The New York School Was Synonymous With Which American Art Movement?
A new exhibition, Abstract Expressionism, opens at London'south Royal Academy this weekend. Information technology is the beginning major survey of the move since 1959. Abstract expressionism is often considered the first artistic movement to shift the centre of Western fine art from Europe to the US, and more precisely New York. But what is information technology, and how did this happen?
Associated with a group of artists working in New York in the 1940s, abstract expressionism came to exist known equally the quintessential American and modernistic art move. Heirs to the progressive abandonment of figurative and naturalist painting styles that had been taking place in Europe since the early 20th century, the painters associated with the movement came to exist known for their innovative utilize of new synthetic industrial paints, large scale canvases, and the evolution of very individual abstruse styles.
Some of the most easily identifiable include Franz Kline's quick and simple brushstrokes, at times likened to Japanese calligraphy; the drips and rapid splatters of Jackson Pollock; Robert Motherwell's large repeated ovals and rectangles; and Marking Rothko'due south large blocks of colour.
Despite often being seen as "childish" painting that "anyone could do", abstract expressionism has a history that is more than interesting than we might suspect at starting time. Because the emergence of the motion in the 1940s and its internationalisation in the 1950s wasn't only due to the piece of work of its artists. It was also due to both the fine art criticism and political environments of its time. Then much so that we cannot think abstract expressionism without because the work of critics such as Clement Greenberg and the part of fine art every bit a cultural weapon during the Cold War.
A European story
Writing at the aforementioned time as the abstract expressionists were developing their signature styles, Greenberg became the critic that most famously endorsed the movement. He claimed it represented the near "advanced" form of Western art. To justify this, Greenberg looked at the piece of work of older European artists such as Manet, Monet, Cézanne and Picasso, arguing that European painting had been progressively moving abroad from representations of the iii-dimensional world exterior. According to him, this was also accompanied past a progressive flattening of the pictorial space.
Greenberg argued that this showed an increasing business concern with investigating the potential and limitations of the elements that belonged exclusively to the medium of painting: a flat sail with specific dimensions (length and width) upon which paint is practical. All historic examples of paintings that requite the impression of 3-dimensional space on sail, all painting that tries to mimic the earth outside of it, were, for Greenberg, paintings that tried to conceal their true nature.
What is crucial hither is that, past producing this narrative of European art, Greenberg was able to claim that, for the outset time ever, the most "avant-garde" form of Western art was no longer beingness produced in Europe but instead in New York. For him, it was painters like Pollock, Motherwell, De Kooning, Rothko, Kline, and Newman that were now, thanks to the new abstruse languages they were developing, conveying on the piece of work that had begun with the European avant-gardes. European artists, he argued, had not been able to deport this to completion, due, in part, to the weight of tradition, something that America did not have to bear.
So it was in large office due to critics like Greenberg, but also collectors similar Peggy Guggenheim, and curators like MoMA's Alfred H Barr, that abstract expressionism eventually gained momentum among the fine art glitterati of New York in the 1950s, despite never existence pop amid the wider American public.
Cold State of war art
But there is also politics to consider. Abstraction had been immune to thrive in part due to the earlier sponsorship of Franklin Roosevelt'southward New Deal, which saw an incredible amount of government funds being used to directly employ artists and commission new public artworks in the aftermath of the Cracking Low. Well-nigh of the works funded by that program were American regionalist paintings and large social realist murals. Merely some of the funds were as well used to support the early work of some of the artists whose career would eventually progress towards what came to exist known as abstract expressionism.
But perhaps one of the most iconic contributors to the dissemination of the movement as the culmination of Western art history was the Cold State of war. In the 1950s, at the peak of the ferocious anti-Communist sentiment of the McCarthy era in the US, the agendas of institutions similar MoMA in New York and critics like Greenberg converged with the political interests of the CIA. Such convergence led to a series of exhibitions that would tour Europe during the Cold War years. The most famous of those was MoMA's The New American Painting, which came to Europe in 1958-59. This evidence was responsible for bringing abstruse expressionism to all major European capitals, including West Berlin.
Whether or not these exhibitions were funded or facilitated by the CIA, equally some take convincingly argued, they were certainly responsible for cementing the perception of America as the legitimate heir of European artful and political values. Against a USSR perceived every bit totalitarian and oppressive, with land-sanctioned socialist realism coming across as kitsch and formulaic propaganda, abstract expressionism, with its variety of individual voices and painterly styles, would eventually get a symbol of the autonomy, liberty and creative freedom allegedly enjoyed by all in the West. These were values that, from so on, became manifest in the generalised perception of the US every bit the ultimate beacon of Western civilization.
Source: https://theconversation.com/abstract-expressionism-how-new-york-overtook-europe-to-become-the-epicentre-of-western-art-65820
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