INTRODUCTION 7 ON ART IN AMERICA 1908–10 19 TOWARDS A NEW AND MODERN AMERICAN ART 1910–14 49 THE ADVANCE TO THE NEW 1914–18 89 THE WORLD CHANGED FOREVER 1919–29 113 NO RETREAT: ADVANCES IN MODERN AMERICAN ART THE 1930S 147 MODERN ART MARCHES ON MAIA_pp1–144_Chapters1234.indd 4 09/11/2015 12:04 THE 1940S 185 A NEW WORLD ORDER THE 1950S 241 A NEW DEPTH IN AMERICAN ART THE 1960S 295 FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE NOTES 334 BIBLIOGRAPHY 342 INDEX 344 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 352 MAIA_pp1–144_Chapters1234.indd 5 30/10/2015 15:39 INTRODUCTION: ON ART IN AMERICA This book is a history – one of the many possible histories that could be written – of the years 1908 to 1968, the richest, most dynamic period of American art. It surveys the best of modern art in America made by four generations of exceptionally talented artists spanning the early years of the twentieth century to the late 1960s. Sometimes, familiar pictures will be examined in new contexts; at other times, little or virtually unknown works will be explored, all standing side by side, not always as equals, but all worthy of respect and attention. In 1970 Barnett Newman said: ‘about 25 years ago … painting was dead … I had to start from scratch as if painting didn’t exist.’1 But he was failing to acknowledge his debt to the American artists who had come before him. He was not the only one to think in this way. As art in the United States gained international attention after 1945, earlier American art was cast off by critics and curators as a kind of demented uncle, in favour of establishing a more elevated pedigree, a celebrated cast of exalted Europeans such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. No doubt these Europeans were crucial, but more was owed to American art prior to 1945 than anybody understood, or cared to admit – not to mention the Mexican artists who had played such a vital role in America during the 1930s and 1940s. This continuity has been missed, largely because historians, curators and critics have been slow to value, and to study in any depth, the history of early modernism in America.2 They have also been reluctant to identify the best of its art; the reputations of too many secondary and tertiary artists have clung on for too long, clouding the waters. American – and all modern – art has had a diffcult time determining just who its best artists are, preferring instead to affix artists to the numerous movements and the most recent spectacles. An important principle in this book is therefore to forget movements and concentrate on the artists, to look closely and carefully at their art, engaging it on its own terms, and examining the connections between them. On Art in America 7 MAIA_pp1–144_Chapters1234.indd 7 09/11/2015 12:04 Study of the early modernist years languished until the 1960s, while post-1945 art attracted wide and ever-increasing attention in America. Only recently have we come to see the fullness of early modernism, or the continuity with earlier American art, so that our sense of that history has become fragmented and incomplete – and often inaccurate. Now, as a result of new and better scholarship in recent years, we know much more about earlier modernism in America, so that we counter and can tear down this wall – the strict boundary of 1945. We can and should understand American art, as diverse as it has been, as part of an ongoing and connected phenomenon with common roots, themes and styles. The primary aim in this book is to develop a sense of integration of all facets of American art, and to stress the continuities and connections within it during these years, all but overlooked until now. For the first time, essential aspects of the history of modernism in America usually treated piecemeal, and seldom if ever connected, will be thoroughly integrated. It is often claimed that a major influence on this understanding of modernism was the negative views of pre-war American art and the promotion of Abstract Expressionism as an isolated phenomenon, by critic Clement Greenberg, and to a lesser extent the opinions of Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who wrote in 1933 about the ‘problem’ of American art.3 Greenberg did not give earlier American modernism the sustained thought he gave to European art, thus contribut- ing to the sense of subsequent triumph after 1945, but his admiration for the modernist painter Alfred Henry Maurer should stand as one indication that his supposed disregard of American modernism is a distortion of what he actually said and wrote. He also had high praise for John Marin, among perhaps ten Americans whose work could hold up to his severe judgements.4 Indeed, he wrote in 1948 that if Marin were not the best painter in the country, then you had to ask who was;5 and that same year he stated that ‘since Mondrian no one has driven the easel picture quite so far away from itself ... Since Marin – with whom Pollock will in time be able to compete for recognition as the greatest American painter of the twentieth century – no other American artist has presented such a case.’6 The talents of Pollock and Marin led him to conclude that ‘the main premises of western art have at last migrated to the United States.’7 It is certainly true, however, that as America emerged as an undisputed world power after 1945, critics, curators and artists sought a top-of-the line pedigree for the new art. The American modernists such as Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove, who had established a level of accom- plishment through their practices that presaged many of the post-1945 developments, were geographically scattered – O’Keeffe in New Mexico, Dove in Long Island and Marin in Maine – with no available critical mass to assert their presence. They were mostly unassuming and following their own course. This would not do for a now triumphant art leading the world, but these artists manifested fascinating connections with the younger Americans that link the generations in important ways, rarely explored until now. It is to these artists that this book pays particular attention. We teach modern art as a series of radical innovations introduced by ever-younger artists, but we forget that the older artists keep on working, adding immeasurably to the passing decades, often doing their best art in their old age. Think of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Monet, Matisse and others; to this, in America, add Marin, Dove, Stuart Davis, Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, all of whose late works are nothing less than glorious. Figures like Winslow Homer and others in their late years have produced some of the Western world’s most deeply felt, 8 Modern Art in America MAIA_pp1–144_Chapters1234.indd 8 02/10/2015 14:11 intensely moving painting and sculpture. These artists remind us that art moves beyond any rigid chronological boundaries, as we shall see throughout this narrative, and it is essential to understand the multiple layers of significant art being made at any given time. It was not until another generation had appeared, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that the earlier moderns could be appreciated and acknowledged by the emerging artists, as, for example, in the case of the respect paid to Dove by Frank Stella,8 or to Davis by Donald Judd.9 A good part of this continuity derives from the later work done by pre-Abstract Expressionist artists such as Davis, Marin and O’Keeffe after the generational changing of the guard in 1945. They were artists of the 1950s and 1960s as much as, say, Mark Rothko, Hofmann and Stella were. Their late work was often the very best they achieved in their lives, and we cannot ignore it if we are to understand the full depth of first-rate, important post-1945 work, which extends far beyond Abstract Expressionism alone. Earlier American art was often dismissed as provincial, since its themes were frequently American and idiosyncratic, but it is this quirky subject matter and raw power that make these compelling works of art. ‘Provincial’, of course, is used to suggest not of the capital, and therefore not as good. But provincial truly means having its own unique qualities, derived from a specifc place and time. It is the art of the country, not of the court, and this might very well be taken as a definition of the nineteenth century and early modernism in America. Many artists early and late, such as David Smith, lauded such art, praising it for its absence of French polish,10 its directness and authenticity, as when Stella said he ‘tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.’11 The nation’s founding fathers, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams and all the others were provincials, but they were geniuses, and being apart from the centre enabled them to think and imagine anew, and thus to bring into being the greatest document the Western world has seen – flawed, yes, but one that gave birth to a new country of unsurpassed possibilities. So too with art: uniquely American art – such as the architecture of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, still one of the greatest monuments in this country; the Hudson River School; the home-grown Cubism of Davis and the mesmerizing black paintings of Stella – could develop by virtue of its belief in itself, and the places from which it came.