egies, using public relations techniques to present artists as 'stars'.

the reinterpretation of tradition - re-establishing a

dead and taking

its

marketing

Based

as it

medium formerly regarded

bearings from the conventions of Expressionism - the

uration served as the model for a concept of art that was

innovation in the traditional avant-garde sense. tinual path of discovery,

The

and

as

New Fig-

no longer directed towards

idea of linear progress, as a con-

was replaced by an emphasis on reshaping the

in the various 'neo', 'retro', 'appropriation'

strat-

was on

past, as

seen

'recycling' approaches.

framework defined by post-avant-garde and post-modern attitudes, a therefore arose which allowed artists to exploit the entire range of modern-

\\'ithin the

situation Fig. 7

Jeff Koons, Saint John the Baptist,

Collection of the

inventions for their

ist 15

own ends,

in

order to make an immediate contemporar\' state-

ment. In response to the pre-eminence of Europe in painting, American

artist

develop forms of

American

its

art

own, combining the appropriation of history with

characteristics.

Object

art,

rather than painting,

medium, highlighting the manufactured

quality of art

and

its

began to

specifically

became the dominant proximity to the world

A disparate assortment of historical traditions - ranging from MarDuchamp's ready-mades (see Cat. 19-23) and Surrealist assemblages to the aesthetics of Andy Warhol (Cat. 183-9) ^^^ ^^e work of Joseph Cornell (Cat. 64-71) -was brought together and blended. At the same time, ideas shaped by the experience of the 1960s and 1970s were taken up again and re-explored. With the realization that the significance of the work of art derives from the context in which it stands, it became necessary to see the strategies employed in selling art, in positioning it on the market, as an integral part of the work itself. The illusory boom created by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s was followed in the latter part of the decade by political decline and economic slump, which dramatically accelerated the breakup of American society. Spectacular events in foreign policy, such as the Gulf War set in train by George Bush, were no more than interim disguises for inner weakness: the fictional character of such displays of greatness was all too evident. The continual talk of a new 'world order', to be set up and administered by the USA, was pure fantasy. Even the upheavals in eastern Europe and the breakup of the So\aet bloc failed to stimulate the forces that might have brought about a regeneration of the USA. With figures such as Robert Gober and Jeff Koons (see Figs. 6, 7), American art of the early 1980s had focused on 'internal' issues, looking at the relationship between the work of art and the world of consumer capitalism of commodities. cel

Fig. 8

David Hammons, Cold New York

Shoulders, 1990.

Jack Tilton Gallery,

and investigating the appropriation and reworking of of circumstances, however, there has latterly been ical

and

social implications

of

art:

two of the names that spring

David

a

Hammons The

tradition.

Under

the pressure

renewal of emphasis on the polit-

and Mike Kelley

(see Figs. 8, 9)

means that economic success can no longer serve as a yardstick of artistic value. Nowadays, the way to succeed is by systematically resisting success. It would be impossible, however, are

to

mind.

to recreate the state of innocence towards

collapse of the art market

which contemporary'

no going back on the experience accumulated

in

and through

art aspires. art

over the

There is last two

decades. Fig. 9

Mike

Kelley, Almost

Galeriejablonka, Cologne

l\ 'hitc,

1990.

At present,

it is

difficult to say exactly

of the 1980s and 1990s. To

identif}'

what constitutes the energies fuelling the art more clearly, one has to abandon

those energies

the internal viewpoint of the art world and turn to society' as a series

a

whole. Here, one finds

of paradoxes. In the 1980s art was hugely successful, adapting

with social and economic

stratet>ics

itself to fit in

and commanding an enormous amount of atten-

Wolfgang Max Faust

142

tion as a social

phenomenon. Yet

were harbingers of

signs of success

exhausted:

ermost

all

instead of ensuring the preservation of

The canons

extinction.

its

that remains of them in the various reworkings of tradition

shell. In its

newly revised form,

pian terms; at most,

it is

of today, modernity

is

art

of the past.

is

their out-

potential in the present.

its

An

era

drawing to

is

its

For the

y ,

^

virtually incapable of speaking in Uto-

is

'atopian', scattering

a thing

a

these

art,

of modernism are

art

close. Repetition,

appropriation, variation: these ideas suggest that the traditional verities are

still

flour-

more problematical than ever before. The question now is no longer how to make art, but whether it should be made at all, at least in the form familiar to us since the emergence of modernism. It is not enough to say that works of art still exist and artists still carr\' on working. These days, the age-old problem 'WTiy bother with art?' is no longer a rhetorical question that has already ishing, but their legitimac}' appears

been answered before impUcations

The

it is

as a question

even posed; instead, the

veil is

being

lifted

from

its

radical

of fundamental principle.

mixture of opulence and miser\' which passes for democrac}" in the prosper-

ous societies of Europe and North America, the massacres in the former states of

World and

Yugoslavia and the USSR, the pauperization of the Third catastrophe facing the world as a whole -

Fig. 10

Jenny Holzer, Installation from the Times Square, New York, 19

series 'Truisms',

the ecological

these things add up to a global crisis that

all

cannot be resolved by conventional means: the established categories of action and

thought are inadequate to cope with it. The qualit}' that nothing - not even art - can blot

in

its

was

a

it

to maintain

energy^ as

\Mth

The

societ}".

on

as a social

phenomenon

in

art has to relate to the things that

greatness of modernist art consisted

W. Adorno - 'a

authenticity, a surface

could be projected.

become

art has

presence in

- to quote Theodor

form of ersatz

lived' life

its

Seen

out.

which certain forms of experience are inscribed, enable

has such an immediate, tangible

crisis it

social antithesis to society'.

which the

to

Art

failures of the inert 'un-

the end of modernism, the fictitious character of

so obvious that the insistence

on maintaining the pretence

is

ana-

chronistic and wholly inappropriate. Drained of the energy supplied by tradition, art

has been reduced to a set of bare functions, a

commercial

is

commodity

no more than

and contemporary"

art,

a

game. Even

too - in 'as-iP terms,

becomes an empt}" phrase, an ornamental

ritual

and

critics

'as

neatly integrated into the

PR managers of local and national

by the sponsors, the

and the entertainment industn. The

authorities

petus

strategies de\ised

invocation of

present

art historians

modernism still which attempts

if

fiction

its

original im-

modern

existed.

art

Thus,

to shore

it

up the

status quo.

Since the early 1980s art has finally broken loose fi-om the ideas that shaped ernism.

The

orthodoxies of the

trine 'amiJiing goes', seen as a

freedom. However, since tradition.

Up

to

now

it

message with

shattered.

past, this

freedom remains

change. Art continues to shuffle

a radical

to the prevailing system.

The

this

question

is

now integral

ing theme has been revealed, above

all,

the stimuli that are necessary^

if

contemporary' art

familiar to us since the inception of

question 'WTiy bother with

art,

whose

Fig. II

Cindy Sherman, So. 22), 1990; from the

series 'Histon,- Portraits'.

Galerie,

Alonika Spriith

Cologne

element in the identity of the USA. than

assured.

ing anyi:hing new.

issue

With

now

is

Fig. 10), eroticism

\iola (Figs.

which

pure

artifice

is

1 is

rcai

m

a constitutive

continued existence in the future

whether

art itself

is

is

why

artists

communication

and the media.

by no

domain of experience,

this

have been searching for

new

in the case of

and the body with Cindy Sherman

is

remotely capable of engender-

the global networking of every

12, 13), reality

art as

On this basis, art acquires the status of a possibil-

appears increasingly improbable. That areas of reference: politics and

teilin-

to transcend 'art' in the guise

is

modernism. The idea of

a 'natural' fact; thus, its

The

characteristic fea-

artificialit}' - have introduced

directly connected with the habit of thinking in 'as-if terms,

Bill

tied to

quantum leap around on the

to art. Its explosive potential as an underly-

by American

tures - the emphasis on 'making', on fabrication and

means

new

being steadfastly evaded.

However,

ity rather

mod-

the doc-

emphasis, art has gained a

a positive

merely dissipates the

By embracing

there has been no evidence of an impending

which would bring about same old paths that link it art?' is still

modern have been

Jenny Holzer (see Gary Hill and

(Fig. 11), and, for

Fig. 12

Gan-

Hill, Still

of Catastrophe, 1987-88

from the video

Incidence

Shattered Orthodoxy*

Today, the real focus of art

ways

in

which

it is

we

are equal partners. WTiat

and, with

the

artist.

it,

lies in

reception. Its significance

perceived, experienced and appropriated. are currently witnessing

is

is

The

143

determined by the

artist

and the viewer

the liberation of the beholder

dream of transforming society' through art and merely one among many participants in the enterprise

the end of Joseph Beuys's

Instead, the artist

of building the future. This

is

is a

behind. Looking at society as that the orthodoxies of

a

challenge he has to accept

whole, the impression

modernism have collapsed -

is

if

he

is

to avoid being left

beginning to emerge -

now

that the former avant-gardes

have long since become deniere-gardes.

A new

art

which seriously engages with our present age of transition can only

develop through dialogue, by interacting with ever\'day

^\\\Wo\z, Heaven and Emth, 1992. Donald Young Gallen', Seattle

"-¥i

terms on which

life,

with science, with poli-

dialogue might be conducted were

and the mass media.

set

out by the poet Novalis at the beginning of the nineteenth century,

wrote: 'Becoming

Fig. 13

The

tics

human

is

an

art in itself.'

this

when he

r

HS Donald

Kiispit

Primary and Secondary

Critics,

new

Instead of seeking to forge

might dedicate

itself to

cults of believers, criticism

bringing into being

a

consciousness of

those factors of experience that are related to style - for

example, the liberation of individuals from dead forms in expression and social behaviour. Harold Rosenberg, 'Spectators and Recruiters''

It

1

may

be heresy to suggest that Clement Greenberg (Fig.

(Fig. 2)

have something in common, but in

Abstract Expressionist

artist.

For both, he

fact

is

and Harold Rosenberg

i)

they share the same conception of the

the tragicjew of American

art, establish-

ing a complex cosmopolitan identity in an aesthetically simple-minded, pro\incial

Everything in their criticism follows from this \'iew of the authentic Ameri- or 'Coonskinner', as Rosenberg wittily called him-- as suffering the same

society.

can

artist

problems of identity and adaptation or stranger wherever he

lives.

as the Jew,

This idea of the

who

is

always regarded as an outsider

artist's

fundamentally alienated place

in

America, and of America's inherent suspicion of the

it

may

officially sanction creativity), is implicit in

Jewishness' and explicit in Rosenberg's 1966 essay Clement Greenberg. Photo © Hans Namuth Fig.

'misfit' artist

(however

'Is

There

a Jewish Art?'

No doubt the idea of the artist's insecure place in a hostile America seems dated. It

I

may have

served to acknowledge the resentment and resistance Abstract Expression-

ism encountered before being appropriated by American society

proved America's greatness.- But even as

David

and

as socially

and economically successful an

Salle declares that 'to be a serious artist in

And US

alienated'.^

as a 'triumph' that

America

is

Senator Jesse Helms's persecution of Andreas Serrano and

changed much since Congressman George Dondero's

by promising to reward him

for

create an art of aesthetic depth that there

is

choice 2

Harold Rosenberg

is

it is

-

let

appropriate, shallow path. Thus, for Rosenberg, the

artist is

always in

a

comply with

way

to disarm an

is

Jew,

him

They

to

embrace him

it,

nor the

critics

who

in effect stand the

its

on

its

head: the

fame. As always,

dialectically.)

Neither the movements that followed Abstract Expressionism to

profane

artist as a

art as a 'Jewish-Bolshevik' conspiracy

enemy

society's

American

defamatory charge of 'Jewish revolution' becomes the basis for the best

For

positive use an idea that supposedly negates

or her, which demonstrates their intellectual sophistication.

Nazi cliche of avant-garde

Self.*

essence of the

Jewish situation, trapped between auto-

assimilation. (In conceptualizing the avant-garde

Rosenberg and Greenberg put into

The

a kitsch artist."

the same: to maintain one's sacred integrity or

nomy and

tests the serious artist

America makes it difficult to alone of profound human insight - by suggesting

between being an avant-garde or

demands. The American

not

less serious.

always faces a choice between being a True or a False

artist

Greenberg,

more

a socially

becoming

art has

day.'

According to Greenberg and Rosenberg, American society

American

artist

always to be marginal

Robert Mapplethorpe suggests that the public understanding of serious

Fig.

much

Greenberg's 1965 essay 'Kafka's

in negative reaction

followed Greenberg and Rosenberg in negative reaction to

them, questioned their sense of the fundamental dilemma that the serious American artist faced: to

endorse American society, however ironically

withdraw ft-om

it

into a

of art or of nature (often

and Earth critics

Art). It

a

combination of both,

was only

favoured, and

Pop Art

(as

new fundamentalism, whether involving a

how

tual light: the alienated

a

as in the

did);

or to

return to the basics

convergence of Minimalism

matter of which side the post-Cireenberg/Rosenberg

they reinterpreted that side to show

True Self avant-garde

it

side, celebrated

in the best intellec-

by Cireenberg's

dis-

Donald Kuspit

146

ciples

Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss,

whatever attenuated form and the 'with

in

;

welcomed by Lawrence Alloway and Lucy Lippard in ver\^ different ways. These critics buttressed their beliefs by fleshing them out with new ideas that, though perhaps more trendy than those of Rosenberg and Greenberg, it'

False Self kitsch side,

were not

basically different.

Rosenberg

writes:

In the chaos of the 20th century, the metaphysical theme of identit}' has entered into

strongly since the war.

It is

from

point that the

this

acti\-it},'

of Jewish

art,

has risen to

artists

a

and most

new

level.

Instead of continuing in the masquerade of conforming to the model of the -American painter bv ac-

quiring the mannerisms of European

art,

.-American Jewish artists, together with artists of other

grant backgrounds - Dutchmen, Armenians,

Italians,

Greeks - began

immi-

to assert their individual relation

to art in an independent and personal way. Artists such as Rothko,

Newman,

Guston, Lassaw, Rivers, Steinberg, and many others helped to inaugurate

a

Gottlieb, Nevelson,

genuine American

art

by

creating as individuals.*

For Rosenberg,

most serious theme

'the

in

Jewish

the problem of identity'.'

life is

Abstract Expressionism was also 'inspired by the will to identit}^ seir.'° It 'enacted' a

.

the aesthetics of

.

.

sense of unique identity through a 'specific encounter' with an

Harold Rosenberg, Discovering

the Present,

Chicago, 1973, p. 132. Harold Rosenberg, Tradition of the X^ra; NewYork, 1965, pp. 13-22. Rosenberg distinguishes between 'Redcoat' artists in stvlistic

uniforms and "Coonskinner" artists making a 'non-sD,le' or 'nonlook' in response to a specific situation. Ironically, the original nonst\-le

inevitably

becomes codified

as a habitual

stvie. I

am

alluding to Irving Sandler's The Triumph

A Histoiy ofAbstract KxpresNew York, 1970, and Serge Guilbaut's

ofA?nerican Ait:

unprecedented

'situation'." Similarly,

immigrant Jews had to enact

their uniqueness

in order to maintain faith in themselves. Indeed, for Rosenberg, Abstract Expression-

ism was not only

a peculiarly Jewish

Arshile Gorkv', about

w^as

and

an immigrant from

Armenia, and W'illem de Kooning, to w hom Rosenberg had the most sustained commitment, was an immigrant from Holland. Jackson Pollock was also an immigrant - from Wyoming. They all came to New York Cit\', an essentially immigrant cit\^

(and

They were grated to

and faced the immigrant problem of ha\ing

one),

still

all

strangers in the strange land of avant-garde art as

new kind of w^orld and

encounter: with a

Not

dam and

only was

a

w^ell. It

new kind of art. As Rosenberg

it

it

easy to start

pattern', as

it

was simpler

'to settle into a self-repeating

some measure of

[and self-congratula-

to manufacture so-called signature art." Nevertheless, in

Abstract Expressionism's heyday the s\Tiergistic interaction of the chaotic

of New^ York and the imported Tradition of the

New was

Correlatively - and no doubt ironically, considering that

ment-Abstract Expressionism came American

self, as

the 1958-59

to

Museum

of

Painting', exported to Europe, indicated.

American Scene painting, with with

Both were

its facile

its

it

remarkably

Modern Art This

catal\lic.

was an immigrant achieve-

show^ 'The

w^as all the

more

New

American

peculiar in that

its

and general lack of expressive depth.

making them especially irrelevant. the 'massive trajectories which speed across the canvas

illustrational,

In general,

but expressed the ruptured psyche of the immigrant

field', as

artist.

in

Franz

urban experi-

The

conflict-

ridden city and the emotional conflicts of the artists correlate abstractly in their art.

Max

Cold War', Artfontm,

vol. 13, no. 9, 1973,

pp. 43-54.

Quoted

in

Dodie Kazanjian,

'Salle Days',

Vogue, vol. 182, no. 5, zMay 1992, p. 303.

See Herschel B. Chipp,

ed., Theories

of Modem

Alt, Berkeley, 1968, pp. 496-7, for e.xcerpts from Dondero's speech on 16 August 1949 in

House of Representatives about the 'horde of germ-carrving art vermin' who had been 'let into our homeland ... to aid in the destruction of our standards and tradithe United States

tions."

Rosenberg's distinction between the pioneer and the conformist artist is essentially that which D. W. Wlnnicott makes between the True and the False Self In 'Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self, in his The Maturational Processes and the FacilitatingEnvironment.

New York,

1965, p. 146, \MnrLicott

True Self with

'the

spontaneous

gesture and the personal idea'. In contrast, 'the False Self results in feeling unreal or in a

sense of futiHty'.

Where

the True Self brings

together experiences of aliveness, the False Self represents 'the whole organization of the

poHte and mannered social attitude' (p. 143). split, vet ironical relationship between the nvo haunts modem art. In .American art it is represented by the irreconcilabilitv" of arhol. Jackson Pollock and .Andy The difference between avant-garde and kitsch as well as between Redcoat and Coonskinner art is the difference between the True and the False Self. .As Greenberg, An and

W

Culture, Boston, 1965, pp. 14-15, writes,

w here avant-garde works through plastic values' that kitsch

Abstract Expressionist gestures are simultaneously

Freedom,

War, Chicago, 1983, as well as to KozlofPs 'American Painting during the

The

rejection of Regionalist,

overt social interest, and of American popular cul-

reification of the Ufe-world

Stole the Idea of

the Cold

associates the

Kline's paintings, not only 'captured the [disruptive] energ\' of the ence','^

monumen-

symbolize the energetic, authentically

Abstract Expressionist painting was 'un-American' in

ture,

points out,

anew in New-

Rosenberg thinks happened with so many Abstract Expressionists,

who complacently began tality

had immi-

simpler to imitate the old, as the Dutch did in 'New' Amster-

the Pilgrims in 'New' England, but, ha\ing achieved

genuine new-ness, tor\^]

begin anew'."

New York to escape Nazi persecution and devaluation. Theirs was a double

neither the immigrant artists nor the immigrant art found

York.

'to

account of Hq-o: XriV York

Modem Art: Abstract Kxpressionism,

achievement, but also the art of immigrants.

w^hom Rosenberg wTote so mo\ingly,

sionisrn,

mnemonic

traces of the Jewish

dilemma and of the puzzling dynamics of New- York. Ambiguously compulsive and spontaneous, the gestures reflect the d\Tiamic new- American situation alongside the

vital

make the work

works by creating an

'breathe',

effect of social

identification.

Rosenberg, 1973, pp. 230-1. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., p. 231.

artist's

resistance to

sionist painting at

tion -

a

its

it.

Thus, through one and the same gesture, Abstract Expres-

best conveys a sense of separate identit}^ and apparent assimila-

cosmopolitan Jewish

achievement.

adversarial individualism, but also a certain

It

signifies

communal

spirit.

irreconcilabilit)'

and

Rosenberg, 1965,

p. 19.

Ibid., p. 17.

Ibid., p. 18.

Barbara Rose, American York, 1967, p. 204.

An Since

igoo,

New

and Secondary

Critics, Primar\'

Greenberg's emphasis on aesthetic purity and the

147

immanent of the same

character of

critical

seems remote from Rosenberg's argument that 'act-painting is artist's existence'.'* However, immanent form also enimmanent identit;^ for Greenberg, as his discussion of Kafka - the exemplary

form"'

metaphysical substance as the tails

dilemma - the same existential uncertainty and critical relationship to both art and Hfe - as the American Coonskinner. The dilemma underUnes the difference between sacred

modern

him -

artist for

indicates.

The Jew Kafka has

the

same

identity

avant-garde abstract art and profane rear-guard representational kitsch

Indeed,

art.

'Kafka's Jewishness' supphes the theoretical underpinning of the practice advocated

and Kitsch'. They are the alpha and omega of his

in 'Avant-garde

criticism,

whatever

the order of their writing.

Kafka wanted more than amthing all

art

come is

.

.

to

terms with

literally

of what

be an

else to

begin to appear falsifying to the

.

art

artist, a

writer of fiction not of oracles

Jew who looked

closely

happening to oneself as

a certain

person in

And might not

world?

a certain

Greenberg, 'Modernist Painting', in Gregor\^ Battcock, ed.. The New Ait, New York, 1966,

transcends

life

p. lOI.

Rosenberg, 1965, Greenberg, 1965,

18.

Ibid., p. 14.

19.

Greenberg, 'Koesder's

by encapsulating the unconscious dominant

New Novel', Partisan

November/December

1946,

Greenberg, 1965,

p. 97.

when they become

pessimistic, usually turn into hedonism', as in

War

post-First \\'orld

Paris, writes

Green-

post-Second World War New York they turned into seemingly 'ungoverned spontaneity and haphazard effects' (p. 210), which can be read as signs of berg (1965),

p. 121.

But

Greenberg,

Nation, no. 164, 8

'Art',

March

1947, p. 284.

Greenberg, 1965, p. 170. See also Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg, Art Critic, Madison, \\1, 1979, pp. 20-9, for a discussion of Greenberg's sense of 'dialectical conversion' as the basic

mechanism of artistic

'°

the one

feeling, or Zeitgeist,

to aesthetic consciousness.

valid 'abstract equivalents' for that experience.

by arguing that

of

a

'The genuine

of a certain world,"' but invents

Fernand Leger did

this

when he con-

when they made

Greenberg, 1965, p. 268. 1 am using the terms of Greenberg's discussion of Halachah. Michael Fried, 'Art and Objecthood', in

Gregory Battock,

art's self-critical its

'reduction' of form

life

completely reconciled to - profane Fried seems to advocate

Minimal An,

New

histor\''

without losing

a similarly ultra-radical art,

lish

a theatiicml relation to

...

their ability

Robert Morris and Tony Smith most

as 'in essence «wf/-theatrical,

5.

Fried, 1968, pp. 128, 130.

29.

Fried, 1980, p.

it.

Labelling works that 'estab-

in

mind""- he celebrates 'the paint-

which

is

to say that they treated the beholder as if

But for Greenberg,

to his

own

to feeling,

and

in contrast to Fried, this

would make it,

surprise, true to himself."

it

or, as

A

such art - however

subliminally theatrical.

we

say.

he

'reIt

evokes them, thus

'theatrical' effect is

only super-

Berkeley,

ficially

28.

grace', but the sacred

ings of Louis, Noland, Olitski, and Stella, and the sculptures of Smith and Caro'

making him, Theati-icality,

is

the beholder' as 'ingratiating and mediocre''"- he seems

invites the spectator to project his feelings into

depend on

sacredness.''

'presentness and instantaneousness' of modernist style 'defeat theater''" rather than

bespeak, however covertly, the emotion generated by

come

to defeat theater'.

its

mean become

reconciling the sacred and

berg subtly unites through emotion. For Fried, 'presentness

- must be true

and

ele-

profane. But the opposition he posits between art and theatre separates what Green-

strained'"

27. PVied, Absorption

reduc-

can dialectically converge.'^ Art 'removed from histon^, behind the

"fence" of abstraction, can indirectly acknowledge - which does not

York, 1968, pp. 146-7. As Fried says (p. 139), 'the success, even the survival, of the arts has increasingly to

critical

'extremes meet': a 'radically transcendental' approach to art and a 'radically positivist'

approach to

there'.'"

ed.,

simultaneously a

is

emotional fundament. 'Dissolving emotion into the abstract

were not

1980, p.

daringly explicit the 'existential

ments of style''^ does not falsify experience, but shows that art alone is true to what is most immanent - deepest - in the world in which it occurs. As Greenberg says,

to have

advance.

5.

More

the result of the work's seeming to invite the spectator to enter

crucially,

it

results

Greenberg, 1965, p. 15, suggests as much when he says that kitsch 'jifedigests art for the spectator and spares him effort', affording 'unreflecdve enjoyment' rather than 'reflection' on 'the effect' art has 'upon himself.

it literally.

from the subliminal emotional relationship established be-

tween the spectator and the work.

30. Fried, 1968, p. 130. 31.

it

On

emphasizes the

in

revolt.

26.

by bringing

it

all

same abstractness

the other hand, this

a personal, particular experience'

tion of the self to

22. 'Positi\asm, materialism,

25.

from

life'.'**

so did the Abstract Expressionists

p. 273.

20. Rose, op.cit., p. 204.

24.

from

and

p. 28.

p. 580.

23.

On

serves the self

of

pessimism' that underlay American existence.'' Greenberg cuts Kafka's Gordian knot

ReviriT, vol. 13,

21.

its

art

art.

It

...

of art.'"

veyed the 'mood of secular optimism' with which the twentieth century opened," and

17.

16.

by

modern

tendency to purity and abstractness.

between

artist starts

the investigation

tests the limits

it,

'discontinuity

life-world, freeing us 15.

Jew ever

happening to oneself remain the most human, therefore, the most serious

is literally

Kafka's conflict bespeaks the contradiction at the heart of it

a

without falsifying himself somehow? Does not art always make one forget what

possible acti\dties? Kafka's Jewish self asks this question, and in asking

hand,

But might not

....

enough? And when did

What

Fried calls theatrical art makes this rela-

tionship explicit. Fried does not address the issue of the different ways in which theatrical

and anti-theatrical

art are true to feeling

general. In any case, he de-dialectizes

- indeed, of truth to feeling

what Greenberg

analysis of 1960s art in terms of the theatrical

in

dialectizes, suggesting that his

and anti-theatrical

is

inadequate.

Donald Kuspit

14H

What

Fried

calls 'the

abstraction in fancy

primacy of absorption'*'

new intellectual

is

really

Greenberg's primac)' of

Krauss also advocates and

dress.

justifies abstrac-

tion, in different, if equally fashionable, intellectual terms: 'the sculpture

of our time

continues this project of decentering through a vocabulary of form that

radically

is

Rodin and Brancusi, by 'representing a relocation of the point of origin of the body's meaning - from its inner core to its surface - [is] a radical act of decentering',-^ and Michael Heizer's Double Negative (Figs, i, 2; p. 133) abstract.'" Just as the art of

forces us into an 'eccentric position relative to the center of the work'," so the copy

impHes that the original

a false centre.'*

is

Mo\ing from phenomenolog)^ through

semiotics to deconstruction, Krauss always affirms the primacy^ of abstraction, with

no awareness

that the issue of truth to feeling

'identification of

form and

Greenberg puts

feeling', as

here as

as central

is

Unlike Greenberg, she and Fried eschew

character.-"

it'**

-which no doubt

the apparently 'cool' appearance of post-Abstract Expressionist

emotional significance of theatre of

puritv^, is

art,

reflects

but misses the

Emotion, the rw media bet\veen the

this inexpressi\at\\

and abstract

life

its 'self-critical'

expressive aspect - the

art's

sold short by Fried and Krauss, while being

secretly central for Greenberg.

The

repudiation of Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s was correlative with the

repudiation of the concepts used to comprehend tial

WTiile the repudiation

it.

and Krauss - presentness and absorption are

for Fried

only par-

is

purit\' in disguise,

much

as

decentring extends Greenberg's idea of 'the all-over, "decentralized"... picture'-' and 'expendable conventions'"*"^ almost to a cases of Alloway and Lippard. their

own

rediictio

ad absitrdmn

a reflection

seems complete in the

on one aspect of Greenberg's

Alloway and Lippard seem to come into their own by is

it

Thus, while Fried and Krauss do not quite achieve

identities as critics (for they build

for them, art

-

of profane

histor\'.

explicitly rejecting

But Greenberg

identity'),

Greenberg:

also thinks

it is.

Like

Fried and Krauss, Alloway and Lippard deny the dialectical conversion of profane

3- This tion

history into sacred art - the inner relation of feeling and form - so crucial for Greenberg.

And

thus, like Fried and Krauss, they miss the point that art

ter of 'self-identification' for

is

at

bottom

a

the

of the

title

Rosahnd E. Krauss, ture.

first

chapter oi Absorp-

Theatricality.

Xew York,

Passages in

Modem

Sculp-

1977, p. 279.

34- Ibid.

him.

Alloway - credited with inventing the term 'Pop Art' -emphasizes the 'connections'

33-

mat-

is

and

and 'reconciliations of fine and popular

of elite and public

art,

35

Ibid., p. 280.

36.

I

am

interpreting Krauss's discussion of the

'discourse of the copy' in Sherrie Le\"ine's art

For him,

taste'. ^'

The Originalit)' of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, .\L\,

in

the artwork

is

a

'conglomerate' or

disparate sources, rather than

Greenberg and Rosenberg locates

the

it 'in

...

'cluster': 'a

an inevitably aligned setup. '+' According to Alloway, only in

'are interested

the end product', the latter

work of art's

'translatabilit}-'

rendez\-ous of objects and images from

art's

unique

identity'; the

the process of work'. +' But

'in

rather than

its

former

37

Pop Art is about

uniqueness. Alloway elevates the 'end-

reproduction' of the cliche into 'the authorized expression of mankind,

common property^ that especially binds ates us

and

views art as

kind of

us together', over the uniqueness that separ-

asserts the self's authority.^ In contrast to a

a

means of socialization rather than

artists"

it

at all, as well as against the

syndrome....! was opposed to

ism',

Greenberg and Rosenberg, he

these male authority figures not because

they were male, however, but because they were

Lippard even

asserts that the first artists she

aesthetic but also in

whom

authorities.'^'

political

attitudes

supported 'differed not only in

from the Greenberg

artists

.

.

.

some of

recognized.' 41.

made

their art bad.

'identifying with female underdogs',^"

Lippard came into her

becoming

effectiveness' rather than 'esthetic effect',^"

interested in

and turning

'a

own

art's

of .\merican

by

'communicative

temperamental con-

including feminist, ecological and multi-cultural production.

Unlike Lippard, Alloway does not completely reduce

art to

1974, p.

'Pop Art:

The

A?}ierican

Ait Since 1^4^,

3.

See also .\lloway,

\\ brds', in idem, Topics in

Xew York,

1975,

5.

43- Ibid., p. 9.

44

Ibid.

45.

Lucy

R. Lippard, F?o?>t the Center,

1976, p.

Xew York,

3.

46. Ibid.

as a critic

sciousness into a culuiral consciousness'.^^ This led her to a variet}' of culturally 'comarts,

.\rt,

An, exhibiWhitney Museum

A?>terican Pop

Xew York,

pp. 119-22. 42- .Vlloway, 1974, p.

47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., p. 10. 49. Ibid., p. 50.

municative'

Lawrence Alloway, tion catalogue,

...were in favor of the war in Vietnam',^* as though this 'politically incorrect'

position necessarily

'It seems to be a law of modemGreenberg writes (p. 208), 'that the

conventions not essential to the \italit\- of a medium be discarded as soon as they are

"masterpiece" s\Tidrome, the "three great

all

self-definition,

40. Ibid., p. 209.

Similarly, Lippard's criticism originates in 'revolt against

can't like

p. 78.

means

39. Ibid., p. 155.

indi\iduation.

Clement Greenberg's patronization of artists, against the imposition of the taste of one class on everybody, against the notion that if you don't like so-and-so's work for the "right" reasons, you

Greenberg, 1966, writes and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance'. Greenberg, 1965, p. 153. "'purit\'"

38.

less

1985, p. 170. Krauss, 1977,

'°

an ideological instru-

ment. His ideological axe attacks certain kinds of art and art criticism rather than

II.

She has wriuen about politically orientated art in Get The Messaged, X"ew York, 1984, ecologically orientated art in Overlay: Contemporaiy An and the An of Prehistotj, X"ew York, 1983, and Mixed Blessings: -Vra- Art in a Multicultural America,

Xew ^brk,

1990.

Critics,

society as such.

ism Lippard, 1976,

is

as a

New York,

1972, pp. 67-8. Steinberg points out that the

opposition Greenberg posits between

mod-

ernism and the Old Masters is inherently 'unstable'. It is not self-evident that they have different goals, especially in view of the fact that 'all major painting, at least of the last six hundred years, has assiduously "called atten-

Robert Pincus-Wltten,

Post??ii?ii?>ialiiy//,

York, 1977, pp. 13-1455- Douglas Da\is, Ait and the Future,

New

New York,

1973, p. 169.

for elim-

democratic communication of signs held in

qualities of objects' (p. 141).

New York,

Ait and Anti-Ait

1988, pp.xiv-x\-. Rose

notes that Greenberg's objection that is

'formally inadequate'

may

V\Tiile there are

many

other

stone

critics, in that

ideas.

Whether

it

Pop

.\rt

critical writing'

.

.

in

which nothing has to be proved or and which is designed to invalidate is

an anti-humanist development.'

60. Alloway, 'Statement',

David W'.Ecker, Jerome

J.Hausman and Ining ence on

Sandler, eds.. Confer-

An Criticis?n and Ait Education, New

York, 1970, pp. 7-9. Rose, 'Statement', ibid., p.

13.

Kozloff, 'Statement', ibid., p. 69.

^4»

is

a reaction,

negative or positive, to their

'the

mandarin tone... of artistic

per-

nor directly stating

'quality'

premise underlying

'the

value judgments';'' or

[his]

beyond

'point

itself to

the

spirit';"^

or Barbara Rose's criticism of the authoritarian

character of Greenberg's notion of 'modernist reduction';'" or Joseph Masheck's essays

form

on

'cruciformality'

and 'hard-core painting', which rethink Greenberg's idea of

in art historical terms,'"*

case when, social

as

figure of American art on 'Warholism''' echoes Rosenberg's moral

Greenberg remains the seminal

Max Kozloff's

attack

ongoing subliminal importance. Certainly

with Lippard and, more obliquely, Alloway, art

is

this

is

the

conceived of more in

and moral than aesthetic terms (although both separate the psychological from

the social, as Rosenberg never does, and from the formal, as Greenberg never does).

as 'the sensibil-

justified,

criticism. It

have chosen to discuss here are those

and the 'closed formalist machine of judgment' -the 'apersonal, her-

attitude, suggesting the latter's

.

I

modernism;'' or Robert Pincus-Witten rebelling against

not be valid,

'criteria of evaluation' of abstract and Pop -\rt may not be the same (p. 47). Joseph Masheck, Historical Present: Essays of the i^jos, Ann Arbor, 1984, pp. 133-69. Max Kozloff, 'Gritical Schizophrenia and the Intentionalist Method', in Battock, 1966,

it\'

the six

subsequent criticism

art

Warholism

critics,

be Leo Steinberg arguing against Greenberg's 'construction' of

because the

describes

tends to favour the

whose conception of the art they advocate has had a lasting effect on our imderstanding of it. Of the six, Greenberg and Rosenberg remain the greater and lesser touch-

criticism. Similarly,

p. 131,

common, and

Nicolas Calas's argument that Greenberg's idea of purity implies that art cannot

achieve purit}' 'with standards used to deter-

i^6^-ig6'j.

Nevertheless, like Lippard, Alloway conceives of art

sona and psyche';'^ or Douglas Davis's criticism of Greenberg for neither defining

inating outside interference' in order to

57- Rose, Autoa-itique: Essays on

''

metic value system' - in favour of criticism 'stressing autobiography, the

Nicolas Galas, Art in the Age of Risk, New York, 1968, p. 140. Galas also thinks that

Greenberg confuses 'standards used

Lippard says femin-

art world. In contrast,

underdog.''

tion to art"'(p. 71).

mine inherent

remains firmly in the

149

her 'sole remaining excuse' for remaining in the art world, there being 'so few

feminists in the establishment'.

p. 9.

Alloway, 1974, pp- 5, 7Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria,

54-

He

Primary and Secondar\'

At

a

1970 'Conference on Art Criticism and Art Education' Alloway yet again

attacked

'elite criticism','"

implicitly Greenberg's,

self-challenging himianistic

discipline','*'

for an 'open, informal' criticism cial functions','" like

and Rose described criticism

as 'a

hke Rosenberg's. Similarly, Kozloff called

uncompromised by 'mandarin

instincts or

commer-

Rosenberg's and unlike Greenberg's. Almost two decades after

the reign of Greenberg and Rosenberg art criticism was

ows, for better or worse.

still

haunted by their shad-

Gail Stavitsky

The Museum and

the Collector

Private collectors usually acquire

account for the

earliest

work before museums. They

and greatest number of acquisitions

in

the contemporan" field - probably not because of greater

mind decides

appreciation or astuteness, but because one

WTiatever economic hope we have

lies

with state sponsorship

or the private collector, especially the younger collector

who

is

usually of the professional class. Da\id Smith, 1947'

The

astonishing growth of American art

museums

since 1870

due to the unique

is

generosity of private collectors functioning within a capitahst, free-enterprise system.

Unhke Europe, America had

neither royalty nor aristocracy, papacy nor ci\dc organ-

izations to develop collections that

would eventually form the

administered, government-funded

museums during

centuries. Large-scale collecting in

America was not possible

nomic

recover)'

collectors

and industrialization

until the period

War. Thus, America's

of eco-

first

major

were mostly self-made businessmen. They included the founders of the

country's great art

of Art. Behind tive lies a

after the Ci\al

basis of publicly

the eighteenth and nineteenth

museums

this pattern

complex

variet\"

New York's Metropolitan Aluseum

in 1870, particularly

of individual philanthropy, private control and local of motivations, including art

as social prestige

initia-

and profit-

able investment, connoisseurship and aesthetic pleasure, as well as populist ideals of civic dut}^ public

education and the encouragement of creati\it\'.

At the turn of the

centur\', J.

Pierpont Alorgan and other

prestigious, blue chip collections of historical

the standards for American ference to the

museums and

work of li\nng

artists

were to transform the nature of

European

art

men

of fortune amassed

which continued to

private collectors (see Fig.

was challenged by

art collecting in

a

i).

Their

small group of pioneers

America through

set

indif-

who

their missionary

efforts.

None I.

David Smith, 'The Sculptors Relationship to the Museum, Dealer, and Public', quoted in Garnett AlcCoy, ed., David S?}iith, New York, 1973' PP- 57-8.

Hg.

1

J.

Schuerle, The French and the American

Napoleons of An,

c.

19 13

of these zealous collectors

commanded

vast financial or industrial empires.

Their varied enterprises or inheritances afforded them the opportunities to develop and spread the new modernist

faith.

were the expatriate Stein family - Leo, Gertrude

(Fig.

their intellectual concerns, befriend living artists

The most

influential pioneers

Gitil Stavitsky

Michael and Sarah - who had become prescient patrons of Cezanne, Matisse and

2),

Among the many visitors to their legendary, art-filled Parisian apart-

Picasso by 1905.

ments were Claribel and Etta Cone, who eventually acquired over forty Matisses, bequeathed

1950 to the Baltimore

in

Museum

of Art. Another important guest was

the photographer, dealer and collector .\lfred Stieglitz,

who

in 1911 tried to sell a

group of works on paper by Picasso to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum's curator Br\'son Burroughs 'vouched that such mad pictures would never

mean amiJiing to -\merica'.' The xMetropolitan's most modern purchase

at that

time was Cezanne's La Colline

(1888-90) -in 1913 the first Post-Impressionist painting to enter an collection. It had been acquired from the Armor)' Show, an event

des Paiivres

American museum

modern

that pro\"ided the major stimulus for collecting

America. This land-

art in

mark exhibition was spearheaded by the painter Arthur B. Davies, art adviser to Lillie P. Bliss and Alary Quinn Sullivan, who would later be among the founders of Xew

Museum

York's

of Modern Art.

The New York ful legal

lawyer John Quinn, the Show's main patron, conducted

crusade to eliminate the import dut\- on

old, thus facilitating the rapid

Quinn had amassed

1924,

with

art,

a perspicacious

the

all

works of art less than

a success-

tvvent}-

New York art market. At his

expansion of the

most important collection of avant-garde

years

death in

literature

and

emphasis on Constantin Brancusi. Another collector gal-

the Chicago lawyer Arthur Jerome Eddy, who became a pioneering patron of Wassily Kandinsk)' and wrote one of the first books on modern art to appear in America, Cubists and Post-b}ipressionis?)i (1914). Walter and Louise Arensberg (Eig. 3) launched their avant-garde collection of xMarcel Duchamp, Dada, Cubist and Surrealist art with the purchase of a painting by Jacques Mllon at

vanized by the

Armory Show was

Fig.

2

Gertrude Stein,

c.

1906

the Show.

Sening

Dreier (Fig.

nyme

Arensbergs' collection and

as the catalyst for the

1915 to 1920,

Duchamp

4).

Along with

as the first

-\merican

functioned primarily as a

Man

Ray, Dreier and

museum

galler\'.

and

York salon from

Duchamp founded

of modern art in 1920 in

.Managed by Dreier, the

landmark exhibitions of international modern

New

major patron, the painter Katherine

also influenced his other

the Societe Ano-

New York,

Societe

art in 1921 at the

although

it

Anony?ne organized

Worcester

Museum

Museum, introducing Dada, Surrealism, De Stijl and museum visitors. In a review of the Brookl}Ti Museum Henry McBride articulated the imperative need for a museum to house modat the Brookl^Ti

1926

in

Constructivism to American show,

ern art permanently. Unable to achieve this goal, Dreier bequeathed the Societfs collection to Yale Universitv' in 1941.

The

first

servative

permanent showcase

Duncan

Phillips,

for

modern

art

was founded by the

who opened his home in W'ashington to the

relatively

con-

public in 192

with works by European and American Impressionists and the Ashcan School, along-

Old Master ancestor El Greco. Soon afterwards, two other institutions of art opened which, like the PhiUips Memorial Art Gallerv^ were one-man operations. Amassing a diverse collection of work by Cezanne, Matisse and others

side the

modern that

was rejected

Arts in 1921,

opened

Dr

as 'degenerate'

when exhibited

in a Philadelphia

suburb in 1925.

Albert Eugene Gallatin inaugurated his

America's countrv''s

first

at the

Pennsylvania

Academy of Fine

Albert C. Barnes greatly restricted access to his Foundation after

museum

premier

Two years more

later,

influential Gallerv" of Living Art as

devoted exclusively to contemporary'

art centre.

it

the critic and connoisseur

art

and located

in the

New York.

Influenced by the considerable publicit}' lamenting the dispersal of Quinn's art estate at auction in 1926, Gallatin installed his collection as a small, informal in the

South Study Hall of New York

relativ'ely

own

museum

from 1927 to 1943. Opening with

a

precocious selection of Cubist paintings, Gallatin subsequently (1928-33)

acquired the his

Univ^ersit)'

first

works by Jean Arp, Robert Delaunay, Joan Miro, Piet xMondrian and

adviser, Jean Helion, to enter an

American museum

collection.

could challenge the Gallery- 's primac)' as a showcase of living

art,

Institute of Chicago established the Birch-Bartlett Collection in

Few museums

although the

Alay 1926

.\rt

as the first

Marcel Duchamp (right) with W'aher and Louise .\rensberg, Hoilj-vvood, 1936

Fig. 3

The Museum and

Fig.

Katherine

4

Duchamp

in

S.

Dreier s

the Collector

153

Dreier and Marcel home at West Redding,

Connecticut, 1936. Duchamp's The Large Glass on the right, his painting Tu m' above the

is

bookshelves

public display in America of Post-Impressionists and pioneer modernists, including Picasso. tion,

On the

Aluseum displayed the

W^est Coast, the Los Angeles Count)'

promised to the museum, of contemporary American and European

been assembled by W'llliam Preston Harrison. Guided by

made

R. Valentiner, the Detroit Institute of Arts had

of important

La

German

FenetJ-e (1916),

director,

its

collec-

art that

had

William

the unusual purchase of a group

Expressionist works as early as 1921 and, in 1922, also acquired

one of the

first

works by Matisse to enter an American public col-

lection.

Museum

Gallatin's

of Living Art (renamed thus in 1936) was overshadowed by the

development of a larger

institution in

New York.

mittee of collectors and connoisseurs,

modelled on such European precedents

Luxembourg European

At

in Paris.

cities. Sixt}'

galleries of

modern

this time,

Founded

The Museum as

of

modern

art

museums were

art,

whereas in America they totalled

its first

the shrewd leadership of director Alfi'ed

its

European sources

to

a

genteel

com-

located in fourteen

European museums, the majority of them

exhibition of Surrealism in 1931 and

Under stripped

1929 by

London's Tate Galler\' and the Palais de

these was Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, which was

museum

in

Modern Art (MoiMA) was

become the

H.

a

in

mere

Germany, had

twelve.'

Among

to organize America's first

Picasso retrospective in 1934. Barr, Jr., the

museum soon

out-

world's leading arbiter of taste, an insti-

tution that established the legitimacy of modernist art and theorv' through definitive, historicizing exhibitions and publications.^ Eunctioning initially as an experimental

temporary exhibition space, the museum did not

permanent collection

until the

1931 bequest of one of collection of 2.

Dorothy Norman, Alfred See?-,

3.

New

York, 1973,

Stieglitz:

p. 108,

a letter

founder-trustees, Lillie

French modern

art in

a large collection

Hopper and

and B

in

An

New York,

Ejfoit to Secure

of Modern Art.

1931, pp. 35-9.**

Museum

of Modern Art,

New

of

others,

MoMA's

York, 197?.

received her

purchase fund with

in 1935. Bliss also

a

presented

art, by Charles Demuth, Edward was not shared by most of the museum's staff and benefactors.

first

exhibitions, 'Painting in Paris

(1930), revealed collectors' prelerences for the

For an account of .Mo.M.A's histon; see Russell Lynes, Ciood OIJ Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the

One

The museum

its first

of American modernist paintings and works on paper. Rockefeller's

.•\ldcn Jewell. .K

P. Bliss.

donation by another founder, .Abby .Aldrich Rockefeller, pioneering commitment to native contemporary

See Appendices

out on the road to becoming a

1934 and established

of 19 December 1939 from Stieglitz to Edward

S ^,2yo,(>()()for The Museum 4.

An Aiiiericaii

quoting

its

set

development of an endowment was stipulated by the

From

critical!}-

.American Collections'

acclaimed, increasingh- val-

uable French modernist masters.

Fhc outstanding exception to

this pattern

was the sculptor Gertrude \anderbilt

Gail Stavitsky

154

who purchased works by Robert

WTiitney,

Henri, Ernest Lawson, George Luks and

Everett Shinn from the pioneering exhibition of

Whitney Studio Club

The

Eight in 1908. Founding the

provided gallery space for progressive

in 1918, she

artists,

assembling the largest collection of contemporar}' American art from each show. After unsuccessfully offering her varied collection of five hundred works by Stuart

Hopper and others to the Metropolitan Museum, Whitney founded her own New York museum, the WTiitney Museum of American Art, in 1931 In the same year, Davis,

.

another major collector of American modernism, Ferdinand Howald, bequeathed his

work by Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, xMan Ray and others to the Columbus Gallen- of Fine Arts in his home town of Columbus, Ohio. Duncan Phillips also emerged as a prescient supporter of such American modernists as Dove, John Graham, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe and Augustus Mncent Tack. By the 1940s European and native pioneers of modernism were increasingly replarge collection of

museum collections. In 1943 Gallatin bequeathed his collection Museum of Art. He encouraged the director, Fiske Kimball, to Arensbergs, who had tried to establish a museum in Los Angeles. In 1950

resented in American to the Philadelphia

pursue the their

bequeathed collection of modern and 'primitive'

establish the Philadelphia

museum

of this period was that of Alfred ley

Stieglitz,

torical

department of twentieth-centun^ art

The

Sam Lewisohn, John Hay \Miitney and modern

Dales' 1963 bequest launched the

though

in 1949, even

until 1967.

French modernism continued to influence many

C. Clark,

of Gallatin to

Another important bequest

encompassing major works by Dove, Hart-

Museum

and O'Keeffe, to the Metropolitan

a separate

art joined that

as a national centre.

The

it

did not

collectors, including

especially Chester

art collection

form

perv^asive taste for his-

Stephen

and Alaud Dale.

of the National Gallery

of Art in Washington, which has since been greatly auginented by Paul Mellon's donations. Possibly the largest collection of European modernist painting by 1940

was that of Walter

Chr\'sler,

who opened

his

own museums

at

Provincetown, xMassa-

chusetts (1958), and Norfolk, Virginia (1971).

Between 1942 and 1946 America's war-induced prosperity^ generated a 'boom' in sales of contemporary^ art - which was relatively inexpensive and available through an increasing tors,

number of outlets. A new^ group of adventurous upper-middle-class

such as the Philadelphia

collec-

Museum of Art's long-time trustee Eleanor Gates Lloyd

Newman, Fred Olson and Alfonso Ossorio, were among the first to acquire Abstract Expressionist works. The pioneer of these patrons was Peggy Guggenheim (Fig. 5), whose uncle Solomon had founded New York's Museum of Non-Objective Art in 1939, highlighting the work of Kandinsk\^. From and the painters Muriel Kallis

1942 to 1947 Pegg\" Surrealist side

work

at

Guggenheim presented her

her

changing shows devoted to new American

sold. In 1944,

artists

European

abstract

and

Art of This Centur)', along-

whose work she purchased and

guided by curator-collector James Thrall Soby, xMoAIA acquired Jack-

son Pollock's The She-Wolf (Fig. public collection.

i, p.

Guggenheim was

institutions, including the Seattle

Modern

collection of

New York galler\'-cum-museum.

Art (the

14)

Art

Museum

gave Pollock and

latter

from her - the

also an active

first

donor of

work by him

modem

to enter a

art to regional

and the San Francisco Aluseum of

Mark Rothko

their first

one-man museum

shows, in 1945 and 1946 respectively).

Often

criticized for

having neglected the American avant-garde, AIoALA. encour-

aged patronage of native

artists

by establishing an Art Lending Library in the 1950s

and by presenting various group exhibitions of local private collections

in 1946, 1948,

modernists, the 1948 show featured paintings by Wlliam Baziotes, Theodoros Stamos and Mark Tobey. These were lent by the pioneering collector of American modernism, Edward W. Root, an art professor and critic who donated his eclectic collection, formed since the 1920s, to the Munson-W^lliams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New 195 1 and 1955. Although the majority of works on \iew were by European

York, in 1956.

During the 1950s

MoMA's

long-time trustee Nelson Rockefeller emerged

leading collector of Abstract Expressionism. Inspired by bition series, organized

Mo.M\'s 'Americans'

by curator Dorothy Miller, Rockefeller

also

as a

exhi-

developed a large

Fig. 5

front of

Peggy Guggenheim and Herbert Read a painting by Yves Tanguy, 1939

in

The Museum and

collection of

modern European, Latin American and

the Collector

'primitiv^e' art.

155

Indeed, Rocke-

tandem with MoMA's international travelling shows - has even been viewed as an aesthetic symbol of American imperialist aspirations. Another major Abstract Expressionist patron was Seymour H.Knox who, from the 1950s onwards, donated seminal works by Arshile Gorky, Pollock, Rothko and others to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Ben Heller's group of monumental canvases by Barnett Newman, Pollock, Rothko, Clyfford Still and others was feller's

patronage -

applauded

in

New York's best private collection of American action paintings when it

as

was exhibited

MoMA

at

Friends of the Whitney

in

1961. Heller also

became

actively involved with the

Museum, lending works by Joseph

Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell and Robert Rauschenberg

in

Cornell, Philip Guston,

1958 and 1964 to the

Friends' series of exhibitions promoting the private collecting of contemporary

American

art.

The Whitney Museum and Milton Lowenthal

presented the private collections of such Friends as Edith

important works by Stuart Davis, and

in 1952, with

Roy

work by Milton Avery, Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Inspired by Duncan Phillips, Neuberger founded his own

R. Neuberger in 1956, with

Hofinann and Pollock.

museum

in

1974

at the State Universit)^

of New York in Purchase.

Another Whitney Friend, museum founder and collector of American European)

art

was the uranium magnate Joseph

P.

(as well as

Hirshhorn. His acquisition of

works by Gorky and David Smith was notably precocious. The Hirshhorn and Sculpture Garden, conceived

as a

modern complement

Museum

to the Smithsonian's

National Gallery of Art (founded in 1941), opened in Washington in 1974 with the unsurpassed donation of over twelve thousand art objects, including a celebrated collection of work

Other major

mer

by Willem de Kooning. gifts

during the 1960s and 1970s were presented by

sculptor) and Jean

collaboration

Lipman

to the

Whitney Museum

Howard

as the fruits

(a for-

of a long-term

on the development both of a representative group of works by Alexan-

der Calder and of a major travelling collection of contemporary American sculpture.

By 1969 lain,

the

Dan

first

two exhibited selections had included sculpture by John Chamber-

Flavin,

Don

Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Claes

Oldenburg and Robert Smithson. Many of these artists also benefited from the patronage of MoMA's prominent trustee-architect Philhp Johnson, who presented works by them to this institution in the 1970s. With a collection ranging from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, Johnson could often be relied upon to acquire, and subsequently donate, challenging work that had not been approved by the Collections Committee. From 1959 to 1970 a special fund established by Larry Aldrich, the founder of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1964, enabled MoAlA to acquire work by such

Fig. 6

.\nd\' \\ arhol, Ethel Scull

1963. WTiitney

Museum

York; Gift of Ethel

Thhty-six Times,

of .\inerican

Redner

Scull

«w*^

.\rt,

New-

Gail Staiitsk)'

Americans not already

and Frank

tin

The

Kosuth, Brice Marden, Agnes Mar-

in the collection as Joseph

were donated by Robert and Ethel and pop of Pop Art' and

modish wife

See John Rublowsk)-, Pop Ait,

New York,

1965,

p. 159.

MoA'LVs Renowned as

pieces by Chamberlain and Jasper Johns to enter

first

5.

Stella.

'the

(see Fig. 6) also

Scull in 1958

and 1961.

collection

the

'mom

Medici of the Minimals', the taxi-cab t\xoon and

owned Abstract

Expressionist

\\

ork.

his

Their reputation

as

daring celebrit}--collectors was based, however, on their canny purchases of Flann,

Johns (acquired in depth during 1959-60), Roy Lichtenstein, Morris, Bruce Xauman, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Stella, Cy Tw-ombly and Andy \\'arhol. Ardently

committed

to the direct patronage of lesser-known artists.

Bob

Scull also financed the

De Maria and Michael Heizer. were Burton and Emily Tremaine, among the first

construction of sculpture and earthworks by \\^alter

The

Sculls' greatest

competitors

buy the work of the Abstract Expressionists, Johns, Rauschenberg and the major Pop artists. In 1965 Pop Art was designated 'a collector's movement', thus acknow-

to

ledging the prominent role played by the Sculls, Richard in the

phenomenal emergence of a

Robert

Scull's

New York

critically

1973 sale of fift\' works in

reflected the rapid expansion

condemned

Brown Baker and

record-breaking auction

a

others

st}'le.'

at Sotheby's in

and commodification of the contemporan-

world since i960. Recently choosing the more venerable American tradition of

art

museum patronage, ian

Dorothy Vogel

another collector-couple, the postal clerk Herbert and the librar-

(Fig. 7),

presented their ever-growing, premier collection of Min-

imal and Conceptual art to the National Galler\' of Art. collecting

many of the

artists

Museum and

Structures' at the Jewish

Known as the

By 1966 they were

already

featured that year in the landmark exhibitions 'Priman-

'Systemic Painting' at the Guggenheim.

'unlikely Aledici', the \bgels have filled their tiny

New York apartment

mostly with graphic work by their friends Carl Andre, Chamberlain, Eva Hesse, Judd, Kosuth, LeWltt, Robert R}Tnan, Smithson, Richard Turtle and Lawrence Weiner.

Art collecting in America originated with the patronage of an 'old money', mostly patrician generation of WASP, East Coast businessmen acquiring historical

masters. Their indifference towards itan

modern

art

was challenged by

group of collectors with increasingly diverse

income. By the time

and

critics to a

collectors

whereas

European

more cosmopol-

backgrounds and sources of

MoMA was founded in 1929, modern art in America had evolved

from the esoteric mission of a small network of ers

social

a

artists,

widespread phenomenon. \Mth

avant-garde collectors, deal-

and museums began to acquire acknowledged

a smaller avant-garde risked the

art

purchase of unaccredited contemporaries.

\Miile few early collectors were devoted to American modernism, the ranks of a\id

patrons swelled during the prosperous post-war years as the capital

when New York replaced

Paris

should like to acknowledge the help ot Xaomi Sawelson-Gorse and Deidre Robson in the I

preparation of this essay.

of the art world. Throughout the centun', some collectors have focused

many more have

on

certain st\iistic tendencies, while

tic

connoisseurship approach, suggesting

\\estern and 'primitive'

art.

affinities

intuitively

developed an eclec-

between modern,

Exemplar)- of this development

is

historical,

non-

the vast Alenil

Houston to house the diverse collection of prehistoric, Surrealist and American post-war art assembled since 1942 by Dominique

Collection, opened in 1987 in 'primitive'.

Dorothy and Herbert \ bgel, 1986

more 'on-guard' by modern masters,

this ratification,

de Menil and her

late

husband, John.

Many

other collectors, including Hirshhorn,

Bibliography Julia

Brown,

ed.,

The

First Shov:: Painting

and

Sculpture from Eight Collections, ig^o-ip6o, exhibi-

tion catalogue,

poran-

.\rt,

Los

-\ngeles,

1983; Laurence \

.Museum of Contemail Coleman, The

Museum in America, Washington, DC, 1939; W. G. Constable, An Collecting in the United States London, 1964; Diana Crane, The Transfonnation of the Aiant-Garde: The Xru" York World. ig^o-ig8^, Chicago, 1987; .Martin

ofA?nerica,

Phillips

and Whitney, have

also

chosen to estabfish new museums,

American conception of entrepreneurial largesse - whereby eventually metamorphose into public show-places.

quintessential collections

acts that reflect the

Formed during

the 1920s by private collectors, .America's

first

private

museums of mod-

ern art were small, experimental galleries, organized in contrast to the exclusionary

An

Feldstein, ed., The Economics

in

Through the unparalleled contributions of collecand private modern art collections now rival, or even excel,

policies of established institutions. tors, Ainerica's public

those of Europe.

ofAnMuseu?ns,

Chicago, 1991: Paul Gamer, '.\n extraordinan," gift of art ...', Smithsonian, October 1992, pp. 124-32; Jean Lipman, ed., et al., The Collector America,

New York,

1971; Karl E..Meyer, The

An Museufft: Poner. ^loney. Ethics, Xew York, 1979; Deidre Robson, 'The .\vant-Garde and the

On-Guard: Some Influences on the Potential Market for the First Generation .Abstract Expressionists',

Ait Journal, vol.47, .\utumn 1988,

pp. 215-21; .\line B. Saarinen, The Proud Possessory, Xew York, 1958; Judith Zilczer et al., The Advent ofModernism, exhibition catalogue. Atlanta, High

Museum

of .-^rt, 1986.

157

Maij

Lublin

American Galleries

From

Stieglitz to Castelli

With one important in

difference, the

modern

ways that were strikingly similar to

time, the focus of art

moved from

its

impulse had led to the

on the

artists.

first salon des refuses.

Durand-Ruel, followed soon

after,

emerged

art gallery

in the

advent in Europe. Within

academy and

the

forums organized by independent

ist

Twentieth Century:

in the

By

The

developing

a

official

United States

a short

period of

salon to various secession-

1863, in France, the secessionist first

modern

gallery owner, Paul

market for avant-garde

art that fed

staleness of salon art.

The

significant difference in the

new kind

kind of art and a

American scene was that the impetus for a new artists and dealers of a

of gallery came fi-om American

most of whom remained in a French academic orbit until the early twentieth century. Robert Henri was a lone exception, although his defiance of academic tradition was felt less in his style than in the way he challenged the powerful National Academy of Design (founded in 1825), which sponsored annual shows that were \'ital to most artists' surthoroughly European inspiration, not from home-grown

vival.

show

response to

them with an

so strong as to identify

earl-

generation of artists rather than with the vanguard that was surfacing in Europe.

By introducing Stieglitz

of

a

Manet and Thomas Eakins was

edness to ier

Academy from within, Henri and other memat the Macbeth Galleries in New York in 1908. new urban realities, but their st\distic indebt-

After attempting to reform the

bers of the Ashcan School held a

Their naturalism was

artists,

innovative art and changing the nature of

(1864-1946; Fig.

i)

did

more than anyone

Almost single-handedly, he turned the

affairs.

in

its

patronage, Alfred

America to transform

gallery^

this state

of contemporary art - of

which there were a considerable number in Boston, New York and Philadelphia - into a gallery of modem art. A photographer and gallery director, Stieglitz launched

his first

vanguard project, the magazine Camera Work,

served Stieglitz, as

it

had the Ashcan

artists, as a

Naturalism

in 1903.

way of breaking

clear of the

Beaux-

making contact with Leo and Gertrude Stein and taking ad\ice from the photographer Edward Steichen, Stieglitz was

Arts st)de. But within a few years, after in Paris fired

with

a passion that

gave a

new

direction to the

little

gallery he

had opened in

A show of 1905 on 291 Fifth Avenue, which would soon be known simply Rodin drawings was followed by Cezanne watercolours and works by Matisse and Picasso, and opened up a novel world of European art to many Americans (see as '291'.

Fig. Fig.

I

Alfred Stieglitz in his 291 gallcn,

York. Photograph, Philadelphia

Museum

New of Art;

2).

Both

Stieglitz's artists

Dove had been

Dorothy Xorman Collection

and patrons had

to Paris in 1908,

and iMarsden Hartley lived

European, avant-garde

bias.

Arthur

John Alarin and Max Weber were both there

in 1905

as a \artual

this

emigre in Europe. Francis Picabia and

New York,

De

Zavas, the

while the French-born collector Paul Haviland, the Alexican Marius

American collector Agnes Aleyer and the Stieglitz's

The was

I.

.Although examples of .American art

bered European

b\'

more than two

outnum-

to

one

at

the .Armory Show, the forei^ works sold best.

One hundred and

his wife,

Gabrielle, played an important role in bringing the latest art and ideas to

socialite Alabel

Dodge Luhan

all

supported

endeavours.

vocation of 291 was soon vindicated by the famous

Armory Show of

1913.' It

away from the European vanguard and promote the unrecognized American avant-garde. Stieglitz began to add the epithet 'American' to everything he did. He billed his wife's 1923 show as 'Georgia O'Keeffe American', and called the large exhibition that he curated two years later at the Anderson Galleries 'Seven .Americans'. His Intimate Gallery, a successor to 291, was typical of Stieglitz, however, to turn

seventy-four works, or roughly ten per cent of what was shown, were

inaugurated in 1925 as an 'American

sold.

Dove, Hartley,

Stieglitz himself

Room' and

featured the

and other Americans.

When

work of O'Keeffe,

the Anderson Galleries

Ma?y

158

Lublin

Fig. 2

Exhibition including work by Georges

Braque and Pablo Picasso gallen,-,

Xew York,

at .\lfTed Stieglitzs

291

1915

later, Stieglitz and several friends opened a new space. An on Madison Avenue, and he continued to show the .American artists whom he had the most faith. Xew dealers quickly stepped in to develop what Stieglitz had initiated. Charles

building closed four years

American in

Place,

Daniel (1878 -1968), a former bar owner, opened his gallery in 1912 to support struggling, progressive artists, including Charles

Daniel Gallen' had emerged polish and

Demuth and Alan

many of Stieglitz's

and the opening of the Intimate

Ray.

By 1920

the

of modernism. Although he lacked the

magnetism of Stieglitz, Daniel became

avant-garde, backing in 1917

at the forefront

artists in

Gallen,-.

a rival in

promoting the American

the period between the close of 291

He was most closely associated with

Precisionism in the 1920s and the urban-industrial themes of artists such as Demuth,

Charles Sheeler and Preston Dickinson.

One of the great landmarks of the Xew York art world,

the

Downtown Galler\-, was

founded by Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970) in 1926 and specialized in contemporar}- realists, such as Stuart Da\-is and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Halpert remained loyal to

American

art

throughout the

gallery's forty-four-year histor\',

ered the doyenne of the American art market.

Much

and was widely consid-

of the art that emerged in the

years following the stock market crash of 1929 was concerned with a need to define

the national identit}' and had been prefigured, for example, by Halpert 's fascination

with folk art and by the remarkable success of Edward Hopper's watercolours of

small-town \iews Artists as

at the

Rehn

Gallerv^ in 1924.

responded to the Great Depression in

Thomas Hart Benton glorified

inald

Marsh depicted

ing this period the

traditional values, while

the harsh truths of cit\'

US

a variet\-

government

itself

to 1943 the Federal Art Project of the

life

came

of ways. Regionalists such

urban

and the need for

to play a

realists

such

major role

a

towards the

programme of

From 1932 (WTA) func-

Works Progress Administration

arts

by

federal art patronage.'

insisting

on

The

WPA defined

Despite the still,

stj'listic diversit}'.

Artists with \-isions as

at

some deeper

Guston were

WPA.

WTA's

galler)' in 1931, to

and

.-American subject-matter, yet the liberal inter-

pretation of this polic}' allowed for great

nourished by the

artists

official polic}'

varied as those of Stuart Da\as, Jack Levine, Jackson Pollock and Philip all

RegDur-

in art.

tioned as the country's largest art patron by subsidizing thousands of

beginning

as

social change.

2.

vast patronage, the .\merican art scene during the 1930s

level,

dominated by

Paris. Julien

Levy (1906-1981) opened

his

The

.\rt

Project was responsible for

108,000 easel paintings and 11,000 designs.

the 'countr\' of pragmatism'.' tion with the

Federal

well over 2,500 murals, 17,000 sculptures,

bring what he called the 'discrete discontinuity' of Surrealism to

The Hansard-educated Le\y began his lifelong fascinaart of the new in 1927, when he accompanied Marcel Duchamp to Paris

See Richard D. .McKinzie, The Neu: Deal for Princeton. 1973, p. 11, and Francis \'. O'Connors essay in the present volume.

Aitists.

was

3.

JuUen Le\y, .Memoirs of an Art Gallen, York, 1977, pp. 12-13.

Xew

Galleries:

to

make an experimental

film with

From

Stieglitz to Castelli

159

Man Ray. With his sensitivity to European culture

Levy ran what became an international centre for the latest advances in painting, sculpture and photography. He first recognized the eccentric genius of Joseph Cornell in 1932, and throughout the 1930s showed such Europeans as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalf and Giorgio de Chirico, as well as the Americans Arshile Gorky and David Hare. Photographs by Paul Strand, Walker Evans (see Figs. 4, 5; p. 33) and Eugene Atget were all brought to the attention of the American public on and

his constant travels,

the cur\'ed walls of the

galler\^.

For

a time,

Le\y offered

experimental films, screening Bunuel and Dali's suicide of his close friend

sionism,

a

weekly programme of

andaloii.

Shocked by the

Gorky and offended by the chauvinism of Abstract Expres-

Levy closed America's

multi-media gallery in 1949. for the sublime. The other great force in bring-

first truly

Lev\^ was a sophisticate with a taste

Guggenheim (1898-1976; Fig. 3), was both fanindustrialist Solomon Guggenheim) and

ing Surrealism to America, Peggy tastically rich (she

Un Chien

was the niece of the

on hedonism. She opened Art of This Century in 1942, wearing a tiny pink landscape by Yves Tanguy on one ear-lobe and a metal and wire mobile by Alexander Calder on the other in an attempt to demonstrate equal respect for Surrealist and abstract art. The galler\^ was both an exhibition space for young artists and a place to display Guggenheim's growing private collection. With Duchamp as her adviser, she presented the most radical works by Andre Breton, W^assily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Giacomo Balla and Fernand Leger. Designed by the Austrian-born architect hell-bent

Fig. 3

Pegg\'

Guggenheim with

the revolving

presentation of objects from .Marcel Duchamp's Boite-en-Valise in her Art of This

New York,

Century Gallery,

1942

Frederick Kiesler, the gallery boasted curved walls covered in ultramarine canvas sails,

mounted on

turquoise floors, unframed pictures

from ropes, paintings revolving on variety of flickering lights (Fig. 4).

ings also set the

New

York

art

a Ferris

baseball bats or suspended

wheel or seen through peep-holes and

a

Guggenheim's frenzied whirl of parties and open-

world spinning, offering young American

artists

the

chance to associate with the European avant-garde. Her support of Pollock and

encouragement of Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofinann, Clyfford and Adolph Gottlieb made her the chief patron of the

WTien Guggenheim

Still,

Mark Rothko

New York School in its infancy.

Venice in 1947, only the well-born and well-connected Bett)^ Parsons (1900-1982) was bold enough to take on the difficult Pollock- as well as Still

and Rothko,

until 195 1 these

left for

who were soon joined by her friend Barnett NewTnan. From

key Abstract Expressionists formed the core of Parson's

1947

gallerv',

hanging shows and writing catalogue introductions for each other, and advising Parsons on prospective additions to her roster. less

white walls, the pared-down

gallerv^

of large-format works that became

Fig. 4 The Abstract Gallen.' in PeggjGuggenheim's Art of This Centun- Gallery, New York

•'^

With its bare wooden

provided

a suitable

a quintessential

floors

and window-

environment for the kind

element of post-war American

Mary Lublin

i6o

painting.

As such, the Parsons

gallerv^

prefigured various later commercial spaces

whose asceticism interacted subtly with the

art displayed in

Many of the Abstract Expressionists left Parsons find a

them/

for Sidney Janis in an attempt to

more commercial manager of their increasing fame and

fortune. But Parsons

(who was herself an artist) pursued her love for undiscovered talent, supporting Robert Rauschenberg and other young artists. By the time the gallery closed in 1977, she had presented most of the major artists of the previous three decades, especially such 'Colour-Field' and Minimal painters as Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Tuttle and

Agnes

iMartin.

critic Samuel Kootz (1898 -1982) began to show European and American abstractionists, taking on William Baziotes and Motherwell when

In 1945 the curator and

Guggenheim closed. Perhaps his most noteworthy exhibition occurred in 1949. It featured Willem de Kooning, Gorky, Gottlieb, Hofinann, Motherwell, Pollock, Ad Reinhardt and Rothko -

artists

whom he associated with a world of 'inward emotions

and pain'.' During the 1950s Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Xoland had shows in his galler\'. Unlike the refined Parsons, Kootz kept his eye on commerce. He scored a coup in 1947 when he returned from Paris with nine recent works by Picasso, going on to support the gallery for many years by selling the Spanish master from his back room. It was also in 1947 that Kootz presented the first Paris show of American moderns at the Galerie Alaeght, a commercially unsuccessfiil but ground-breaking attempt to develop a market for this work in post-w^ar Europe. However, American art was beginning to take its place on the world stage, and for the first time in history a large international market developed. European classics remained, nevertheless, the commercial salvation for many an American gallery, including those best known for American art. WTiat is striking about Sidney Janis and Leo Castelli - the two gallery directors most instrumental in the rise of successive generations of the New York School - is the degree to which both belonged to an archetypal European mould. By the 1940s Janis (1896-1989) had initiated a career as a curator, private dealer and art critic, publishing with his wife, Harriet, a study of Picasso and Abstract and Swrealist An. Janis's gallery opened in 1948 on 57th Street, occup\dng the space vacated by Kootz. There he embarked on an ambitious series of museum-like shows such as 'Les Fauves' and 'Futurism'. By 1949 he had begun to exhibit art that made the gallerv^ a focus of Abstract Expressionism. With the exhibition 'American Vanguard xArt' of 1952-53, Janis became identified with figures such as Baziotes, de Kooning, Pollock, Gottlieb, Kline, Rothko and Motherwell. The gallery never had more than nine American artists at one time, since Janis, like Kootz, needed to sell classic European art in order to survive. But things had begun to change by 1953, when de Kooning's show of aggressive paintings of women sold out, netting about $ 14,000. Canvases by Pollock were selling for S 5,000 to $ 8,000 just before his death

(The national mean income at the time was about $ 2,800 per year.)'^ After the Second World War the Italian-born Leo CasteHi {b. 1907) started

in 1956.

his

career as perhaps the most influential art dealer of the twentieth centur}-, his nascent interest in

contemporary

couple finally settled in ist

art

guided by his Rumanian wife, Ileana

New York in the

late 1940s,

works acquired largely through contacts formed during

Paris gallery^ in the 1930s. Finding this galleries as his eye to

American

art.

artists as

WTien the

a brief involvement

Curt Valentin, Pierre Matisse and Valentine Dudensing,

with

a

art

on

a

par with the European avant-

when he opened a gallery in the The strengths of de Kooning, Poland David Smith were demonstrated when their work was placed alongside first

room of his East 77th

5.

paintings by artists such as Leger, exhibition of that

first

6.

exhibition Castelli held Street house in 1957.

Mondrian and

year which established the direction Castelli was to take:

'New

O'Dohert)-, Inside the White Cube, Santa Monica, 1986. See Grace Glueck, 'Samuel M. Kootz Dead 83: An Acti\-ist for American .^rt', SriV York Tinies, 9 August 1982. See Diana Crane, The Transfonftatioi of the Avant-Garde: The Nrw York Ait World, ip^fo-Sy, Chicago, n. d.

7.

Quoted

in

{c.

New York,

at

1987).

Laura de Coppet and

The Alt Dealers, 8.

Picabia. It was, however, the final

Bern- Parsons, see Lee Hall, Bett}' Parsons: New York, 1991. On the

aesthetics of the gallery^ en\'ironment, see Brian

Castelli turned

Gorky and Rothko with such post-war

On

Atrist, Dealer, Collector,

Jean Dubuffet and Pierre Soulanges.

garde also inspired the living

4.

In 1950 he and Janis assembled an exhibition pairing the

This desire to place American contemporary^

lock

1914).

market dominated by such more established

Abstract Expressionists de Kooning, Pollock,

French

{b.

CastelH sold European modern-

.\lan Jones,

1984, p. 142.

Quoted in Cahan Tomkins, 'Profiles: A Good Eye and a Good Ear', New Yorker, 26 May 1980, p. 41.

Galleries:

Jasper Johns's first exhibition, at the Fig. 5 York, 1958 Castelli Gallery,

From

Srieglitz to Castelli

i6i

Leo

New

Work' included Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the tw o artists with whom his career is most closely identified, and announced Castelli's unfailing s^anpathy with what was soon to emerge as Pop Art. Earlier that year, an encaustic painting by Johns included in a show assembled by the art historian Meyer Schapiro at the Jewish Museum had caught the dealer's attention. Johns's first one-man show, held at Castelli's in

in Castelli's

January 1958 (Fig. 5), instantly catapulted the artist to fame. It was also, own words, 'probably the crucial event in my career as an art dealer,

and... an even

more

crucial

one

for art history'." Johns's Target with

Four Faces

appeared on the cover ofAjtnews and Alfred Barr purchased four paintings for

Museum

of Modern Art, Target with Four Faces

Castelli

had been familiar with Rauschenberg's work well before

with Johns. Betty Parsons's exhibition of Rauschenberg's in 195 1

The

among them.

had prompted Castelli to include the young

his

involvement

now famous white

paintings

the 'Ninth Street Show'

artist in

that he helped to organize later that year. Rauschenberg's series of red paintings

shown telli

Charles Egan's Gallery in 1954 (see Cat. 135) served only to confirm Casin his opinion of the artist's originality. However, the Pop artist's first show at at

Castelli,

mounted

just

two months

after Johns's,

only managed to provoke

Yet by the following year, Castelli had succeeded in placing in a public collection, selling Migration to the

museum

at

a

\isitors.

work by Rauschenberg

Cornell Universit)^.

of the historical moment. movements emerging and try to

Castelli's talent lay in his ability to grasp the significance

He has

defined his purpose simply, stating 'you spot

pick the best practitioners'.''

were made under Frank

Stella

who had

The

reputations of most of the major artists of the 1960s

Castelli's guidance.

He

established the careers of

Cy Twombly,

and Roy Lichtenstein, before enhancing the standing of Andy Warhol,

turned to Elinor

Ward

at the Stable Caller)'

and James Rosenquist, when the

following a rejection ft-om Cas-

Green Gallery in 1965. With his first exhibition of Claes Oldenburg in 1974, Castelli completed his group of Pop celebrities. Ellsworth Kelly, whom he took on from Janis at the same time as telli

in 1964,

latter left the

Oldenburg, was something of an anomaly in the gallen's circle, for painters concerned primarily with colour - Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler

and others - showed up-town with Andre Emmerich. Castelli has always professed to have

no

interest in the business of art,

his willingness to help other dealers, artists, critics

early years he helped to

change the American

and curators

galler\-

is

and indeed,

legendary. In the

system bv introducing

a

.Maty Lublin

i62

European-u-pe retainer (monthly wages advanced against royalties from enabling his

artists to

concentrate exclusively on their

innocence has revealed what can only be considered

art.

friture sales),

Often, Castelli's seeming

canny sense of the interplay

a

museum. WTien .Alfred Barr wished to acquire Stella's black painting The Mmriage of Reason and Squalor (Cat. 155) for The Museum

betAveen the art market and the large

of

Modern Art

lowered the price from S 1,200 to S700, enabling

in 1959, CastelH

Barr to circumvent the disapproval of the museum's trustees and purchase the work

\nthout the consent of the board.

This generosit)' has frequently worked to

advantage.

Castelli's

He

has been

extremely shrewd in his development of a network of contemporary dealers, increasing the status of his

York

Although

area.

by pro\iding

artists

accessibilit}' to collectors

such as Kootz had tried to develop

earlier dealers

market for American Abstract Expressionists, former wife, Ileana Sonnabend,

outside the

who

it

was

a

New

European

Castelli, in partnership

with his

successfully broke through the barrier of

Euro-

WTien Sonnabend opened her gallen' in Paris in 1962, she showed mostlv This exposure to European museum directors, curators, journalists and collectors proved immensely important, placing Pop Art at the centre of the centrism.

Castelli artists.

international scene.

Other

been instrumental

talents have

1926) and Richard Bellamy front of the art market. Voice,

had established

{b.

By 1958 Karp, who

galler\''s

Karp

{b.

position at the fore-

started out as an art critic for the Village

world by presenting the sculpHappenings of Allan Kaprow in the elegant, up-

his place in the avant-garde art

ture of John Chamberlain and the

tow^n galler\^ of

in Castelli's rise to the top. Ivan

1924) helped secure the

A lartha Jackson.

He went on

to

become

Castelli's galler\' director, a

momentous years of 1959 to 1969. Karp's outspoken, more elegant, European charm, and the New

position he held during the

aggressive personalit}' offset Castelli's Yorker's cessful

enormous

skill at

manipulation of

generating press commentar\' proved decisive to the suc-

critical

opinion regarding the

gallery's artists. Eventually,

Karp assumed responsibility for the important and often daunting task of viewing the work of idealistic young painters for his employer, who preferred to adAise collectors and curators. This commitment to up-and-coming artists became the focus of the eclectic O.K. Harris Gallen, which Karp opened in October 1969. After five years as director of the Hansa Galler\', an artists' co-operative, Bellamy opened the loosely run Green Galler\- in i960 with funding from the taxi magnate and collector Robert

Scull.

Unlike

Castelli,

Bellamy selected

his artists

by personal

preference and in recognition of their pressing need for exhibition space. ter cast figures of George Segal, the

boards of James Rosenquist, the constructions of Mark

di

to

work

it

succumbed

Many dealers who

drawing the older

own

Xauman later

bill-

all

presented at the Green

to financial difficulties in 1965. Bellamy had continued

closely with Castelli,

Richard Serra, Bruce

plas-

Suvero and the Minimalist

works of Donald Judd, Dan Ela\in and Robert Alorris were Gallery before

The

multi-media creations of Lucas Samaras, the

dealer's attention to, for example,

and Keith Sonnier.

became prominent worked

for established galleries before

Jim Dine and Karp Robert Indiana their first one-man shows when he took over from at the Martha Jackson Galler\' in i960. But it was W eber's association with the \lrginia Dwan Galfinding their

lery,

whose

until

work

its

place in the art world.

director he was

closure four years

artists

Weaker

De

John \^eber

from 1967, when later,

it

{b.

1932) offered

moved from Los Angeles to New York,

that fostered his close identification with the Earth-

Maria, xMichael Heizer and Robert Smithson,

as well as the

Minimalists Sol LeWitt and Robert R\Tnan. In 1971

Weber opened

the building in

his

own

located. Paula Cooper,

whose

had opened her gallery in

this

420 West Broadway in SoHo, and Sonnabend galleries were also

exhibition space at

which the more renowned artists

Castelli

included Jonathan Borofsk}' and Joel Shapiro,

former industrial area of lower Manhattan by 1968, but

was with the inauguration of the 420 building that the contemporary art scene moved from up-town to down-town. Soon after, SoHo emerged as the centre of the

it

international art world.

Galleries:

The young dealer Mar\^ Boone

(b.

From

Stieglitz to Castelli

163

1951) began her rise to a position of power

when

she took a space at the 420 building in 1977. Perhaps reacting against the reification

Marden and Dorothea Rockburne, with Bykert Gallen^, Boone turned towards rep-

she found in the Minimalist painters Brice

whom

she had worked at Klaus Kertess's

resenting art that was

more emotional and

painterly.

She soon emerged

as the

key

dealer for Neo-Expressionism. \^Tiile promoting her male-dominated stable of art stars,

who

included Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, David Salle and Julian Schnabel,

Boone became

part of the media-orientated art

boom

of the 1980s. She assumed the

198 1 she

queen of SoHo, inspiring endless interviews and press cov^erage. In combined forces with the still-dominant Castelli to show the works of

Schnabel,

a joint effort that

role of reigning

standing as

furthered Boone's ascendancy while confirming Castelli's

a leading force in the market.

Part of the reason for the power of the art dealer in the decades following i960

may

New York's

museums. W^th the exception of sev-eral ground-breaking exhibitions, The iMuseum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the \Miitney Museum of American Art failed to focus consistently on dev^eloping trends and new talents, leaving responsibilit}' for this to galleries and alternativ^e spaces. Perhaps this has been the case ev^er since Durand-Ruel supported the French Impressionists in the late nineteenth centur\\ The American dealer's place in the art world can best be summed up by recalling a comment made by that most famous of Americans in Paris, Gertrude Stein. When Picasso boasted to her about a forthcoming exhibition of his work at The Museum of Alodern Art, Stein retorted have been

with

a

a lack

of direction in

devastating 'no

of avant-garde art in

museum

can be modern'. This certainly applies to the fortunes

New York, w here it was

left to a select

group of knowledgeable

and perceptive dealers to shape the development of American centur\^

art in the twentieth

i65

Caiter Rntdijf

The

'The Body Electric': in American Art

In

November

igj ^A?lforiim magazine published a colour photograph of the sculptor

Lynda Benglis

in the nude.

decidedly feminine, the

arched -

Erotic Dimension

a sexy

Her

artist's

skin looks well tanned and liberally oiled. Slim yet

body

is

arranged in

a

hip-slung pose, with back

contrapposto. She has cut her hair short and greased

it

The

back.

pression on her lips hovers part-way bet\\'een a pout and a sneer, and there

is

From

sion to Lolita in the white-rimmed sun glasses that hide her eyes.

an

ex-

allu-

Benglis's

crotch extends a long and meticulously detailed dildo, held in place by her right hand.

Intended to

illustrate

an essay on her sculpture,

thetic phallus so scandalized the editors of

advertising pages.'

With her

that.

Nowadays,

Benglis's flirtation with

and quirky interlude in

as a short

this portrait

of the

pornography

long and successful career, yet

a

artist

with a syn-

Aitfonmi that they banished is

it

it

to the

remembered

was more than

precedent-setting dildo, she prepared the American art world for

by

sexually explicit images

Koons and Cindy Sherman.

who

artists

flourished in the 1980s - Eric Fischl, Jeff

Pictures of Koons assuming self-consciously erotic poses

with the Italian porn star Cicciolina show an obvious debt to Benglis.

More

subtly,

Benglis's hermaphroditic charade of 1974 illuminates the sexualit)^' lurking in the art

of certain predecessors -Jackson Pollock, in particular. In an art world scaled to the swagger of figures such as Pollock and \^'illem de

Kooning, question:

said Benglis, art

is

about

'all

territory',

and there

your floor

that establishes your presence?

Expressionist,

macho,

As Benglis saw it, American

sexist game'.'

Her male

is

product of a 'tough'

a

only one pertinent

sensibility,

was

art

a 'heroic, x\bstract

colleagues tended to see

way, though they shrugged off her accusator}^ tone. Taking art

is

How big is the zone you capture and occupy with your painting, sculpture, video piece, your public persona? How powerful is the image

'How big?'

it

as

it

the

same

axiomatic that serious

they expected the serious

artist to

show mas-

culine aptitudes, temperamentally and even physically.

Painting fi^om the shoulder, not the wrist, de Kooning gigantified the pictorial architecture that he had inherited from the School of Paris. Undeniably, there athletic bravura in the (see Cat. 97, 98)

he painted in the early 1950s. Evoking demonically powerful

males, the artist put ject

how

all

his strength

flirted

two-fisted tough

compared the just as well

guy

with prettiness. persists.

Many

Robert Pincus-Witten, 'Lynda Benglis: The Frozen Gesture' (1974), in The Nev: Sculpture nj6^-i()-jy. Beraeeu Geo?tietiy

New

exhibition catalogue,

Museum

ot

American

2.

York,

Whitney

Art, 1990, pp. 310-13.

Benglis's portrait appeared

November 1974

and Gesture,

on

p. 7

of Ajrforuf/is

issue.

Lynda Benglis, quoted

in

Pincus-Witten,

op.cit., p. 312. 3.

Patsy Southgate, quoting J»ckson Pollock, in Jeffre\' Potter, 7b

A

I

loleiit

Biogi-aphy ofJackson Pollock, p. 88.

Grave:

New

An

this

metaphor,

mocked

the image of the

commentators, the

a

and beyond, de

New York painter

artist

fe-

his sub-

as a

among them, have

He could

a

Pollock drip painting looks like the product of seminal image (see Fig.

the figure of the toweringly phallic

ninity she suggested that

we

artist,

2, p. 80).

With her

dildo,

and with her naked femi-

are too quick to assign a male nature to art

made with

was with gestures more sweeping than Pollock's that she made her far from macho floor sculptures - puddles and heaps of hot pink and green latex. Approached from the direction of these flamingly sensuous objects, his

vigorous gestures. After

all, it

poured paintings seem vigorous but not slashingly aggressive. Look past the image of Pollock as the he-man artist and you see that certain passages in his work are gorgeous,

Oral

York, 1985,

Still,

from

trajectory of Pollock's flung paint to the arc of a male's urine.-

explosively masculine energies 1.

display. Yet his colours learned

have noted that his method mimics ejaculation too.

Introduced by

Benglis

on

to be lush and, as his career lengthened into the 1960s

Kooning often

is

brushwork that churns over the surfaces of the Woman pictures

called

if

He was capable of preciosity, even, as were all the heroes of the soYork School's founding generation - de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert

brash.

New

Mothci-well. Like Benglis's dildo, the hypcr-masciilinit)- of American art and artists

is

1

66

fake, a

Caiter Ratclijf

product of make-believe. At their strongest, works of American

sensuality' prior to the social construction

Among Buren,

crowd of Pollock's sculptural descendants

the milling

who

art aspire to a

of gender.

Richard Van

is

achieved flashy, theatrical effects by covering walls with poured and

spangled bits of fibreglass. Rafael Ferrer smeared walls with wide swaths of grease, as

an adhesive for handfuls of hay, and Barry- Le Va scattered

on

materials

guided only by the most

galler\' floors,

all

manner of mundane

On

flexible protocols.

materials touched by an expansive impulse evanesce, as

when

xAlan Saret's

occasion,

seemingly

casual tangles of wire dissolve into clouds of light.^ This art surges and flows and at

times writhes with a manifestly physical pleasure.

It

s\Tnbolizes the happily poly-

morphous body, at once enveloped and enveloping. Though it feigns mindlessness on occasion, art of this sort can betray something like wit. Until the waters of Utah's Great Salt Lake submerged it, Robert Smithson's The Spiral Jetty (Fig. 3, p. 134) made a Pollock-styde gesture at the scale of the far western desert. Built in 1972, this rock a

length of 1,500

scape. W'ith etrate the

feet.

and gravel earthwork coiled over the

Turning in on

itself, it

same

making The

can

a vortex

direction reversed, Svaixhson's Jetty

its

lake's surface to

designed to engulf the land-

became

a projectile

ready to pen-

immensit}'. At once vaginal and phallic, this large sculpture

small joke about the mutabilit\' of gender. in

was

Beyond the joke

made

a

the sculptors faith that,

is

and

Spiral Jetty, he found unit\- with matter, space

light

on an xAmeri-

scale.'

To

America is a grandiose and sexoially consummating the union, who or what plays which role? No artist has spoken direcdy of the experience. To hear it discussed, we need to attend to Walt WTiitman, whose blending with America began with a happy image of himself as 'a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, /Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, identify oneself with the immensity' of

ambiguous

sort of nationalism. In

drinking and breeding.'

T) extend own

to further elaborations of his

'And the good or bad

I

this self-regarding pleasure,

being. 'In

say of myself

I

all

my palms

I

he turns to others

in

its

as

see myself, he announces,

say of them.' Feeling that he simply

American people, WTiitman embraces the land gaps, /I skirt sierras,

people

vastness:

'my elbows

is

the

rest in sea-

cover continents.""

New World

recurs in the art of Mars-

den Hartley, Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe, painters

whom we meet on the way

This feeling of orgasmic oneness with the

back from IMiitman's century' to our own. Granted, O'Keeffe insisted on not drawing equations between female anatomy and natural things, especially flowers. Yet in

her pictures of

irises

and other,

less easily identified varieties, petals are

voluptu-

By irresistible implication, the unseen interior of an O'Keeffe blossom is vaginal. Her flower pictures had a scandalous allure in the 1920s and, half a century later, made her a feminist hero. Since the 1970s her stature as a political figure-head has grown so steadily that it is difficult to see how much she has in common with male contemporaries such as Dove and Hartley. ously labial (see Fig.

Though

alert to

i, p.

47).

4.

Cubist and Expressionist innovations in Europe, these American

For a suney of these episodes, see Alarcia Tucker and James Alonte, Anti-llliisioii: Procedures/Materials, exhibition catalogue,

modernists never tried to maintain properly avant-garde allegiances to one style or another.

Remaking and mingling the shapes of observed

things.

Dove

abstraction (see Cat. 33, 34). Instead of detailing a place, he evoked

arrived at

its

weather,

drawing no distinction between external conditions of sun or rain and the inward

mate of his

feelings. In his late,

York, WTiitney

schematic manner Hartley frequently painted

Each object of his

affection

\\ alt

New York,

pling with the presence traditionally called 'Nature'.

there

is

always a victor: the

scape and thus indexes

it

artist,

who

The

is a

title

promiscuous grapis

friendly, yet

You see this wide, urgent embrace in the art of O'Keeffe and Dove and other American painters of their time, among them Charles Burchfield and John Marin. Because WTiitman and Pollock and so many of their descendants also display this exu-

poem

'I

Sing

The Body

Electric' (1855);

ibid., p. 127. 7.

Ralph \\'aldo Emerson, 'Nature' (1849), in Joel E?>/ersoii: Essays aud Lectures, New

Porte, ed.,

imprints his presence on the American land-

to the passionate body.

(1855,

1982, pp. 206, 210, 219. The quotation in the of the present essay is taken from Whit-

was the moment-

struggle

1979, pp. 109-16.

Whitman. 'Song of Myself

man's

ary occasion for a persistent, pan-sexual yearning. His art

in

1891-92), in Justin Kaplan, ed., Walt Wlntmau: Co7?iplete Poetiy and Collected Prose, New York,

with pictures of the Maine coast, he gave to rocks and clouds the same rapturous, flesh.

New

.\rt,

Robert Smithson, 'The Spiral Jetty' (1972), The Writ'nigs ofRoheit Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt,

6.

ages to the fishermen of Maine. Alternating these expressions of homosex^ual love

brooding care that he lavished on

of American

1969. 5.

cli-

hom-

Museum

8.

York, 1983, pp. ID, 14. Barnett Newman, respectively 'The First

Man

Was an .\rtist' (1942) ^"*^ '^\\^ Sublime is Now' (1948), in John R O'Neill, ed., Baniett Xe-d-?fnjii:

Selected Writings

\brk, 1990, pp. 158, 173.

and

IntercirdS,

New

The

berant pan-sexuality,

Erotic Dimension in American Art

begins to look like the essentially American

it

should not overlook the American inclination to be chaste. This

trait. is

167

However, we

another facet of

same pervasive awareness of the body. In a carnal spirit WTiitman embraced an infinitely large idea of America. Though Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of his nation w^as as grand as WTiitman's, and his the

embrace

he favoured vision over touch. With his sensual urges spiritualized,

as wide,

Emerson described himself as scape.

As

a 'transparent eyeball' adrift

'the currents of the Universal Being' flow

above the American land-

through him, he becomes

son became exceedingly sensitive to Declaring himself as

a

a

light,

century later that 'the

first

master of the American

from our eyes

'the nostalgic glasses

which he

called 'the first of painters'.'

man was

an

of

history^'

Barnett

artist',

light, the spiritual

'the

Emer-

lover of uncontained and immortal beauty'. Sustaining his love through vision,

Newman

cast

illumination that removes

and reveals 'our relationship to the

absolute emotions'." His wide fields of luminous colour (see Cat. 107-12) promulgate

the faith that, in the cessful painting

is

New W'orld,

less

language to enunciate. canvases of

art

an image than

A

and the a

artist are

Mark Rothko

2

at the

Rolicrt

Morns,

l-'ustcr tor liis cxliibition

Castelli-Sonnabend

Galler\',

New

Under CK^ord

(see Cat. 113 -18).

New

Still's

light

fills

the

agitated touch,

York School sublime shows

ethereal in comparison to \ATiitman,

Emerson looks

its

sybaritic

beside the nineteenth-century sectarians called 'Shakers'. Strictiy celibate, these rural

York,

1974

a suc-

(see Cat. 103-6).

Though he was Fig.

Newman,

melancholy variant of the same American

such radiance turns melodramatic and the

Gothic shadows

renewed. For

presence that reveals truths too elemental for

Utopians practised a severe style of carpentry that has attracted

contemporary American tical

204).

artists.

forms of Shaker furniture

Though he

Donald Judd,

as a

precedent for his Minimalist boxes (see Cat. 202,

often covers these metal objects with coats of lush colour, their prim

forms give them an aura of simple American

virtue.

ness, that earnest clarity, in Minimalist sculpture

There

coffin-like, the largest of

them seem

are variants of that prim-

by Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and

Robert Morris, though the grey boxes Morris made Vaguely

many admirers among

in particular, has cited the plain, prac-

in the

less chaste

mid-1960s stand

apart.

than numb.

Doting on death, Morris does not deny sensuality so much

as inflict

it

with

a chill.

Particularly cold seasons freeze his images in sexually \-iolent postures. In 1974, the

year of Benglis's portrait with dildo, Morris appeared on an exhibition poster naked

and statuesque in

a helmet,

dark glasses, a spiked metal collar and chains (Fig.

apocalyptic pictures of the next decade prophesy universal violence. This pan-sexTjality in a sado-masochistic tory^ light

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59. Mociema Aluseet, Stockholm

Fig. 3

turns cruel and Pollock's

is

2).

His

American

mood. In Morris's apocalypse Newman's unbounded energies become destructive.

revela-

i68

Caiter Ratdiff

The American

taste tor absolutes

is

strong but never absolute. Early in the 1950s

Robert Rauschenberg made all-black and all-white paintings. Soon, though, he was loading his canvases with pictorial incident and found objects: de Kooning-style

brush-marks, scraps of newsprint and lumber, fragments of furniture, and what not. Splashing the quilts and sheets of Bed

(Museum of Modern

Art,

New

York) with

shrieking colour, Rauschenberg evoked much, from nightmares to sexual assault. In Monogi'dJ}! (Fig. 3) with

its

billy

goat stuffed through the tight ring of a car tyre, there

rebus of penetration to be read.

is a

The commercial

technique of photographic silk-screening encouraged Rau-

schenberg to flood his canvases with pictures gathered from

from the

art

and through the viewfinder of

television screen

books and magazines, his camera. In Barge

(1962-63; National Gallery of Art, Washington) the curves of

mimic the haunches of Velazquez's Rokeby bits

of images mirror,

hke

a big

jostle

and

infiltrate

Pollock canvas, potentially

a

super-highway

Venus. All across this 32-foot-long canvas

one another, churning up

a field that feels,

infinite. life,

Rauschenberg drew

artists.

Coolly, Jasper Johns

Ecstatically splashing in the image-currents of ordinary

attention to subjects that had gone unseen by ambitious

did the same, and soon the Pop artists had appeared. In 1961 Tom Wesselmann launched his series Great American Nudes (see Fig. 4) - anonymous female sex objects on display in tableaux accented by images of consumer products. These paintings and wall sculptures are as bluntly erotic as skin-magazine centrefolds, almost. Claes

Oldenburg's soft sculptures are more allusive (see Cat. 170-2). Like household objects in form, they have the

weight of flesh. Sometimes engorged but usually

flaccid, these

appliances and plumbing fixtures appear to be caught in an endless round of sexual

excitement and exhaustion. Oldenburg gets

at the obsessions

and disappointments

that drive consumerism.

In Oldenburg's version of

no

satire,

Pop Art

lurks a quirky impulse towards satire.

only obsession, in the peculiarly chaste art of Andy Warhol. His

itive pictures

There

flat,

is

repet-

of stars such as Marilyn Monroe, EKis Presley and Jackie Kennedy

promulgate an aesthetic of the crush - the adolescent infatuation with some untouch-

These stars included Campbell's soup Warhol had a crush not merely on famous people, but also on the supermarket's plenitude of brand-name goods (see Cat. 185, 186). Desire has materialized into commodities. In imagination WTiitman embraced the American people and blended with them. Pollock's gestures gave him an imaginar}^ oneness ably glamorous presence (see Cat. 183, 184).

cans and Brillo soap pads, for

Fig.

4

Tom

Wesselmann, Great Ajuericau Xiide

No. )7, 1964. Whitney

New York

Museum

of .-Vmerican

.\rt,

The

Fig. 5

Eric Fischl,

Collection,

Bad Boy,

Erotic Dimension in American Art

169

1981. Saatchi

London

with unbounded American space. Warhol, too, identified himself with America, ting

all

his attention

be absorbed by the endless

a place in the array of celebrities

field

of American

stars.

let-

As he found

he so promiscuously adored, Warhol's art defined

sexuality as narcissism unalloyed.

In obscure corners of Warhol's oeuvre are a few explicitly sexual images.

homosexual, though several show

a

naked

man and woman

in a casual

Most

embrace.

are

None

offers the affront of Benglis's portrait with dildo or of Morris's rough-trade beefcake.

That

sort of aggression

was rare

in

American

art until the 1980s,

when

a

period of

uninhibited sexual illustration began. In Eric Fischl's pictures (see Fig. 5) the un-

expected nakedness of certain figures introduces sexual tensions into otherwise unexceptionable scenes of suburban family

life.

The

effect

is

always mysterious. Fischl

is

given to theatrical lighting effects and subtly skewed perspectives, and he likes to load his pictorial narratives

with insoluble clues.

nostalgia for the onset of adolescent sexuality.

Fig. 6

Max

Jeff Koons, Position Three, i^gi. Galerie

Hetzler,

Cologne

Still,

he conveys

a

sharp and uneasy

lyo

Carta- Ratd'tff

Fig. 7

Cindy Sherman,

Pictures,

Nothing mars the happiness of Keith Haring's universe

(see Cat. 235, 236).

New

Untitled, 1992.

Metro

York

As

some method other patterns, Haring often told

spaceships hover and dogs bark, androg^Tious babies multiply by

than the usual one. Arranging his creatures in narrative sexual stories.

Sometimes

sible to distinguish

a drawing's

copulating figures proliferate until

one body from another. Line

itself

it is

becomes orgasmic,

impos-

as in the

dripped, poured and splashed canvases of Pollock. In Haring's hands, Pollock's subtly ordered intimations of the infinite a

down-town Manhattan All

is

become images of exuberant

disorder, as

carefully controlled in the sugar}'

manoeuvers with Cicciolina

(see Fig. 6).

world where Jeff Koons executes sexual

His

fanatically detailed pictures

and statues

of their couplings illustrate an idea of Utopia. If we attend carefully, he promises, will

be the better for

said that 'Jeff

it.

Koons

Talking of a film he planned to make with CiccioHna, the there for people to

is

on

dance-floor.

become who they

are.

And

after

we

artist

someone

am this, am becoming this. "...The public will only have an impression of w^hat they can become.'" The promise is that sex, or the spectacle of Koons having it, is good for you. Remarkably, he gives signs of being con\inced by his own moralizing. Cindy Sher-

\iews the film, they are

.

.

.

going to have the impression that

"I

can be

this, I

I

man's kind

is

more con\incing, or at least more unsettling. a decade Sherman has taken photographs of

For more than

roles (see Cat. 242-5).

At

first,

herself in assumed

these were familiar stereotypes from B-mo\ies - the

quietly sex\' librarian, the would-be career

woman

ft-eshly arrived in

Manhattan.

became more bizarre. She impersonated a coven of grotesque hags in one series of photos. Another showed her as a corpse half silted over by waves. Sherman has vanished ft-om her most recent works, as masks, false breasts and bellies, and bits of mannequins arrange themselves in allegorical figures of sexual horror. All are contorted, some are mutilated. The most dreadful one (Fig. 7) leers at us as she Slowly, her self-images

gives birth to

something unidentifiable. These figures preach caution.

conjured up, -\IDS

is

Reaching back to her casts

shadows over the

earlier

ver\'

art,

notion of gender. Sherman's illustrations of sexual trauma

most abidingly powerful images are not

illustrative.

am-way, the images that remain strong over the seasons are enacted

by exemplary gestures. And the strongest of these gestures are charged, with

dangers

work, the calm and ghastly light of her new pictures

are persuasive at present. Yet the

In American

Of the

only the most obvious.

a sensuality that

sweeps aside

all

limiting notions of gender.

like Pollock's, 9.

Quoted

in .\ndre\v

Art, vol. 23, no. 153,

Renton,

'Jeff

Summer

Koons'. Flash

1990, p. 112.

lyi

Karal Ann Marling

The Media

in America:

But

is it

Art?

A selection of incidents

from the media during 1992: George HoUiday, the bystander who videotaped the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers on 3 March 1991, sues film-maker Spike Lee for in•

fringement of cop\Tight, charging that the footage Lee has incorporated into his

upcoming movie, Malcolm X, was illegally obtained. The discrepancy between Holliday's tape of King being brutalized by the cops (Fig. i) and the verdict of a jury that concluded they didn't do

it

expected to figure in their •

Bill

sparked off the L. A.

Denny hauled from

driver Reggie

McKibben,

riots.

A second video, showing lorry

the cab of his vehicle and beaten by rioters,

is

trial.

a writer for the

New

Yorker,

ington suburb for tw-enty-four hours straight

off.

watches cable television in

He sees some

a

Wash-

amazing stuff- yowl-

ing televangelists, obscure sporting events, infomercials for products almost too bizarre for the

day alone on

a

normal

retail trade

mountain.

The

pungency of life into one tual

and endless re-runs of sitcoms. Then he spends

conclusion:

TV^ sucks. is

McKibben wants no

package of

the global village Marshall

part of it.

a

out the specificity and

vast, undifferentiated, placeless, timeless

snack food for nineteen-year-olds. If this

prophesied in the 1960s,

It flattens

spiri-

McLuhan

He'd rather be Thoreau

jun.,

pla\ang at hermithood somewhere in the /Vdirondacks." •

On the

of his

tenth anniversary of its

sci-fi thriller

looks a

littie

too

first release,

Ridley Scott presents a

new version

Blade Runner --sl so-called 'director's cut'. Perhaps the original film

much

like

Rodney King's Los Angeles

he has re-edited the sMovy to highlight

a

for comfort.

But Scott claims

romantic sub-plot. In one of the most famous

passages in American literature, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

gently past?' all

tells

Gatsby

along. •

the hero that he can't alter the past to suit his fancies. 'Can't repeat the

The

cries.

'WTiy of course you

In an impassioned

Still from George Holliday's video of Rodney King being attacked by Los Angeles I

police officers,

Bill

3

McKibbon, The Age

bifomiatwu, F.

Alarch 1991

o^llssiiig

New

York, 1992, pp. 52-3. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, in

Mizener, ed.. The Fitzgerald Reader, York, 196^, pp. 185-6.

.•\rthur

New

Well, Jay Gatsby was apparendy right

Op-Ed piece for the Los Angeles Times Emmy-winning proLaw and Hill Street Blues) complains about too much

ducer Steven Bochco (oi L.A.

Fig.

can.''

new, hearts-and-flowers Blade Runner proves his point.

.

K/inil

Aim

Mai-ling

market research and too many commercials on network T\\ vision as an art form', he concludes, 'and challenge those

'I'd

acknowledge

working

in the

tele-

medium

to

redefine their standards of excellence accordingly.''

The

•

largest indoor

shopping mall

in the

world opens in suburban Alinneapo-

lis/St. Paul, a few miles from the first indoor mall ever built (in 1954-56). This new mega-mall, the .Mall of-\merica, consists of more than three hundred stores centred

on an amusement park

replicating the adventures of Charles Schulz's cartoon beagle,

'Snoopy', from the Peanuts comic ture Jack

strip.

Two years eadier, the French Alinister of Cul-

Lang had named Schulz 'Commandeur

of his contribution to world

Alusee des

art.

Snoopy appeared

Decoratifs in Paris,

-\rts

des Arts et Lettres' in recognition

For the opening of the Peanuts retrospective in a suit designed

at the

by couturier

Christian Lacroix.

Oh - and

one more thing.

Home Fires,

In

•

book

a

that follows a middle-class familv

\\ ar to 1990 using techniques of documentary' film or his subjects in 1948 gathered

ment

The neighbours

plan.

around

a

from the Second World

home \-ideo, Donald Katz finds

ten-inch T\" set bought on the weekly pay-

dozen strong. T\'

are there, too, three

sets are

still

Owners are trend-setters, electronic pioneers. A professor looking into phenomenon finds that watching TV^ stifles conversation, except during the commercials, when even-body talks as quickly as possible in 'a new kind of rapid dis-

novelty items. the

course'. In 1948 people

who

have

sets

spend an average of three-and-a-half hours

a

day in front of them."

So what,

if

amthing, do these assorted incidents have in common? Urban

T\

Books based on toon

critters in the

bone contempt still

.

Film auteurs adding moustaches to their own Mona

riots.

Lisas.

Car-

roimd. California culture ascendant or in flames. Bred-in-the-

for the

media coexisting with the

wistful notion that tele\-ision

aspire to the condition of fine art? Factoids. Fragments. Marshall

might

McLuhan.

the

Canadian professor of hterature who became .America's best-known media theorist of the television age, treated argumentation

as a

discontinuous process. In the old-

moved from left

fashioned print media, for which he had increasingly little use, things

to right in a logical lock-step. In the electronic age of pixels, ever\-thing

on the screen,

all

over, simultaneously.

So

McLuhan tried to write in

a

was up there

mosaic format,

juxtaposing suggestive obsenations without 'proWng' that one fact influenced an-

other in any particular way. Hey, 'the jnediu?n

Form and

is

the message'.'

content were both at issue in his work. His

they were legion, hated what

McLuhan

many professional

critics,

and

analysed: ads, comics and Charles \"an

Doren, the promising academic turned notorious prime-time game-show cheat. The anti-McLuhanites also despised the way he did

MT\"

it,

in

aphorisms and

ellipses that look.

That wasn't exactly McLuhan's point, but it was close enough. Tele\dsion was a 'cool' medium, invoKing the \-iewer in a direct, sensory way, as s/he reconstructed images from scattered motes of light on the picture tube. Realit}-. in other words, was the responsibilit\- of the guy in the La-Z-Boy chair with the cold beer. Although McLuhan harboured the odd in retrospect, like an afternoon of

translated into

t}-pe.'

the tube, there was nothing passive about the collective, neo-tribal ritual being en-

acted around his electronic hearth.

thought

actively

The mosaic made

at the

.

.

whether 'adult'

in his

the epitome of

.

all

famous essay

that

is

in praise

spurious in the

It

was purest

kitsch,

life

of our times.'"

And

kitsch

-

form of dancing Alka-Seltzer bottles, moronic radio soap operas or \\ esterns on tele\nsion - was a conspirac\- on the part of capitalist overlords

The

spurious media culture was nothing

O te?npora!

more than

a

its

commodit}', an

Ad men ruled the media and the media ruled the supine mores! .Mxm Toffler counted the number of dramatized classics

instrument of oppression.' masses.

Kitsch' (1939), in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock Critical Debate, X'ew York,

and After: The 8.

wrote

in the

whims."

7.

of the avant-garde, 'ersatz cul-

variously to subdue, to arouse or to narcotize an audience of nitwits, according to e\il

6.

MarshaH McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Kxtensions of Man, Xe\\" York. 1964, pp. 7-8. See, for example, Ra\Tnond Rosenthal, ed., McLuhan: Pro and Con. Xew York, 1968. Clement Greenberg, 'Avant-Garde and

1985, p. 25.

subject-matter of popular art and despaired.

Clement Greenberg ture

pp. 36-7. 5.

sense because the audience

This attitude contrasts markedly with the stance of many of his peers, who looked hard

4.

did.

it

T\'I' Minneapolis

"Here's what's

Star Tribune, 8 September 1992, 7E. Donald Katz. Home Fires, Xew York, 1992,

was not the priman* sense engaged when famihes gathered before

belief that \-ision

wrong with

3

9.

Herbert J. Gans explains and disputes this reasoning in Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, Xew York, 1974, p. \-iii. See. for example. .Max

Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adomo, 'The Culture Industn': Enlightenment

as .Mass

Deception', in The

Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.

John

Cumming. Xew York, 1972, for the bestknown formulation of a thesis latent in many .\merican texts of the 1950s, including John

Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) and \'ance Packard's The Hidden Peiyuadas

{ii)j~).

The Media and

and symphonies broadcast by the networks that mindless trash and the

TV

in a given year in a

Art

173

vahant effort to prove

were not always synon\TTious.' But Newton

set

Alinow, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in a famous 196 speech, called the broadcast industry'

The

distrust of

media-made

'art'

vast wasteland' of tasteless, debasing dreck."

'a

or popular culture in the 1950s and early 1960s

had something to do with the exalted

Beginning with Abstract

status of high art.

Expressionism, American art was one of the major ideological weapons of the Cold

War

era. Its gestural

aspirations:

was

imagery stood for freedom and

scale for

its

American

cultural

Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries proved that the United States

a leader in art as well as in the

side the So\net

Union and

technology of consumer merchandise. And, along-

the Sputnik (1957), America could further claim a certain

moral superiority from the Pop

artist's

critique of tail fins, ads, comics

food. Despite his preaching in favour of TV,

McLuhan

and processed

himself larded his prose with

reverential twaddle about artists of the avant-garde persuasion shooting non-elec-

mere mortals glued to their sets could scarcely imagine. Andy Warhol and the others were marketed like refrigerators or rock stars, art seemed insulated from the grubby grasp of capitalism by its own pictorial inscrutability." \^Tiat did these drips mean} These soup cans? Only the critics knew for sure. There were movie critics, too, of course. Even the weekly TV Guide offered occasional commentary' on the significance oi Bonanza or I Love Lucy along with the channel listings." In general, however, the media confirmed the American tradition of tronic 'probes' into a future

Finally, despite the fact that Pollock,

individuahsm, whereas

democratic claims of

art,

mediated and interpreted by

readily apparent in politics than in aesthetics.

makes every viewer once broadcast

'experts',

meritocrac}' and a self-selected

class,

a judge,

an expert,

in living colour

advanced the anti-

The

elite.

effect

The Rodney King \ndeo,

just as the daily spectacle

during the dinner hour,

let

is

more

for instance,

of the Vietnam War,

viewers judge

Lyndon

Johnson, William Westmoreland and the other military experts. Abraham Zapruder's

home movie

of the Kennedy assassination continues to challenge

what happened

in Dallas in

November

1963.

The media

official

accounts of

level the playing field.

By

permitting free access to images - and to pictures that have evaded cultural censorship

- they have always served the

interests of the immigrant, the illiterate, the per-

son without high standing or influence, the average American.

Los Angeles

forces as well, perhaps chaos in

basic to the

American national

is

If

they are anarchistic

the price of accessibility. But they are

character.

In an ingenious essay on advertising Daniel Boorstin traces American anarchy,

along with individualism, hyperbole, optimism and an obsession with novelty, to the

newcomers across the Atlantic in the first place. According to his woodblock prints in exploration chronicles, illustrated handbills for the railroads, dime novels, paperback almanacs and Buffalo Bill's Wild West were crude versions of the modern media, spreading the news of a new land and touting its real and mythical virtues. Such 'advertising', he wTites, 'has become the heart of the ads that brought

'^

analysis, fanciful

10.

Alvin Toffler, The Culture Consumers: Ait and Affluence in America, Baltimore, 1964, pp. 21-32.

folk culture

11.

Quoted

12.

Family Ideal in Postwar A?nerica, Chicago, 1992, p. 48. See Christin J. Alamiya, Pop Art and Consumer

in L\Tin Spigel,

Telrcision

and

Make Room for TV:

the

American Super \larket, Austin, 1992. See Glenn C. \ltschuler and David I. GrossCulture:

13.

vogel, Changing Channels: America in

14.

Guide\ Urbana, 1992. Daniel J. Boorstin, 'Advertising and American Civilization', in Yale Brozen, ed., Adveitising

and 15.

'TV

Society,

New York,

1974, pp.

12, 23.

See Karal .\nn Marling, Ceorge Washington

and A?ne?-ican Culture, iSr6-igH6, Cambridge, .\IA, 1988, pp. 160-2. For the relationship between fine and popular art in the nineteenth century, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highhrou- Loirbrow: The

Slept Here: Colonial Revivals

and even

its

very prototype'. x\nd for most of the nineteenth centur\\ folk

George Washington looked much Rembrandt Peale oil painting as in the bowl of a souvenir spoon fi-om the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.'' The American .\rt Union flourished at mid-century under a lotten^ system whereby all members got an engraving of the expression and art were not altogether dissimilar:

the same in a

genuine

oil

painting awarded to

a single,

lucky ticket-holder.

The medium,

not the

message, was the watershel between high and low art in an emerging age of mechanical reproduction.

The media were

multiples,

made

possible bv the

new technology'

of the industrial world.

Mass

culture,

media

culture, begins in earnest with the

the other great American

fairs

of the turn of the

Columbian

century'. In

E.xposition and

Chicago,

St.

Louis,

Buffalo and San Francisco huge crowds, undifferentiated by income or learning,

gathered to celebrate progress around giant machines that wove yard upon identical

E?nergence of Cultural Hierarchy in Af/ierica,

yard of carpet, printed newspapers by the bundle and cranked out thousands of

Cambridge,

.souvenir handkerchiefs, each

iVlA, 1988.

one bearing the same likeness of the

F'ather of

His

Karal Ann Marling

174

CountT}-. Often the festi\nties took place in buildings constructed with the latest

interchangeable, factorx'-made parts but artistically disguised as temples of Imperial

Rome.

.Art

conferred dignit\- on the products of the machine. Art looked singular,

stunning, unique - in marked contrast to the

gewgaws any

tourist could take

secure in the knowledge that his pictorial handkerchief was just Hke

home,

the rest.

all

The past vs. the present. Art vs. the media. The first home-grown avant-garde movement in American painting of the twentieth centunhinged on such polarities. The artists of the so-called Ashcan School assimilated Tradition

vs.

innovation.

media iconography into their paintings

(see Fig. 2). Specifically, they represented the

amusements and the \ibrant street hfe of the urban masses - especially of children - or pictorial themes common to both craven journalism and the reformist magazine photography of Lewis Hine.'* The transgressive element in Ashcan art -the group was called 'the black revolutionan' gang' - was not its alia prima technique but its

hard-bitten, press-room topicality'. According to the experts, art in gilded frames

was supposed

to trade in loftier stuff altogether: sentiment, sensibilit}', beaut}',

eternal truths.

Until D.

W. Griffith came

to 'reform' the mo\-ies \\ith doses of Biblical historicism

and morahty, the early motion picture industry also dwelt on popular Ashcan School themes.'"

As long

as the films

mo\ies enjoyed some

OK. So was 'artists'

were

silent

and the aesthetic derived from movement,

intellectual standing as a crude folk art. Charlie

the antic, street- wise Alickey

Mouse

of the 1920s. But

had the temerit}' to suggest that the movies might actually be

art in their

own right,

reasserted (see Fig.

the distinction between

3).

In 1912

W insor AlcCay,

modern animation, lamented the chance to draw for the mo\ies. 'The coming father of

utation not by pictures in

mere media and

still life,

brilliant

2

John Sloan,

Picture Shop

Windoa; 1907. Gift

when cinema new kind of

a

real culture

was

swiftly

newspaper cartoonist and

fact that xXIichelangelo artist',

Chaplin was

Fig.

The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey; of Mrs FeUx Fuld, 1925

he predicted,

'will

never got the

make

but by drawings that are animated.''" But

his rep-

when he

tackled a serious, contemporary subject with tragic overtones in The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), the artistic merits of McCay's effort were admired chiefly by other

animators.

WTien

\\ alt

Disney wedded

1940 Fantasia, the film was a Yet, able.

critical disaster

and

throughout the 1930s, detente between

Government

places

classical

relief

where the only

art

music to the cartoon format in a financial flop.

art

and the media had seemed

programmes were bringing murals was

in the

his

form of greeting

to

pubHc

ine\it-

btiildings in

cards, calendars, picture

maga-

Fig. 3 Reginald Alarsh, 20-Cent \Ioiie, 1936. WTiitnev Museum of American Art, New York

16.

On

die entertainment media of the streets,

see

Rob

ville

Sn\der, The Ihice of the and Popular Culture in \'eii'

Cipf: laiitie-

York,

New

York, 1989. 17.

The

See Lan- Ma\-, Sarening Out the Past: and the Motion Picture

Biith of Mass Culture hidustiy, 18.

Quoted

New York, in

1980, esp. chs.

John Canemaker,

His Life and Work,

New York,

2

lllnsor

and 4. McCay:

1987, p. 134.

I

The Media and

Art

175

Thomas Hart Benton, //o/AiiooJ, 1937. Fig. 4 Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Bequest of the artis

zines and movies with elevated themes."

Under

the auspices of Associated American

Artists, a private

New York firm that sold prints by established figures through a mail-

order catalogue

at

ing Grant

Wood

for the studios.'"

media

department store

Benton was

pubhcist and

as a

prices, a

and Thomas Hart Benton a

number of prominent painters, includwent to Hollywood to work

(see Fig. 4),

Disney in reverse, peddling his painterly sendees to the

a reporter.

Thus,

it is

hardly surprising that Disney should

have hired Benton and the Surrealist Salvador Dali to work on

a sequel to Fantasia,

eventually abandoned in the fire-storm of mocker)' that greeted his presumptuous foray into

art.

After his brush with high

art,

Disney returned to the media with

a

vengeance,

becoming, arguably, the single most influential force in twentieth-century visual culDisneyland (1955) virtual realit\' took on three dimensions and viewers could literally inhabit the film or T\" show. He was the

ture. First,

first

he reconfigured the media:

of the HolH^w'ood moguls to cease

ergistic relationship

betw een one

at

hostilities

with television and develop the

medium and the other. Home viewers

s\ti-

could change

the channel ft-om a Western to a cartoon; tourists at Disneyland could stroll fi"om

Frontierland into the precincts of Fantasyland, presided over by Donald

'Alain Street U.S.A.', Disneyland,

Fig. 5

.\naheim, California, 1955

19.

See, for example, Karal .\nn .Marling, Wall-to-

Wall America:

A

Murals

Great

in the

Social Histoiy of Post-Office Depressitffi,

.Minneapolis,

1982. 20.

See of

F.rika Doss, Beutoiu Pollock, and the Politics Modernism, Chicago, 1991, esp. ch. 3.

Duck and

176

Karal Alui Marling

Mickey Mouse. The circular forms of Mickey's head constituted a \isual esperanto, on a par with the Coca-Cola logo. In the new Disney park in Florida, opened in the 1970s, Mickey, the globe and a geodesic dome were conflated into one universal symbol of benign but omnipresent wholeness.

In the past decade Disney's corporate empire has been lauded for hiring cuttingedge architects - Michael Graves, Robert A. xM. Stern, Frank Gehry-to design its

theme parks and with Disney, exploited

it

architects

who

offices.

In a real sense, however, post-modern architecture began

recognized the imagistic power of the commercial vernacular and

in Disneyland, almost twenty years before

might benefit from

ping mall, where

'real'

a closer

look

at

Robert Venturi suggested that

Las Vegas."

The contemporary

post-modern architecture on the outside cloaks

a

shop-

vernacular

may include cowboy car\^atids and whole amusement parks, can also be traced back to Main Street U.S.A. at the entrance to Disneyland (Fig. 5). In this rich stew of images, which is the medium and which the message? WTiere does the art stop and something else begin? Are malls media? Or solid, by-God things: architecture, interior that

art?

Does

it

Between

matter?

It's

ever\^where,

Americans now watch, on average, the 1950s.

all

the time, this 'whatever-it-is-ness'.

trips to the mall, after (or with) a daily

The

six

hours of

dose of the morning funny pages,

tele\'ision

even- day. But

it's

not

like

choices are staggering. Network. Cable: the all-Disney channel; old

black-and-white movies, colorized by Ted Turner; Technicolor epics re-sized and

home use. The VCR. Video games. Grandpa's home movies translated xMcLuhan would be dazzled by the sheer level of potential involvement. Zapping through the chamiels. Sound off. Sound on. EveryiJiing green, or orange. Do-it-yourself television. Mutable. Personalized. Culture at Home. Art: where the pictures and the hot stories are - Rodney King's story^, according to George HolHday's video. Pictures - mo\des - that are never quite the same twice: you can re-run the past any time, day or night, and make it better, or more colourful, or more artfnl. Take it or leave it. Go live on a mountain top. Or stay tuned for Eyewitness News at re-edited for to tape.

II.

Riots in L. A.

Fig. 6

Edward

Kieiiliulz, Six u'Clock Neiis, 1964.

Collection William X. Copley

21

.

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Leaniing From Las Vegas, revised edn., Cambridge, \W, 1977.

177

Peter Selz

Americans Abroad

In 1766 John Singleton Copley, the foremost painter of the American colonial period,

wrote to his compatriot Benjamin West in England, lamenting that in the American colonies not a single portrait was 'worthy to be called a Picture'.' Eight years later

Copley went

There he painted

to England.

Arts and spent the next

Pennsylvania for

fort)^

London

and

his masterpiece, Watson

the

who had

years as a 'British' painter. West,

left his

succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds

in 1763, eventually

Shark

was elected to the Royal Academy of

(1778; National Gallery of Art, Washington),

native

as Pres-

ident of the Royal Academy.

Copley's was not the

Thomas

last

such lament to be raised. Even

a

hundred years

later,

Cole, an artist of great spiritual aspiration, spoke regretfully of an American

public that preferred 'things not thoughts'. American artists had to cope with a con-

The work of the carpenter and the artimore highly valued than the rarefied pursuit of the arts; an egalitarian sensibilit)^ in the new republic found it hard to give special respect to artistic talent; geries of adversity in the nineteenth centur\^

san was

and an ingrained Puritan tradition regarded the sensuous aspect of the

visual arts with

suspicion. In short, a fundamental anti-intellectualism, traceable at least as far back as

Andrew Jackson, marginalized

the 1830s, the era of President

painting and sculpture.

James McNeill England and Erance pro-

In the latter part of the century three of America's foremost

Whistler, Mar\^ Cassatt and John Singer Sargent,

vided a more sympathetic

artistic

and

that

felt

intellectual

artists,

en\ironment,

as well as better

patronage, than their native country.

A generation later,

Lyonel Eeininger

He

lished himself as a painter.

when

opened

it

in

Weimar

was the

in 1919,

left

New York for Germany, where

first artist

and he remained there

In America a supportive intellectual communit)- of exist until the early years

Stieglitz

to

Avenue

Eifth

at 291

was

in

of

this century,

New

when

artists,

until

its

Bauhaus

closure in 1933.

writers and critics did not

Alfred Stieglitz established his gallery

York, a place where

a crucial cultural force in early

he estab-

to join the faculty of the

new

ideas could be exchanged.

twentieth-centun,' America, an antidote

inherent aesthetic provincialism. At the suggestion of his friend and fellow

its

photographer Edward Steichen, he began

photography

in the

1906 to show modern art

in

Photo-Secession Gallery^

at 291.

He

as well as

exhibited Rodin's boldly

unconventional drawings of nudes, never before shown anwhere, and followed them

new drawings by

with

Matisse. Then, in rapid succession, he introduced Toulouse-

Lautrec, Cezanne, Brancusi and Picasso.

In the nineteenth century Americans

gone

Rome, and

to

later to the

who went

chose Paris. There, too, they were swept up

Maurer, who

arrived around 1900, was the

and the Fauves. in his

famous

Max Weber,

class,

which was

in 1910

He

VVcst, 12

Novemhcr

\

WcCouhrcy,. Imenan, Art ,:oo-„j6o: Somrcs iind Dociuiicnts,

Knglcwooci

ClitTs, 1965,

j).

14.

/^

-

American

in contact

had they

to be influenced

by ALitisse

by Patrick Henry Bruce, Arthur B. Carles with Picasso during the incipient years of

doi/aiiier's

work

at Stieglitz's 291 gallen-.

frequented (lertrudc Stein's Saturda\- soirees

most celebrated American expatriate and

had moved to Paris

Ik-njaniin

1766; ciuotccl in lohn

now

an atmosphere of invention. Alfred

in

first

also attended

arranged an exhibition of the

Fleurus. This John Singleton Copley, IcttcAo

for their training

introduced the Spanish painter to his close friend Henri Rousseau and

Many of the Americans I.

Europe

arriving five years later, actually studied under Matisse

and Morgan Russell. Weber was

Cubism.

to

academies in Diisseldorf and Munich. But

\ n

in

de

in the rue

significant avant-gartle writer

1903 and, together with her brother Leo, acquired key paintn-

11

W

,,r-

,

1.

' ,

-^

.

1th extraordman- acumen the Stems '"^^ ^V Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and others. selected the finest new art. For almost fort)' \'ears (iertrude was an important intcl-

lyS

Pet a- Selz

lectual catalyst. Stieglitz

met her

in

1908 and

year later published her biographical

a

sketches of Alatisse and Picasso in his journal Camera Work. painter Joseph Stella

memorably described

The

Italian-.\merican

encounter with Gertrude Stein:

his

'Somehow in a little side street in Alontparnasse there was a family that had acquired some early work of Alatisse and Picasso. The lady of the house was an immense carcass austerely dressed in black. Enthroned on a sofa in the middle of the room where the pictures were hanging, with the forceful solemnity of a priestess or Sybilla, she

was examining

pitilessly all

Alarsden Hartley, a solo

at

show

Gertrude

newcomers, assuming

a well-trained artist familiar

at 291 in 1912,

Stein's salon,

high and distant pose.''

a

with the

new trends

he met the American expatriates

as well as

Alost important was his encounter with \\assily Kandinsk}"'s book Art.

Ax.

in painting,

Hartley's suggestion, an excerpt

from

it

was published

Hartley's series of abstract mystical paintings, called 'intuitive abstractions'

and

done

in

French painters.

On

the Spiritual in

Camera Work in

in Paris in 1912-13,

'spiritual illuminations', conflated

group.

He went

new

to Berlin

Franz Alarc, and had

Autumn

art

five

was that being created

Henri Bergson's

his Berlin stay.

Germany by

felt

that

the Blaue Reiter

and Alunich, made direct contact with Kandinsky and works included

Salon in Berlin in 1913, the

During

in

1913.

which he

philosophy, Kandinsk}''s art theor}' and American Indian imager\\ Hartley the most significant

had

before sailing for Europe at the age of thirt\--five. In Paris,

first

in

Herwarth

\\'alden's First

German

truly international sun-ey of avant-garde art.

Hartley combined

his

response to the

cit}''s

military'

pageantry^ with mystical si,Tnbolism in strangely emblematic compositions that

reached their cHmax in Poitrait of a Geiinan Officer (Cat. i). Its flags and militar\' insignia referred to an intimate friend who had been killed in action. Hartley achieved a tighdy knit, Cubist-derived structure

German

combined with the

vivid, intuitive

York to Bermuda, to

New New Alexico, back to Paris and Berlin, spent several years in the

south of France tr\ang to enter the

spirit

of Cezanne in Aix, returned to

the beginning of the Nazi period, and then went to

Nova

s^Ti thesis

Germany

at

Scotia before settling in his

native Alaine in 1937, where, during the last six years of his

powerful

colour of

Expressionism. After the war, restless and insecure, he travelled fi"om

life,

he accomplished a

of his previous work.

The son and grandson

of American sculptors, Alexander Calder had studied

engineering before turning to

art.

Realizing that 'Paris seemed to be the place to go',

Fig.

I

Alexander Calder working on

his Circus

(1926-32)

I

\ 2.

Joseph

John p. 29.

I.

Stella, 'Modern .Art' (MS); quoted in H. ^zwx, Joseph Stella, New York, 1971,

Americans Abroad

179

he sailed for France in 1926. For the remainder of his long career, his time and energy

were

di\'ided

between France and America. In Paris he

first

made wire

renditions of

animals and people. These he then animated to create his famous Circus (see Fig.

which attracted the attention of the Parisian

i),

art world.

Calder, inspired by Joan Miro's free organic forms and Piet Mondrian's equilibrator\^ colours,

wanted

to

make three-dimensional

versions of the

latter's

work. His

kinetic sculptures, at first driven mechanicalK^ then floating freely in space,

christened 'mobiles' by Marcel

Duchamp. Although

by experiments in kinetic sculpture by

Duchamp

78).

move

at

random,

Naum Gabo, Alan Ray and fortuitous variations. He invented

himself,

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Calder introduced infinite designs that

stirring lightly like leaves in the

Calder changed sculpture from

were

these works had been preceded

a static, solid art to

wind

(see Cat. 72, 77,

one of movement

in time.

During the 1960s and 1970s he continued making mobiles as well as 'stabiles' (so named by Jean Arp), which are monumental in scale and help define the space of their urban en\aronments (see Cat. 75). More than any other American artist of this period, 'Sandy' Calder was accepted in France, as elsewhere, as belonging among the twentieth-century masters.

Isamu Noguchi, Sunken garden for die Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Libran-, Yale Universit\-, New Haven, Connecticut, 1960-64 Fig. 2

Isamu Noguchi arrived

in Paris a year after

Calder and assisted him with the

dis-

play of the Circus. Born in Los Angeles to a Japanese poet and an American writer,

Noguchi spent much of his childhood and youth in Japan before returning to study in the US. In New York he was deeply affected by an exhibition of work by Constantin Brancusi, and in Paris the Rumanian master took him into his white studio as his assistant, initiating him into the s\inbolic meaning of pure, abstract form. In 1930 Noguchi returned to the East. He studied with the celebrated Chinese painter Chi Pai-Shih in Beijing, and in Japan he learned to work in clay, largely by studying ancient himiira sculptures. In Japanese sculpture, theatre and architecture he

beyond complexit)' which Brancusi had first instilled in his mind. Returning to New York, he became part of the incipient New York School and also began an extended association with the choreographer Martha Ciraham, found again that

'simplicit}

creating innovative stage designs.

and landscapes voyager,

(see Fig. 2),

These relate to the sculptural t()talit\- of his gardens later became a major aspect of his work. A restless

which

Noguchi worked on

sculpuiral projects in Paris, Cireece, India, Japan, Israel

and the marble mountains of

Italy, carrying out significant civic commissions and producing many designs which, though sometimes unrealized, encapsulate his humanist and visionan- thinking.

i8o

Peter Selz

Mark

Tobey,

who wns born

Midwest, also achieved

in the

Eastern and Western thought.

He

was

a

wanderer

personal synthesis of

a

mystic and, like

as well as a

Nog^chi, acquired familiarity with foreign cultures, which he incorporated into art.

At the age of twenty-eight, living

ent of Baha'i,

uniting

a faith

all

in

New York, Tbbey became

a life-long

religions. In 1923, while residing in Seattle,

his

adher-

•V V

he was

introduced to calligraphic brush painting by the young Chinese painter Teng Kuei.

With

this

mode he

'•'

felt

enabled to use his brush to open up the solid forms of W'est-

'iy

',

/

'

;.

ern art and penetrate the void of space.

Pursuing his search for visit to

China and Japan

became

proficient in

a

realm beyond the rational mind, he undertook

some time in Tobey taught

in 1934, spent

sii??/!

painting.

a

Zen monaster)'

at

throughout the 1930s. There he exchanged ideas with writers and other

marrving Eastern and Western

in

Tobey began

In the early 1940s

white and off-white

lines.

a crucial

Kyoto and

Dartington Hall in Devon

such as Aldous Huxley, Arthur Waley, Pearl Buck and Rupi Shankar,

engaged

in

intellectuals,

who were

/

"!."!

also

ideas.

his all-over abstractions, often using a

mesh of

In these works he rejected formal composition, activating 'r'

the total surface of the painting as an energized continuum (see Fig.

Willard Gallery in

New York in

1944, they heralded the

of Jackson Pollock. Never fully recognized in

Orient

as well as in Paris,

Basle.

ciated

.'

i-

'.-

i,v:

at the

much larger all-over canvases

New York, Tobey was esteemed in the

first

to Ait infonnel and American painter since \Miistler to be honoured

\enice Biennale. Tvvo years

at the

Shown

where he seemed closely related

Tachism. In 1958 he became the with a gold medal

3).

later,

he settled permanently

' ,

/

in

Here again one notices an intricate pattern of acceptance and rejection assowith the phenomenon of 'fleeing America' -whether to Europe or across the

Mark Tobey, White Night, 1942. Seattle Museum; Gift of Mrs Berthe Ponc\- Jacobson

Fig. 3 .Art

Pacific.

For a time French critics did indeed suggest the term 'Ecole du Pacifique' encompass the work of Tobey, Morris Graves and Sam Francis. Born in Oregon 1910 and brought up

man in

in Seattle,

Graves

first

encountered the Orient in 1928,

Merchant iMarine. Returning

to in

as a sea-

immersed himself in the Asian art collection at the Seattle Art Museum and began to study Zen philosophy and aesthetics. He worked closely with Tobey, whose calligraphic 'white the United States

to Seattle, he

writing' Graves adopted for his s\Tnbolic renderings of 'spirit birds' (see Fig. 4),

sacred vessels and pine-trees.

He

shared involvement with

Zen with

his friend, the

composer John Cage, who was greatly influenced by Graves's evocative and mysterious paintings and wrote a series of 'dance chants', or word portraits, of the painter. For most of his life Graves migrated from place to place, always finding spots of seclusion - a rock on Fidalgo Island in Puget Sound or a small isle in Count)' Cork -

whence he occasionally stillness in

Sam

Zen

travelled to

Japan and India.

finds a response in Graves's use of the

The emphasis on

meditative

forms of nature.

Francis went from his native California to Paris, where he became

a \ital link

He was also drawn to the 1957. On first arri\ing in Tok)'0,

between Tachism and Abstract Expressionism.

making the experienced

home. In

first

many

a sense

\isits to

oi deja vu,

Japan in

a 'return to the non-rational',

turn, the Japanese, with their traditional

tive experience,

The Japanese citing a

of

new

\iew of art

responded almost immediately to Francis's

artist, like

and

felt

ven'

as a primarily

work

Orient, -•'5fl^

Francis

much

at

medita-

(see Cat. 121, 122).

the Abstract Expressionist, sees the working process as

eli-

consciousness that becomes the work, and Francis found himself closely

attuned to Japanese aesthetics.

A

sojourn in Europe - almost obligator)' for American

World War - became

less

States with the rise of Nazism.

uge for many eminent emigre Breton,

Marc

Chagall,

artists

before the Second

imperative as their European confreres came to the United

By the mid- 1940s artists,

the United States was providing ref-

including Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Andre

Duchamp, Max

Ernst, Lyonel Feininger, Stanley William

Hayter, Richard Lindner, Jacques Lipchitz, Andre Masson, Roberto Matta, Miro,

Moholy-Nagy, Mondrian, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Amedee Ozenfant, Kurt Seligman, Yves Tanguy and Ossip Zadkine (see Fig. 5). Some of these were to take up permanent residence.

Fig.

4

Morris Graves, Blind

Museum

of Modem Art,

Bird, 1940.

Xew York;

The

Purchase

Americans Abroad

i8i

Photograph taken on the occasion of the

Fig. 5

exhibition Gallerj^

'.\rtists in Exile' at

New York,

(front row)

1942

Roberto

.

the Pierre Matisse

From

left to right:

Alatta, Ossip Zadkine,

Yves

Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Femand Leger; (back row) Andre Breton, Piet Mondrian,

Andre Masson, Amedee Ozenfant, Jacques Lipchitz, Pavel Tcheletchew, Kurt Seligman,

^Eugene Berman

TU^o

German

painters,

Hans Hofrnann and Josef Albers, became

ant art teachers in America.' artists to

There

really

most importseemed no longer any need for American the

go abroad. Nevertheless, they continued to make their pilgrimages to

Europe, chiefly to Paris. Second World War veterans could study there at government expense, and many enrolled at the Academic des Beaux-Arts, the Academic de la Grande Chaumiere and at the ateliers of Fernand Leger and Zadkine. More than three hundred young American painters and sculptors went to Paris during the 1950s. Among them were a good many African Americans who, by moving to France, escaped the discrimination and racism at home while recei\nng more attention and

Fig. 6

Romare Bearden, 777? Prevalence of Ritual: Hirshhom .Museum and Sculpture

Baptmii, 1964.

Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,

DC

3.

Hofinnnn taught then

at his

own

at

Berkeley

school in

in

New

1930 and 1932, York from 1933

Mountain from 1933 to 1949, then was Chairman of the Department of Design at \alc from to 195H. .\lbers first taught at Black (College,

1950 to 1958. 4.

Romare Bearden,

inter\iew with

I

lenr\ Cihent,

June 1968; .\rchi\es of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

i82

Peter Selz

None, to be sure, equalled the phenomenal success and the honours accorded Henrys Ossawa Tanner, who had lived as an expatriate in Paris from 1895 until his death in 1937. Between the wars a substantial 'Negro art colony' had been established in Paris, though the artists were less successfril than their celebrated jazz-musician friends. Among the African American artists in Paris better exhibition opportunities.

was the widely respected Beauford Delaney, who exhibited

after the 1950s

tigious Paris galleries.

and Henr\' Miller,

as well as

Romare Bearden, ity

a vital

an older comrade to the American painters.

presence in that blossoming of African American creativ-

between the wars known

charge from the

US Army

many newcomers, found whelming:

'[I]

at pres-

He was a close friend of the writers James Baldwin, Jean Genet

as the

in 1945.

Harlem Renaissance, went to There he was befriended by

Paris after his dis-

Brancusi, but, like

the cultural richness and the diversit}" of Parisian

was so absorbed

other, that I could never get

in seeing

and walking

around to doing any

in Paris

painting.'^

life

over-

from one end to the

Only

after returning to

New York did Bearden create his distinctive, syncopating photo-collages (see Fig.

6),

empathizing with Afro-American culture, and achieve widespread recognition.

The younger generation of African Americans in Paris included Bob Thompson, who did some of his finest post-Abstract Expressionist figurations during his years in the city, before mo\'ing on to Rome and an early death. Barbara Chase-Riboud was given a solo exhibition of her exquisite sculptures, which combine metal and

man shows

in Paris, at

fibre, at

The sculptor Sam Gilliam had one of his first one-

the Alusee d'Art Aloderne in 1974.

Darthea Speyer's

gallerv', in

Howardina Pindell

1970;

w^as

introduced to the art world at the Paris Biennale of 1975; and Ra\Tnond Saunders executed many of his mysterious, paradoxical collages during extended sojourns in the French capital.

When

Ellsw^orth Kelly (Fig. 7)

Max

(1946-48),

mode

Beckmann's

Colmar

licas

a student at the

Boston

Museum

of Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Alexei Jawlensk}' and, above

On

informed Kelly's early work.' to

was

School

had the greatest impact on him. The expressionist

\-isit

all,

Picasso,

France in 1948 he immediately travelled

arrival in

to see Griinewald's Isenhewi Altarpiece.

Only when he began

creating rep-

of objects in his surroundings was Kelly able to break away from his Beckman-

nesque figurative idiom. By the

1940s he was creating

late

flat

paintings based

on

road-markers, pavements, windows, ground-plans and walls.

He

objects - or, as he called them, 'already mades' - in a

akin to photography;

manner

the geometric shapes were located and arranged in the

artist's

transformed real

eye.

Kelly was in contact with the two groups of Geometric Abstractionists in Paris, Abstraction-Creation and Circle

et

Caire, and

became well acquainted with Alichel Seu-

phor, the leading spokesman of these artists and a follower of Mondrian. ally

wrote to Kelly, voicing his opinion

you're going to be the

Magnelli, but

more

best'.^'

that,

De

Stijl

'amongst Mondrian's serious successors,

Fig. 7

Ellsworth Kelly in the Hotel de

Bourgogne,

Paris,

1949

meeting with Arp in 1950. Kelly was more

Laws of Chance than towards

and neo-Constructi\ist

art.

In

fact,

did during his Paris years, Colours for a Large Wall (Fig. its

eventu-

Kelly encountered Georges Vantongerloo and Alberto

significant w^as his

inclined towards Arp's investigations of the

discourse of

He

the rational

while the foremost work he

8),

had

a systemic appearance,

organization and choice of colours were entirely arbitran^ This large painting

(eight-feet square)

w as

in great contrast to the salon-size paintings

Geometric and Tachist painters scale

alike.

At

this time,

done in Paris by

Kelly was unaware of the large

on which such Americans as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still in New^ York, where he went in 1954 after ha\ing seen the cata-

had been working logue of an Italy,

Ad Reinhardt

exhibition.

which traditionally attracted American

the post-w^ar period. William entire creative

with

Rome

as

artists,

continued to draw painters in

in \ enice in

1948 and spent almost his

life on Italian soil. In 1952 Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, their base, travelled throughout Italy and to North Africa. In Rome

Rauschenberg continued to Alberto Burri's studio, collages,

Congdon arrived

his

work

in

photography and collage

where he saw the

may have confirmed him

latter's

(see Fig. 9).

His

visit

eloquent, stained, rough burlap

in his exploration of hea\y, encrusted

and ravaged

Fig. 8

1951.

Ellsworth Kelly, Colours for a Large Wall, of Modem .-Vrt, Xew York;

The Museum

Gift of the artist

Americans Abroad

Robert Rauschenberg, Double-exposure photograph of himself and Cy Twombly with the Horses of San Marco, Venice, 1952 Fig. 9

surfaces. Burri arranged for Rauschenberg's exhibition at the Galleria dell'Obehsco in 1953 (see Fig. 10),

given a solo Robert Rauschenberg working on his Peisoiial Fetishes, Rome, c. 1953. Photograph probably taken by Cy Twombly Fig. ID

183

Having

show

where Burri himself had shown

at the Stable Galler\^ in

lived in Spain,

North

a

year earHer; Burri, in turn, was

New York in

1954.

Africa and Italy, Tvvombly (Fig. 11) settled in

Rome

permanently in 1957. His paintings (see Cat. 142-5), with their scribbles and clusters, their cursive skeins, smudges and scratches, may not be immediately accessible in their evocation of ancient myths, their allusions to specific loci, their references to Italian

Renaissance painters, but these concerns are fundamental."

The

tides of the

paintings evoke ancient deities and allude both to Virgil and Hesiod and to Shelley

and Keats,

who had

also

been steeped

Roland Barthes remarked, function in order to

Fig. II

Cy Tvvombly

in

Ellsworth Kelly, telephone conversation with the author, 20 May 1992.

6.

Michel Seuphor, letter to Ellsworth Kelly, 21 October 1953; quoted in Ellrdonh Kelly: The Years in France, ig^8-i(^^^, Washington and Munich, 1992, p. 33, n. 16. Katharina Schmidt, 'The Way to Arcadia: Thcjughts on

Twombly s

in

Mediterranean culture. These

maze

initiated into the work.**

in

which we have

A carefiil

to retrace

tides, as

our steps

reading of Twombly's images

Pompeii, 1957

5.

7.

become

like a

Myths and Images

Paintings', in

Cy

in Ca"

I louston, recognizes that 'the entire field of Mediterranean culture - its myths, its history,

1992, p.

Tivoinhly,

12,

its art, its

acquired

poets, painters, a

and sculptors -

constantly growing, changing and

deepening, yet abiding significance I'lwombly sj life and work'. H.

Roland Bardies, 'The Twombly,

New York,

Wisdom

1979,

of

p. 15.

in

.\rt', in C)-

Fig. 12

R. B. Kitaj,

The Ohio Gang, 1964. The .Museum of .Modern .\rt. New York; Phillip Johnson Fund

Peter Selz

184

permits the viewer to penetrate an apparent chaos to arrive at their inner silence and the opening of a

window on Twombly,

R. B. Kitaj, Hke

His

multiple allusions,

with references to

Born

man

art, literature and histor\\ on \irtuoso drawing, is filled with discontinuous allegories, questions and unexpected relationships, Walter Benjamin, T.S.Eliot, Franz Kafka, Erwin Panofsk}" and

collage-like pictorial

Ezra Pound,

to the classical past.

highly cognizant of

(see Fig. 12), based

mass culture.

as well as to

in Cleveland,

is a

world

Kitaj, too, has led the life

Ohio, he was adopted by

a X'iennese Jew^,

of an expatriate.

brought up in upstate

New York, joined the Merchant Marine, sen-ed in the US Army, studied at Cooper Union in Xew York, the -\kademie in \lenna, the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and the Royal College of

.Art in

London.

He

emigre in London and considers himself a

decided finally to remain

member of the

he invented. At the same time, he sees himself

as the

as a

permanent

'School of London', a term

perpetual outsider, the

Jew

in

the Diaspora," the artist in exile.

German and find

a

culture, at Stunde Null (zero hour) after the war, required time to recover

new

voice.

The

German government resurrected the D-A\D (DeiitGerman Academic Exchange Service) to bring art-

\\ est

scher Akade7}nscher Aiistaiischdienst; ists

from abroad

centre of the

Lawrence

arts.

to the insular

Ferlinghetti,

Feldman and

cit\'

Among American

a great

of Berlin, to transform

Dick Higgins and

many \-isual

it

into a cosmopolitan

grant recipients were the poets Gregor\' Corso,

Emmet

\Mlliams, the composer

Li Berlin Allan Kaprow, as part of a Flux-us

acti\'it\',

erected Siveet IVall in 1970 with

the help of the American 'concrete poet' Dick Higgins and the

K. H.Hodicke. dox.

The

wall enclosed nothing and separated

During the 1960s and 1970s many American

worked

in

Germany (see

Morton

artists.

no one,

German

artists associated

Fig. 13), which, like the rest of

painter

a S}Tnbol of para-

with Fluxus

Western Europe, supported

more than the L'S. Other D.AAD grant recipients were the h\-perrealist sculptor Duane Hanson; Charles Simonds, the creator of miniature archaizing such

acti\'ities far

ensembles; and Colette,

who

transformed her innovative and intimate li\ing en-

\-ironments into sets and costumes for the Deutsche Oper, Berlin. George Rickey

Fig. 13

1962.

Phil

From

Comer,

Piario Activities,

left to right:

Emmett

Wiesbaden,

Williams,

George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Benjamin Patterson. Photo © H. Rekort

(unidentified),

In 1989 Kitaj published the

first

Dinspora

Manifesto in London, in the prologue to which he states: 'I ofter this manifesto to Jews and

non-Jews

alike in the (fairly) sure

knowledge

that there be a Diasporic painting.'

.\mericans Abroad

accepted a

DAAD

stipend in 1968. His

moving

sculptural forms

made of

typologies - respond to the motions of nature and are

gineered with mathematical precision. Rickey faber M'hose

work embodies random

and collector of Constructivist

art.

is

both

artist

order. Significantly, he

In 1964

(when

this

- of

is

iSs;

many

a great

bright steel, en-

and engineer, the

ho7f/o

also a student, historian

w riter was Commissioner

for

American Art for 'documenta III') Rickey was invited to install a 35-foot-high sculpture of two tapering stainless steel blades which oscillated in parallel rh\^hms in ft-ont of the Fridericianum in Kassel. This work confirmed his reputation in Germany.

Over ing for

I

a

its

period of some twent\' years, Rickey spent half of every year in Berlin, enjoy'intelligence, attraction

permanent

placed in

installations

fi-ont

ments perfecdy grant.

and energy'.

Among

his

many German commissions

the precisely equiposed Four Squares in a Square (1969),

of Mies van der Robe's Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which in

its classical,

Edward Kienholz has

DAAD

is

it

comple-

balanced symmetry.

also spent at least half of every year in Berlin since his 1973

His tableaux vivants are biting critiques of contemporary

raise disturbing existential questions.

society,

Kienholz was one of the few American

and

artists

whose work commented on the disgrace of the Vietnam W^ar; his narratives of reproach were never popular in iVew York. In Berlin he produced his Volksewpfangers series (see Fig. 14), the cheap old radio receivers of the Nazi period used to listen to Fig. 14

Edward Kienholz, The

C/i^c

(Volksempfangers series), 1975. Private collection

broadcasts of Fascist propaganda.

Now,

instead of emitting the voices of Hitler or

Goebbels, they resound with Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen. interventions by a foreigner in

the

German home,

German

history.

histor\',

Volks empflingers

were

original context in

they were exhibited in Berlin's Nationalgalerie in 1977, producing

both controversy and acclaim. By using history's

on

The

Taken out of their

relics as his objects,

Kienholz reflects

but he also comments on the media in general and their control of our

lives.

Kienholz, coming from a small provincial town in the American penter, a

bricoleiir,

largely self-taught as an artist, a person

recognition in his

embody much of

own

country^

Northw est -

- found acclaim only abroad. His

the enduring impetus that has directed

life

and work

many American

search in European and Asian culture for aesthetic resonances as well as for sense of artistic tradition and

its

ramifications.

a car-

who has never achieved full artists to a

deeper

i87

Thomas

Kellein

the Sheer Size:

It's

European Responses

It

to

American Art

was American products - 'movies, chewing gum, check jackets, Coca-Cola' -

Second World War, came

after the

Central Europe. In the early 1920s States

to

form

fine arts,

art in

and films fi-om the United

Europe and enriched

by contrast, had remarkably

Marcel Duchamp, the French-American

that,

kind of cultural substitute in parts of

jazz, literary fiction

had exerted an influence on modern

and Berlin. American

a

artist

little

who went

to

in Paris

life

effect until 1958.

New York during the

World War, established himself thereafter as an impresario for the development of an infrastructure among private collectors, gallery owners, artists and museums. After forming the Societe Anonym e with Man Ray and Katherine Dreier in 1920 and promoting the importation of works of art from such sources as Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm gallery, the Bauhaus in Weimar and the studio of Kurt Schwitters, he acted in New York as a mentor to young artists, whom he encouraged to First

1

See Lucius Grisebach, 'Stationen amerikanischer Kunst in Europa nach 1945', in Dieter

Honisch and Jens Christian Jensen,

Ame?ikanische Kunst von 1945 bis heute: Ktinst der USA in ewopHischai Sammhingeji, 2

Cologne, 1976, p. 9. See the artists' contributions in Anne d'Hamoncourt and K}Tiaston McShine, eds., Marcel Diichamp, exhibition catalogue, New York, Museum of Modem Art, and Philadelphia

Museum

See Craig Adcock, 'Marcel Mittier zwischen Europa

Duchamp

als

und Amerika',

in

Europa/A?nerika: Die Geschichte einer kiinstlei-ischen

Faszination

catalogue, Cologne,

seit

Museum Ludwig,

1986,

however, of the 1947 exhibition 'Large Scale Paintings' at The Museum of Modern Art, which, in addition to Guernica,

Modem

undertaken. Accounts of the so-called

New

York School generally derive the 'big canvas' from a stylistic logic inherent in modem art

Monet and Mondrian

or

condemn

it

Ad Reinhardt absolutized tendency with his 'art-as-art' dogma: 'The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing'; Barbara Rose, ed., Art-as-Art: The Wittingly or not, this

Ad Reinhardt, New York,

1975, p. 53. In the exhibition field, the

tendency was expressed, above kunst', a

same

by 'Westshow subtitled 'Contemporary Art all,

since 1939'; Laszlo Cilozer, ed., Westkunst: Zeitgenossische

Kunst

seit i()^aris

-V. •^-'

-^i.

13

Mas

Ray, Marcel Diichamp iiARLKs

Demuth,

/ Saii' the

Ihc Metropolitan

Figure 5

cm (35'/: x 30 Museum of Art, W\i

Oil on cardboard, 90 x 76

///

(iohl,

1928

in.)

York;

:1ic Alfrcil Sticglit/ C'ollcction,

1949

46

Charles Demuth,

Love, Love, Love:

Oil on panel, 51 x 53

cm

(20 x 20V4

Homage

in.)

Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid

to

Geitrnde Stein, 1928

47

Charles Df.muth, Oil on composition C^ollcction ot

Buildings, Lancaster,

l)oarci,

61 x 51

cm

1930

(24 x 20

Whitney Museum of Auicrican

in.)

Art,

New

York;

(lift ot

an anon\ nious ilonor

Hb^

48

Stuart Davis, Oil,

Cigarette Papers, 1921 bronze paint and graphite pencil on canvas,

48.5 X 35.5

The

cm

(19 X 14 in.)

Alenil Collection,

Houston

49

Stuart Davis,

Odol, 1924

Oil on canvas-hoard, 61 x 45.5

Andrew

I

.

Crispo Collection,

cm

New

(24 x 18

^brk

in.)

50

Stuart Davis, Lucky

Strike,

Oil on paper-board, 45.5 x 61

1924

cm

(18 x 24 in.)

Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Washington, DC;

Museum

Purchase, 1974

Institution,

51

Cuarlv.»Sheeler, Upper Ded\ 1929 Oil on canvas, 74 x 56.5

cm

(zy x 22 'A

in.)

Fogg Art Museum, I larvard University Art Museums, Louise E. Bettens Fund

Clamhritlge,

MA;

52

Charles

SHEELt.R, Skysa-ijpers (Offices), 1922

Oil on canvas, 51 x 33

The

cm

Phillips Collection,

(20 x

13 in.)

Washington,

DC

53

Charles Sheeler,

Vini'

Oil on canvas, 121 x 92

Museum

cm

ofNrd' Yofk, 1931 (47 'A x 36 'A in.)

of Fine Arts, Boston;

The Hayden

Collection, 35.69

54

Charles Sheeler,

Classic Landscape, 1931

Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 81.5

Collection of the

cm

Mr and Mrs

(25 x 32

in.)

Barney A. Kbsworrh Foundation, St Louis

55

Joseph Stella,

Factories at

Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 92

Collection of The

cm

Night - Nrcv Jersey, 1929

(29 x 3674 in.)

Newark Museum; Purchase

1936,

Thomas

L.

Raj-mond Bequest Fund

56

JosKiMi SiELLA, A?/icnaiii Liiiidsatpc, 1929 Oil on ainvas. 200. > x 100 cm (yy x ^y'A in.) (iollccrion

Wnlkc/ Art Center, Minneapolis;

(lift

of the

I

.H.

Walker Foundation, 1957

J

57

Edward Hopper,

Drugstore, igz cm (29 x 40

Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 101.5

Museum

of Fine Arts, Boston;

in.)

The Bequest

of John T. Spaulding, 48.564

58

KmvARD

noi>PFR, 4,'/^ow^/, 1927

Oil on canvas, 71.5 x yi.5

Des Moines Art

(Center

cm

(28 x 36

Permanent

in.)

(Collection, 1958.2;

Purcliased with funds from the iMJimindson

,\rt

I-ouiidation, Inc.

59

Edward Hopper, Frow

Williamsburg Bridge. 1928

cm (29 x 43 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Xew York; George Oil on canvas, 74 x 109

A.

Heam

Fund, 1937

6o

Edward

I

Ioppfr,

Enom

Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 91.5

Sheldon Memorial Art

K M.

in

cm

New

Yoi-k\

(29 x 36

(laller)-,

1932

in.)

LniversiU' of Nebraska, Lincoln;

Hall Collection, 1936.II.-166

6i

Edward Hopper,

Conference at Night, 1949

Oil on canvas, 70 x 102

cm

(27'/: x

40

in.)

Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas;

The Roland

P.

Murdock

Collection

62

Edward Hopper,

Pennsylvania Coal Town, 1947

Oil on canvas, 71 x 101.5

The

cm

(28 x

40

in.)

Butler Institute of American Art, \bui;ij town, v)I

I

63

Edward Hopper,

Hotel by a Railroad, 1952

Oil on canvas, 79 x 102

cm

(31 'A x 4o'/4 in.)

Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966

Institution,

Washington,

DC;

64

Joseph Cornell, .-^ Drcisi/iiT Roo7?i for Gille, 1939 Mixed media box construction, ^8x22 x 17 cm (15 x 8'/: Richard L. Fcigcn,

New

\'()rk

x 6V-t in.)

Joseph Cornell, Greta Garbo, c. 1939 Mixed media box construction, 33.5 x 24 x Richard L. Fei^en,

66

7.5

cm

(13'/:

Xew York

Joseph Cornell, Victorian Parlour (Paolo and Francesca), 1942 Mixed media box construction, 32 x 24 x 7.5 cm (12'/: X 9'/! x 3 Richard L. Feigen, New York

in.)

Constellation

x 9'/: x 3 in.)

67

JosKPii C^ORNKi.i., S(uip Bubble Set, 1940; replica, 1952

Wooden I'lic

An

box with glass and ohjecls, ^4.^ Institute ot (Ihicatjo; Siirieon

li.

x

48. 5

cm

(r^/:

V\'illianis l-und,

x ly in.)

1953. 199

68

Joseph Cornell, LEgypte de Mile Cleo de Merode Cours Elhnentaire d'Histoire naturelle (The Egypt of Mile. Cleo de Merode, Elementary Course in Natural History), 1940 Mixed media box construction, 27 x 18.5 x 12 cm (loV: x y'A x 4V4 in.) Richard L. Feigen,

New Yorlc

69

JosKPH Cx)rni:ll,

Uiititli'cl

{CiTAnd Hotel des lies d'Or), 1952

media box construction, 27 x 15 x 8 cm (iiilcrie K.iricn (ncxc, (ioloirnc and I'aris iVIixcd

(10'/: x

6 x

^A

in.)

70

Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Hotd de I'EtGile), 1953-54 Mixed media box construction, 51.5 x 36 x 12.5 cm (2o'A x 1474 Galerie Karstcn Grevc, Cologne and Paris

x 5 in.)

.'7i

JosKPH

C>()RNKi.i,, t/w^/V/f^

Mix'cd nicciia

l)()x

(Diirer Boy), 195^

construction, 52.5 x ^4

(2o'/-i X 13'/: X 4'/4 in.)

Private c()llecti(