Jed Perl - Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013957900

ISBN 9781598533675

The Library of America 259

Art in America 1945 1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism

is published and kept in print

in memory of

STOKLEY P. TOWLES

(19352013)

with gifts from his family.

(following )

Art writing is always a literary mongrel. But there has never been a period when the visual arts have been written about with more mongrel energywith more unexpected mixtures of reportage, rhapsody, analysis, advocacy, editorializing, and philosophythan in America in the quarter century after World War II. The international reputations achieved by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, David Smith, and various other painters and sculptors were a display of freewheeling artistic prowess that signaled a dramatic realignment in the relationship between the Old World and the New. And Americas equally freewheeling literary fraternity was eager to spread the news.

As to how the news would be interpreted, that was a whole other story. Honestly, it was an entire storybook full of stories, as will become apparent from the range of impressions, interpretations, and theories encompassed in these pages. The sense of confidence and authority that American artists, curators, collectors, critics, gallerygoers, and museumgoers were experiencing in the 1950s and 1960s was certainly unprecedented. What was not so easy to explain was the nature of this new assertiveness. In a 1953 essay, Parable of American Painting, Harold Rosenberg argued that the finest American artists were pragmatists and improvisationalists, to some degree not unlike the eighteenth-century Americans, the Coonskinners as he called them, who had defeated the more traditionally minded British. But if the American artists oppositional nature helped to explain how American art came of age in the middle of the twentieth century, the historical thrust of Rosenbergs argument served as a reminder that the swaggering authority of the new American art was not entirely new. Certainly there were American artists who had already been interested in embracing the role of the dissident or the renegade in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when they watched as the Nude Descending a Staircasethe work of a Frenchman, Marcel Duchampcreated a sensation at the 1913 Armory Show. Meanwhile, Alfred Stieglitz was quietly building an audience for avant-garde art through his pioneering exhibitions of work by Picasso, Matisse, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Georgia OKeeffe, as well as in the pages of his magazine Camera Work. By the 1950s, New York and indeed much of the rest of the country were home to several overlapping generations of artists who regarded themselves as avant-gardists and modernists of one sort or another. And all these creatorsthe younger and the older painters and sculptors, with their differing styles, values, attitudes, and objectiveswere promoted, critiqued, celebrated, and explicated in the art writing of the period, which when taken together comprises an achievement as substantial as any produced in a comparable period of time in one of the great European centers.

While the rise of landscape painting in America in the nineteenth century had inspired the nations first substantial body of writing about art and aesthetics, it was probably the battles for art-for-arts-sake that the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler waged through his eloquent texts at the end of the century that laid the groundwork for Americas cosmopolitan sophistication when it came to the visual arts. Around the same time, Henry James was exploring the American imaginations confrontation with Europes visual arts traditions, beginning with Roderick Hudson, his early novel about a promising young American sculptor who comes to a tragic end, and concluding with his biographical study of an old friend, the American expatriate sculptor William Wetmore Story, a book that stands as a marginal but nonetheless magnificent achievement in the James canon. There were certainly other original voices speaking out about the visual arts around 1900; among them were John La Farge, Elihu Vedder, and Sadakichi Hartmann, who each argued for an American aesthetic with its own forms of mystery and magic. The great questions that would challenge so many mid-twentieth-century writersHow do we define the Americanness of American art? What is the American artists relationship with cosmopolitan values?have been debated for a very long time.

Paul Rosenfelds Port of New York, published in 1924, is arguably the first book that devotes significant space to the visual arts in twentieth-century America and has endured, a small classic of adventuresome thought that celebrates the artists in the Stieglitz circle with passages of strikingly impressionistic lyric prose. Any account of American art criticism in the first half of the twentieth century ought to give pride of place to Rosenfeld, and also include generous selections of work by Marsden Hartley, William Carlos Williams, Walter Pach, Henry McBride, Lewis Mumford, and Lincoln Kirstein, as well as some more conservative voices, especially Royal Cortissoz. If any generalization can be made about such a wide range of writing, it is that the struggle to define modernity and the struggle to under-stand the nature of America were seen as proceeding hand in hand. The fruit of these explorationswhich were also pursued through the exhibition programs of pioneering institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Gallery of Living Art at New York Universitywas a new level of cultural self-confidence. Clement Greenbergs take-no-prisoners view of modern art might not have been possible without Stieglitzs ardent embrace of art-for-arts-sake a generation earlier, which of course did not prevent Greenberg from complaining in 1942 that there is about [Stieglitz] and his disciples too much art with a capital A, and too many of the swans in his park are only geese.

In the 1940s or 1950s, although there were certainly art critics with regular posts, among them Henry McBride at