The Visual Arts in Post-1945 America

POS7 1/3/02 03:28 PM Page 113 7 The Visual Arts in Post-1945 America ERIKA DOSS In 1949 art historian Oliver Larkin ended his Pulitzer Prize-winning survey, Art and Life in America, with this optimistic statement: “Nowhere . is there more brilliant artistic technique, more latent creative talent, than here” (Larkin, 1949, p. 478). Larkin’s paeans to America’s cultural exceptionalism were not atypical in the imme- diate post-World War II era. Indeed, in 1948, influential critic Clement Greenberg proclaimed “how much the level of American art has risen in the last five years, with the emergence of new talents so full of energy and content as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, David Smith.” “The main premises of Western art,” he added, “have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial produc- tion and political power” (Greenberg, 1948, p. 215). For many historians and critics, the second half of the twentieth century has meant the cultural and economic dominance of America’s visual arts. Notions of cultural nationalism, first championed in the 1910s and 1920s and supported during the Great Depression by various New Deal arts programs, remained strong in the imme- diate postwar years. A steady progression of new American art styles, from Pollock’s postwar brand of Abstract Expressionism to later movements such as Neo-Dada, Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptual art, Feminist art, and Neo-Expressionism, whetted crit- ical appetites, fed historical understandings of native creativity, and piqued art market interests, nationally and internationally. If European strains of modern art, especially those of French avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Matisse, had previously commanded the attention of collectors and curators, the post-World War II era saw a surge of interest in an American avant-garde, and American culture in general. By mid-century, New York had clearly replaced Paris as the world capital of modern art – the culmination of aesthetic, social, and economic trends decades in the making – and modern art had become widely understood as “American” art. During the 1940s, many universities added courses in American art to their curriculum; a decade later, the first dissertations in American art and “the systematic filling of academic and museum positions with Ph.D.s in American art history began to take place” (Johns, 1984, p. 342). In 1951, the first training center specifically focused on the study of American art and culture was established at the Henry Francis Dupont Winterthur Museum (Delaware); in 1952, the editors of Partisan Review organized a benchmark symposium, “Our Country and Our Culture”; in 1954, the Metropol- E itan Museum of Art mounted the twenty-four-gallery exhibition, Two Centuries of POS7 1/3/02 03:28 PM Page 114 114 ERIKA DOSS American Painting; in 1956, Time magazine championed American art in an eight- page cover story (Stich, 1987, p. 8); in 1958, the Museum of Modern Art circulated a major survey of contemporary art, The New American Painting, throughout Europe. Even at the end of what was termed the “American century,” American art remained triumphant: celebrated in the much-touted 2000 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial and commanding new art market records in gallery sales and auctions. Surveys of American art, from Oliver Larkin’s landmark historiography (Wallach, 2001) to texts by art historians (Wilmerding, 1976; Taylor, 1979; Baigell, 1984; W. Craven, 1994; Bjelajac, 2000; Doss, 2002) and critics (Rose, 1967; Hughes, 1997), detail the evolution of art styles and important cultural moments. Yet many accounts of post-1945 American art have been shaped by “histories” outside the academy: by critics and theorists who wrote for art journals and magazines; by museum curators who organized exhibitions; and by artists who found their voice in manifestos and interviews. In the years after World War II, American art emerged, evolved, and was repeatedly redefined in artists’ studios, galleries, museums, and classrooms, and by institutions such as the College Art Association (CAA, the primary professional organization for art teachers and art historians in higher education, numbering 14,000 members in 1997). The art press and mainstream media played major roles in articulating the artistic agenda, shaping cultural tastes, and contributing to larger public discourses about American art. Moreover, since the mid-1970s, the historiography of America’s postwar visual arts has been informed by revisionist sensibili- ties which recognize that earlier versions of the story of modern American art were frequently biased and exclusive, overlooking much of the art and many of the artists of the postwar period. Shifting understandings of modernism, and of modern art, are central to an understanding of postwar art, as are shifting understandings of national identity; indeed, much of post-1945 American art, and its historiography, has repeatedly focused on recreating and redefining modernism as well as notions of modern American identity. From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism: New Notions of American Modernism During the 1940s, a remarkable shift occurred in American art as the representational American Scene, Social Realist, and Regionalist styles dominant during the Great Depression were eclipsed by new strains of abstract painting and sculpture. As one critic observed in 1944: “There’s a style of painting gaining ground in this country which is neither Abstract nor Surrealist, though it has suggestions of both, while the way the paint is applied – usually in a pretty free-swinging spattery fashion, with only vague hints of subject matter – is suggestive of the methods of Expres- sionism.” “Jackson Pollock, Lee Hersch, and William Baziotes are of this school,” he added, “in addition to some forty other contemporaries” (Coates, 1944, p. 50). The new modern art was called Abstract Expressionism, and alternately “action painting” and the “New York School” because most of its artists lived and worked in New York City, and because postwar American critics deliberately aimed to E contrast it with the “School of Paris” abstractions of Picasso and Matisse. Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950 (plate 1), a huge 8 ¥ 17-foot canvas POS7 1/3/02 03:28 PM Page 115 THE VISUAL ARTS IN POST-1945 AMERICA 115 Plate 1 Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950. Oil on canvas, 105 ¥ 207≤. The Metro- politan Museum of Art, New York. densely covered with intersecting lines and splashes of paint, is emblematic of the Abstract Expressionist style that dominated post-World War II American art, and typical of the “drip” compositions the artist pursued from 1947 to 1950. A foremost student of Regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton in the 1930s, Pollock rejected his mentor’s commitment to “art for the millions” and social reform, concentrating instead on personal expression and social alienation (Doss, 1991). As Pollock remarked, “My work with Benton was very important as something against which to react very strongly” (Pollock, 1944, p. 14). Postwar artist Adolph Gottlieb similarly echoed: “It was necessary for me to destroy ...the concept of what constituted a good painting at that time” (Sylvester, 1990 [1963], p. 265). Explanations of Abstract Expressionism’s emergence and cultural dominance prevail in postwar American art history. Indeed, Abstract Expressionism remains the most discussed and debated movement in twentieth-century American art: inspiring more scholarship and speculation (history surveys, artist biographies, museum exhibitions); commanding some of the highest prices in the art market (a 1956 painting by Mark Rothko sold for $13 million at Sotheby’s in spring 2000); and dramatically influencing subsequent generations of artists. Abstract Expressionism, in other words, remains the measure of success against which modern and contemporary American art is judged – as art, as art history, as blue-chip goods. Indeed, in the late 1970s, when a younger generation of artists including Julian Schnabel aimed to “become” art historical, they imagined themselves as the new Pollocks, fashioned an audacious style similarly full of drips and splashes (although Schnabel’s “drips” were broken plates), and called their grand scale art “Neo-” Expressionism. The romance of Abstract Expressionism began with this historical narrative: in E post-World War II America there emerged an heroic band of avant-garde artists, POS7 1/3/02 03:28 PM Page 116 116 ERIKA DOSS rebels whose cause was to overthrow various representational styles of art and the political agenda they embodied in order to create a culture more in keeping with the “American Century” that magazine publisher Henry Luce prophesied in Life magazine in 1941. Arguably one of the most important twentieth-century declarations of national purpose and identity, Luce’s manifesto urged the nation to embrace a “vision of America as a world power which . will guide us to the authentic creation of the 20th Century – our Century” (Luce, 1941, p. 65). A decade later, in an equally influential Art News essay titled “The American Action Painters,” critic Harold Rosenberg lionized the typical Abstract Expressionist artist as an American loner, “heir of the pioneer and the immigrant,” a “vanguard painter [who] took to the white expanse of the canvas as Melville’s Ishmael took to the sea.” Rosenberg also constructed the standard history of the movement, noting: “Many of the painters were ‘Marxists’ (WPA unions, artists’ congresses) – they had been trying to paint Society. Others had been trying to paint Art (Cubism Post- Impressionism) – it amounts to the same thing. The big moment came when it was decided to paint. Just TO PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value – political, aesthetic, moral” (Rosenberg, 1982, p. 30). Such accounts mythologized the Abstract Expressionists as heroic avant-garde rebels, the art world equivalents of brooding 1950s movie stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean, or teen idols like Elvis Presley.

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