Get Up and Try Again By Lois Rosenquist Irwin

More CELEBRATED THAN ITS COUNTERPARTS in letters, architecture, and music, American postwar art has go a success story that begs, not to be retold, but told freshly for this decade. The most recent likewise as about exhaustive book on Abstract Expressionism is Irving Sandler's The Triumph of American Painting, a title that sums upwards the self-congratulatory mood of many who participated in its career. Three years agone, the Metropolitan Museum enshrined 43 artists of the New York School, 1940–1970, as one pageant in the chapter of its own centennial. Though elevated as a cultural monument of an unassailable but also a fatiguing grandeur, the virtues of this painting and sculpture will survive the present period in which they are taken also much for granted. Yet, if we seem to have explored everything most this fine art technically, we have not yet asked sufficiently well what past interests have made it so official.

The reputation of the objects themselves has been taken out of the fine art globe's hands by money and media. But this award reflects rather than explains a social allure that has been far more seductive overall than even the marvelous formal achievements of the piece of work. I am convinced that this allure stems from an equivocal yet profound glorifying of American culture. We are non and so careless equally to assume that such an ideal was consciously articulated by artists, or, always directly perceived by their audiences. Nevertheless, that the art in question has been eloquent in surmising our near cherished public myths and values would exist hard, on test, to deny. Their international reputations should non preclude our acknowledgment that a Clyfford Withal or a Kenneth Noland, an Andy Warhol or a Roy Lichtenstein, amid many others are quintessentially American artists, more than meaningful here than anywhere else. It is less evident, though reasonable that they have acquired their present bluish-chip status partly through elements in their work that assert our most recognizable norms and mores. For all the comment on the "triumph of American painting," this aspect of information technology has been the one least studied, a fact that in itself has historical interest.

If we are to account for this omission, and right information technology, we are inevitably led to enquire what, after all, tin be said of American painting since 1945 in the context of American political credo, national self-images, and even the history of the land? Such a question has non been seriously raised by our criticism, I remember, for two reasons. Ane is the respectable just unproven suspicion that such an outlying context is too porous and nonexclusive for anything meaningful to be said. The other is the simplistic supposition that advanced fine art is in deep disharmonize with its social, predominantly centre-class setting. The liberal esthete otherwise variably critical of American attitudes, has been loathe to witness them celebrated in the art he admires, even though this is to subtract from its humanity every bit art. (The radical philistine correctly senses systems support in American fine art, but reads its coded signals far too crassly as direct statement.) Professional person avant-garde ideology exhibits a corking distaste for the mixing of political evaluations with artistic "purity." Yet however user-friendly, they dam up the continuing psychological resonance of American art and reinforce the outdated piety with which information technology is regarded.

2 facts immediately distinguish ambitious American painting from all predecessors in mod fine art. Before the Second World State of war, this country had exerted no earlier genuine leadership nor had information technology whatever significant cultural prestige in visual art. Distinguished painters were active—Georgia O'Keeffe, Marking Tobey, Edward Hopper, and Stuart Davis—merely their example was considered as well parochial in coloration, and thus as well "unmodern" to provide models for mainstream work. The complete transformation of this situation, the switching of the art capital letter of the West from Paris to New York, coincided with the recognition that the Usa was the most powerful country in the earth. In 25 years, no one could dubiousness that this society was determined from the first to employ that power, economic and military, to extend it everywhere so that at that place would exist no corner of the world free from its influence. The most concerted accomplishments of American art occurred during precisely the same period as the burgeoning claims of American earth hegemony. It is incommunicable to imagine the esthetic appearance without, among several internal factors, this political expansion. The 2 phenomena offer parallels we are forced to admit, but may find hard to specify. But equally the nations of Western Europe were reduced to the level of dependent customer and colonized states, so besides was their art understood here to be adjunct, at best, to our ain. Everywhere in the New York fine art world at that place were such like shooting fish in a barrel assumptions of self-importance and natural superiority as non to find their match in any of the noncommunist democracies. Never for one moment did American fine art become a conscious mouthpiece for any bureau as was, say, the Voice of America. But information technology did lend itself to be treated every bit a form of benevolent propaganda for foreign intelligentsia. Many critics, including this one, had a meaning manus in that treatment. How fresh in memory even now is the belief that American fine art is the sole trustee of the avant-garde "spirit," a belief then reminiscent of the U.S. authorities's notion of itself as the lonely guarantor of capitalist liberty. In these phenomena to a higher place all, our record ascribes to itself an incontrovertible "modernity."

To detect historical precedents, I rather imagine, one has to go every bit far dorsum equally the France of the Revolution, Directory, and Napoleon, and imperial United kingdom of the 19th century. Just though the Abstract Expressionists produced a magisterial imagery, it never became a court art under centralized patronage. And though their successors, the Pop artists, tackled everyday themes and presented the most banal icons, no one would judge their work genuinely demotic or sentimental. These pictorial modes were projections toward fantasy audiences past artists who felt themselves estranged from whatever audience, regardless of the level of their eventual commercial success.

In 1945, the U.s.a. emerged intact and unbombed from a devastating world state of war that had left its allies traumatized and its enemies prostrate. We were a country, co-ordinate to Dean Acheson, still at an adolescent stage of emotional development, withal burdened with vast developed responsibilities of global reconstruction and leadership.^one Compared to Soviet Russia's overwhelming armed might on the footing, America possessed a terrifyingly counterweighted superweapon, the atomic bomb. We had also a heavy war industry whose reconversion to peacetime needs was being urged by public opinion and economic skilful sense.

In the worldview of the untried president, Truman, the European civil war had removed a buffer that had hitherto stood against the eruptive forces of Euro-Asiatic communism. Comparable to Centrality enslavement, these forces clearly had no legitimate aim in establishing for themselves a security zone in Eastern Europe. Here was a state of affairs that called for the stepping up rather than the relaxation of the American militancy that had just proved itself with such effectiveness in actual combat. It was necessary to alert the idealist spirit of the Americans to a new danger when they were feeling their showtime relief from state of war weariness and pleading for widespread demobilization. At Truman's disposal, significantly, were two important psychological levers: the recent illusion of national omnipotence, and the confidence, no less illusory, that all the world'south peoples wanted to be, indeed had a right to be, like Americans. "We will elevator Shanghai up and upwardly, ever up, until it is just similar Kansas City," a U.S. Senator once remarked.ⁱⁱ

To galvanize such attitudes, and to justify the allocation of funds that would contain the communist menace, Truman dramatized world politics as a series of perpetual crises instigated past a tightly coordinated, monolithic Red conspiracy. He made his point graphically in Islamic republic of iran, Greece, Berlin, and eventually Korea. "Information technology must be," he said, "the policy of the U.s.a. to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."³ The Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, the Atlantic Alliance and Point Four, and above all, National Security Quango newspaper 68 were measures, infused sometimes with extraordinary generosity and always with extreme boldness, to strengthen economies whose weakness made them vulnerable to "subjugation," and not incidentally to invest in their resources and to improve their position to buy American products, the better to ensure our political say-so. Thus when these activities were countered past the Russians, was initiated the era of mounting interventions, "diminutive diplomacy," the artillery race, and increasing international scares—the era known to us equally the Cold War.

The generation of painters that kickoff came of age during this catamenia—whose tension, in hindsight, was so favorable to the development of all the American arts—felt united on ii issues. They knew what they had to reject in terms of by idioms and mentality. At the same time, they were aware that achievement depended on a new and pervasive creative principle. Pollock, Still, Rothko, de Kooning, Newman, Gottlieb, and Gorky were prideful, enormously knowledgeable men who had passed through the government-sponsored WPA phase of their careers and now knew themselves, no longer charity cases, to be cast out on their own. During and before long after the war, they were withal semi-underground personalities with first one-man shows alee of them, although they were on the average forty years quondam. For them, regionalist painting, rigid geometric abstraction, and politically activist art were very infertile breeding grounds for new, quantum ideas. On the hostile American scene in general, they counted not at all.

In 1943 some of them contributed to a statement which, in part, reads:

Equally a nation we are now being forced to outgrow our narrow political isolationism. Now that America is recognized equally the center where art and artists of all the world meet, information technology is fourth dimension for usa to accept cultural values on a global scale. ⁴

No doubt the remark reflects the personal and quite natural bear on of the leaders of modernistic European art, temporarily present in New York as emigres from the state of war. That their tradition had been blasted apart does not seem so much to have depressed as excited the Americans. Jealous understudies were preparing to have over the roles of those whom they considered failing stars. Above all, in that location was to exist no convergence of immediate aims or repeating of European "mistakes," such equally Surrealist illusionism or Neoplastic brainchild. Where artists like Léger and Mondrian deeply sympathized with the urban vitality of America, this was precisely the motif—peculiarly in its accent on machined rhythms—that the Abstract Expressionists thought deadening to the human soul and had to escape.

Information technology is remarkable that art searching to give form to emotional experience immediately after the most cataclysmic war in history should have been completely lacking in overt reference to the hopes or the absurdities of modern industrial power. These Americans were neither enthusiasts of the modern age nor nihilist victims of information technology. None of them had been physically involved in the groovy bloodletting. The violence and exalted, tragic spirit of their piece of work internalized consciousness of the state of war and plant a striking synthesis in expressive brushwork contained by increasingly generalized and reductive masses. Theirs came also to be a most spacious, enveloping fine art, its spontaneity or sheer willfulness writ large and innocent of the mockery and despair, the charnel elements in such Europeans of their ain generation as Francis Bacon and Jean Dubuffet, whose works flared with atrocious memories.

The native rhetoric, rather, was an imperious toughness, a hardboiled aristocracy. In 1949, William Baziotes wrote: "when the demagogues of art call on you to make the social fine art, the intelligible art, the good art—spit on them and become back to your dreams. . . ."^five All the ideas of the New York School were colored by antagonism to the applied mind, not as to some disembodied attitude, but equally an inimically lowbrow and literalist obstruction to an authentic understanding of their work in America. Nothing was more irrelevant and foreign to their conception of terror in the world than American "knowhow," exactly at the moment when that "knowhow" was to provide a backup in concerted U.S. tactics of saber-rattling.

On the contrary, in choosing archaic icons from many cultures, Southwest Indian or Imperial Roman, for example, they attempted to find "universal" symbols for their own alienation. Their art was suffused with totems of atavistic religion raised in protection of man against unknowable, afflicting nature.

Yet, it was as if their relish for the absolute inextricably composite with the demands of the single ego, challenge solidarity with the pioneering modernism of European art, and compensating for the inability to establish contact with social experience. Robert Motherwell was the but 1 amid them to express written regrets on this score. The modern artists "value personal liberty because they exercise not find positive liberties in the concrete character of the modernistic state."^six Not being able to identify with debased social values, they paint only for their colleagues, even if this is to condemn them to ceremonial remote from

a social expression in all its public fullness . . . Modern art is related to the problem of the modern individual's freedom. For this reason the history of mod art tends at certain moments to get the history of modern freedom. ⁷

In a very curious backhanded fashion, Motherwell was by implication honoring his own land. Here, at to the lowest degree, the creative person was allowed, if only through indifference, to be at liberty and to pursue the inspired vagaries of his own conscience. Elsewhere in the globe, where fascist or communist totalitarianism ruled, or where every energy had been spent in fighting them, the situation was otherwise. Modernistic American fine art, abandoning its erstwhile back up for left-fly agitation during the '30s, now self-propagandized itself as champion of eternal humanist freedom. It added to the conviction, if not the logic, of the artists' stand that they couched such sentiment in the fancied morality of archaic religion. Prior to the tardily '60s the simply iconographical link, and a contemplative 1 at that, with the activism of their youth, was Motherwell'southward endless series on black bull'southward testicles, titled "Elegy to the Spanish Republic."

It is impossible to escape the impression that the uncomplicated latitude they enjoyed equally artists became for this first generation, function of the necessary content of their piece of work, a theme they reiterated with more intensity, purpose, and at greater length than in whatever other prior movement. Where Dadaism, a postwar art 30 years earlier, had utilized license for hilarious disdain, the New Yorkers charged "freedom" with a new, sober responsibility, even with a grave sense of mission. Each of their creative decisions had to be supremely exemplary in the context of a spiritual privilege denied at present to most of their fellow men. "The lone artist did not want the earth to exist different, he wanted his canvas to exist a globe."^viii Here were radical artists who, at the very inception of their movement, purged themselves of the radical politics in their own background. They did this not because they perceived less domestic need for protestation in the belatedly '40s (on the contrary), but because serious politics would drain likewise much from the courage needed for their ain creative tasks. That they heroicized these tasks in a fashion suggestive of American Common cold State of war rhetoric was a coincidence that must surely have gone unnoticed past rulers and ruled alike.

Information about these preceptors of American painting would exist incomplete without dealing with their agreement of themselves as practitioners of the "sublime." "The large format, at one blow, destroyed the century-long trend of the French to domesticize modern painting, to make it intimate. Nosotros replaced the nude daughter and the French door with a modernistic Stonehenge, with a sense of the sublime and the tragic that had not existed since Goya and Turner."⁹ Going farther than even Motherwell here, stressing the need for an unqualified and boundless art, beyond beauty and myth, Newman, personally a very thoughtful agitator, wrote "We are reasserting men'south natural want for the exalted, for a business with our relationship to the absolute emotions."¹⁰ Hence was revealed the positive value, an inevitably doomed quest for unlimited power, to which painters of high resources aptitude their backs. Nothing less would satisfy them than the imposition of a roughhewn thousand style. Avant-gardes are non strangers to self-righteousness. And the unusual feature here was not the exclamation of sovereignty over the French tradition, the merits that art history was now definitively being fabricated on these shores—correct, as information technology turned out. It was, rather, the declaration of total moral monopoly, the separation of the tiny minority in possession of the absolute from the unwashed materialist multitudes.

To exist sure, the quest for sublimity invariably emerged every bit a call against institutional absolutism and was e'er considered to be a meaningful gesture of disobedience against repression. "In that location," said Clyfford Still, speaking of his role in the '40s, "I had fabricated it articulate that a single stroke of paint, backed past work and a listen that understood its potency and implications, could restore to homo the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apologies and devices for subjugation."^eleven How one might chronicle such an overwrought mood to the prevailing fear of atomic devastation is a baffling and disturbing question.

Looking back on this effect, the art historian Robert Rosenblum saw it characteristically in art historical terms:

. . . a quartet of the largest canvases by Newman, Still, Rothko, and Pollock might well be interpreted equally a post-World War II myth of genesis. During the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature gave proof of the divine; today, such supernatural experiences are conveyed through the abstract medium of paint alone." ¹²

Their analogousness with, one would hesitate to call information technology a historical derivation from, the deserted, magniloquent, and awesome landscapes of Romantic painting obviously furthered nationalist overtones for these artists likewise. By 1950, in none of the recently occupied and worn-out countries could there be painting of such naked, prepossessing cocky-confidence, such a metaphoric equation of the grandeur of one'due south homeland with religious veneration.

Still, it would misrepresent this art to call information technology internally bodacious. As the '50s wore on, it became evident that however original in pictorial style, American painters had emotional ties with the anxieties and dreads of French existentialism. It is truthful that they disengaged themselves from the typical Sartrean problem of the translation of personal to political liberty, simply they showed cracking business for his notion that i is condemned to liberty, that the very necessity to create oneself, to requite oneself a distinguishable existence, was a desperate, fateful plight.

The tension of the private myth is the content of every painting of this vanguard. The act on the canvas springs from an effort to resurrect the saving moment in his "story" when the painter first felt himself released from Value—myth of past cocky-recognition. Or information technology attempts to initiate a new moment in which the painter will realize his total personality—myth of future cocky-recognition. ^thirteen

From a quite famous essay, "The American Activeness Painters," Harold Rosenberg's sonorous remarks were designed to reveal the heights to which the gestural side of our art aspired past indicating the precipices off which the psychology of gesture might easily fall. I faux step, one difference from the "real human activity," and you lot produced merely "apocalyptic wallpaper."

In terms of American tradition, the new painters stand up somewhere between Christian Science and Whitman'southward "gangs of cosmos." That is, betwixt a bailiwick of vagueness past which one protects oneself from disturbance while keeping one'due south eyes open up for benefits; and the discipline of the Open Route of gamble that leads to the farther side of the object and the outer spaces of the consciousness. ^xiv

Information technology is certain that however much they may have disagreed with these dialectics, painting, for the American vanguardists, was oft an uncertain and obstacle-prone activity, rife with internal challenges to accurate feeling, in which, "As you paint, irresolute and destroying, naught tin can be assumed."¹⁵ Behind their bravado and machismo, a more authentically insecure note is sounded, a tingle of fright in the musculus, acknowledging the very real possibility of sudden failure, and with that, something far more serious indeed, loss of identity. Fake consciousness was a not so secret enemy inside the artist's organism. Rosenberg'southward article itself ended with an attack on the taste bureaucracy, the enemy without, which was witlessly fatigued to modern art for reasons of status, and could not grasp the morality of the quivering strokes for which his whole piece was a singular promotion.

During the '50s the world-policing United States experienced a series of checks and frustrations that fabricated information technology both a more sobering and uneasy identify in which to live. Washington launched policies on the basic assumption that a loss of face and U.Due south. backdown in any area of the globe, no matter how remote, would bring nigh an adverse shift in the residual of power. Even a local defeat would dilate our weakness, milkshake organized religion in our resolve, and get out countless nations exposed to our communist enemies. One tends to forget that the domino theory, with its paranoid vision, budded over 20 years ago. It was an era of confrontation. To run into trial and crisis, American bases hemmed in the Iron Curtain on every front, radar nets were extended at always further remove from our boundaries, the nuclear arsenal was expanded, SAC B-52's flew stepped-upward patrol missions, and the defense budget and the armaments industry grew at an accelerated pace. Merely American influence could not match American power, despite its offensive and defensive potential.

Events proved that nosotros could no more cross the Yalu River with dispensation than we could aid the Hungarians when they revolted confronting Soviet manipulation. Eisenhower'due south "New Look" depended on the deterrence of "massive retaliation," consistent with the thought that the presence of hyperdestructive weaponry could resolve issues across the accomplish of inadequate manpower in the field. Merely this concept did non lend itself to flexibility. The discrepancy between commanding rhetoric and the control of actual affairs proved and then axiomatic that a noxious climate of suspicion, jingoism, apathy, and megalomania envenomed the American atmosphere. "There are many depressing examples," writes Charles Yost,

of international conflicts in which leaders have start aroused their own people against a neighbor and then discovered to their chagrin that even when they judged the fourth dimension had come to move toward peace, they were prisoners of the popular passions they had stimulated. ¹⁶

Such was the situation that set the scattered American left in retreat and brought forth the full ire of right-wing criticism of regime policy in the American '50s. This manifested itself in a fusillade of civil-rights suppressions, and chop-chop became exemplified past the choke of McCarthyism.

Liberal personalities in sensitive or influential positions were purged in an ever more than promiscuous campaign to root out the cancer of supposed disloyalty. Superpatriots, in their intimidating cry, "Xx years of treason," conceived that there was as much an internal danger to their ideal America as the foreign threat. A superiority circuitous began to impose upon American civilisation a form of demagogic thought command, e'er more sterile, rigid, and unreal, with particular animus against intellectuals of the Eastern multifariousness, stigmatized equally "eggheads." Ironically, Stevenson, the main egghead, felt obliged when campaigning confronting Eisenhower, to accuse him of not doing enough to stop the communists.

It was in the interest of federal government to ward off the accusations that would undermine its credibility equally a bona fide cold warrior.

You accept to take chances for peace, just every bit you must hazard in state of war. Of course nosotros were brought to the verge of state of war. The ability to become to the verge without getting into war is the necessary fine art . . . If you try to run away from it, if y'all are scared to get to the brink, you are lost. We've had to look it square in the face. We took strong activeness. ¹⁷

Thus, John Foster Dulles explaining his policy of brinksmanship. In this unwitting mockery of existential realism, such cliff-hanging willingness to gamble the fate of millions (as at Quemoy and Matsu), was naturally accompanied by a persistent negative design of action: the refusal to negotiate or musical instrument test-ban treaties and disarmament proceedings. Moreover, Dulles' ideology of run a risk, really a form of international "chicken," was steeped in the pieties of Christian faith, whose application, simply the same, required "the necessary fine art." However, the atmosphere eventually became so nightmarish that the conservative Republican, Eisenhower, went to the summit with Krushchev, in tacit access that a stalemate had been reached.

The "haunted fifties," equally I.F. Stone called the decade, acted every bit a psychological depressant on the national consciousness. At Little Rock, the desperation of blacks became one time more visible and stayed just every bit unrectified. Under the gospel of anticolonialism and defense force of freedom, the United States was supporting a multitude of corrupt and petty dictators. For all our energy, growth, abundance, and progressiveness, the Pax Americana emerged every bit the chief banner of counterrevolution. Under the stupefying, stale impact of these contradictions, a whole college generation earned the title "silent," while others, no less conformist in their style, dropped out among the beats. Separated by only a very few years, there appeared William Whyte'south The Organization Man and Paul Goodman'southward Growing Upwardly Cool. Mort Sahl could quip that the federal government lived in mortal fear of existence cutting off without a penny by Full general Motors, a mild enough acknowledgment, during the plethora of ill jokes, of who was really in charge.

In 1958, Dwight Macdonald submitted an article to See—'America! America!'—in which he wondered whether the intellectuals' blitz to rediscover their native country (one of the obsessive concerns of the fifties, at most every level of cultural life) had not produced a somewhat uncritical amenability in the American imperium. ^xviii

Run across magazine, which rejected Macdonald's piece, was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, all of whose branches were discovered, past the '60s, to be supported secretly past dummy foundations gear up by the CIA. Here was a grouping of prominent Common cold War intellectuals who

had achieved both autonomy and affluence, every bit the social value of their services became apparent to the government, to corporations, and to foundations. . . . The mod land, among other things, is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and challenge to be the but instrument which can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in society to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists not as paid propagandists or equally state censored time-servers but as complimentary intellectuals. ¹⁹

Information technology signifies a new sophistication in bureaucratic circles that fifty-fifty dense and technical piece of work of the intelligentsia, as long as it was self-censoring in its professional detachment from values, could be used ambassadorially as a commodity in the struggle for American potency.

If this country was unrivaled in industrial chapters and military machine might, information technology must follow that nosotros had a culture of our own, too. Ane ought not, therefore, be surprised to see the fading away during the late '50s of the official confidence that mod fine art, however incomprehensible, was subversive. While conquering all worthwhile critics and curators on its dwelling house territory, in the process beingness imitated a hundredfold in every fine art department in the land, Abstract Expressionism had also acquired fame in the media and riches in the support of culturally mobile middle-class collectors. A 2nd and even third generation of followers, many of them trained on the G.I. Bill or on Fulbright scholarships, had testified to the virility of its original principles. But this onslaught of acceptance, that and so vitiated its proud breach and so undermined its concept of inhospitable life in America, went far to traumatize the movement. It was at the bespeak of a stylistic hesitation that the work of the Abstruse Expressionists was sent away by official agencies as prove of America's coming of creative age. Where the USIA had earlier capitulated to furious reaction from right-fly groups when attempting exhibitions of nonrepresentational fine art or work by "communist tinged" painters, information technology was now able to mount, without interference, a number of successful programs abetted and amplified by the International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. While the Museum played a pivotal office in making our painting accessible across the seas, private dealers had already initiated the export process as early on as 1950. But, now it was to be the austere and eruptive canvases of the early masters, those lordly things, that came to European attending through well organized and publicized traveling shows. This occurred during one of the repeated dips in America'due south epitome on the continent. Making much headway in England and Germany, less in France and Italian republic, the New American Painting, as it was called in an important show of 1959, furnished out-of-date and oversimplified metaphors of the bodily complication of American experience.

At the risk of considerable schematization, I would say that the torments of the '50s had enervated and ground down the ideological kinesthesia of the American creative person. Never comfortable with manifestoes, he embarked now into an ironic, twisted, and absurdist "Neo-Dada," as information technology was at outset known, or a distinctly impersonal, highly engineered chromatic abstraction. Significantly, neither of these modes pretended whatever philosophical or moral claims at all—the better, as it turned out, to specify sensations and appearances in the immediate environment. Technology had shown, with dazzling conviction, that ways were more important than ends, and that in the vacuum of a society that was losing a sense of its goals, professionalism and specialization had utmost value. Now that their mentors had shown that American fine art could be "mainstream," members of the younger generation could release their pent-upward fascination for their surroundings without fear of existence taken—or sometimes even delighting in being taken—for regionalists. In this flattened upstanding landscape, public data, oftentimes of the almost trivial, alarming, or contradictory character, held almost cabalistic sway for a huge percentage of artists. Reciprocally, this meant that at that place would be greater intensity but also shorter attending spans in the popular regard for what they did. Fine art thinking, that had been yoked to i field theory for several years, now gave prove of breaking into many differing spheres of ephemeral, specialized involvement. Public weather condition stimulated an extreme acceleration of artistic change.

Whether they expanded or restricted the menstruation of bachelor information, the younger artists tended to adopt a morally neutral stand except to the absorbing studio tasks at hand. Discredited for them were the he-man clichés that in one case magnified the would-be potentials of art and that bespoke of thorough refusal to conform the artistic enterprise to the tastes of the conservative audience. In place of Olympian but self-pitying humanism, they insisted on functional attitudes and a absurd tone. No longer, for instance, was there whatever agonizing over personal identity or spiritual resources, the bugbears of crisis-oriented Action painters. Without undue pangs of conscience, work got done almost on a production-line basis.

To speed this mythless fine art, the '60s provided the tempi of enthusiasm. McNamara's "price effectiveness" and Kennedy'due south Youth Corps and Alliance for Progress seemed at the time a exciting combination of objectives that would get out behind the embarrassment of Sputnik and the U-2 incident. A "can-do" mentality promised momentum away from the stagnation of the Republican years. Pledging to end a fictional missile gap, the new president also engendered plans for flexible counterinsurgency, created the Greenish Berets, and masterminded the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Politics became a theater of charismatic hard sell. Science in the universities became a colony of the defense industry. Contingency plans, doomsday scenarios, think tanks, the Velvet Secret, Greatcoat Canaveral, the drug civilisation: all this hard-and software, to use terms coined during the period, bobbled together in that indigestible stew of sinister, campy, solid-country effluvia with which the American '60s inundated the world. In retrospect, in that location is a moment when we tin can come across that Herman Kahn, "thinking the unthinkable," and Andy Warhol, wishing that everyone were like a machine, participate in the same sensibility.

In the beginning, there was Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The interest both these men had in the work of Marcel Duchamp and the composer John Muzzle, from the belatedly '50s on, indicates a deflationary impulse, as far at least as serious, k manner abstraction was concerned. Simply it is nevertheless a moot indicate whether the American flags of the one, or the images of Kennedy in the art of the other, were derisory in any social sense. These 2 artists took from Dada neither its scornful theater nor its lightsome subversions, but rather its malleability, even its ambiguity. The absence in their work of any hierarchical scheme, either of discipline or formal relation, was, in any event, far less malign than in Dada. Function of the divergence may be explained by the fact that the American polity, unlike the sprawling chaos of the early on European interregnum, maintained a high ratio of stability to prosperity. The possibilities of the sardonic were limited in a country whose youth, more than and more than during these years, was oriented to scientific careerism.

"What does he love, what does he hate?" asked Fairfield Porter of Johns. "He manipulates paint strokes similar cards in a patience game."²⁰ Time and again, the note struck in his work, and that of Rauschenberg, is of a fascinated passivity. It vicious to these brilliant Southerners to materialize the slippage of facts from one context to some other, the possibilities inherent in the blurring of all definitions, the mutually enhancing collision of programmed take chances and standard measurement. And all this was understood in the larger mental simulacrum of a game structure in which, not the potentials, but the deceits of grade became the main issue. Theirs was an intellectual response that best-selling pointlessness by making a subject field out of it. They plant in the numbness that affected whatsoever sensitive citizen agog earlier the disjunctive media stimuli of his globe, a source of iconic energy. Instead of an arena of subjective human being reflexes and editorialized sentiment, dominated with allusions to human and his space, they conjured a plane laden with neutralized objects or images of objects.

The commercial success of the Pop artists, legatees of Johns and Rauschenberg, is bound up for u.s., at its inception in 1962 as it is at present, with their commercial subjects and styles. There was repeated all over over again the controversy that Realist incursions into high art, like Courbet's, had originally provoked. The greatest estrus was generated past the question: "Is any of this material esthetically transformed?" Nonetheless, this fourth dimension in that location was no socialist creed to add fuel to the fence—merely an objectivity that seemed a mask for the celebration of what everyone, fifty-fifty the artists themselves, admitted to be the most abrasive images in the American urbanscape. Pop symptomized, more it contributed to, an age noted for visual diarrhea. In that charged atmosphere around the fourth dimension of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the "New Realist" bear witness at the Sidney Janis Gallery deceived some into thinking that a political argument, in accord with their views or not, had been decreed in American art. If annihilation, yet, its omission of any political parti pris, in contrast to its highly flagrant themes of crimes, sex activity, food, and violence gave Popular art the most insurrectionary value. Few people could speak coolly about it at all.

One of the exceptions over a long catamenia, Lawrence Alloway, afterward wrote:

Equally an alternative to an aesthetic that isolated visual art from life and from the other arts, there emerged a new willingness to treat our whole culture every bit if information technology were fine art . . . Information technology was recognized in London for what it was ten years agone, a move towards an anthropological view of our society . . . the mass media were entering the work of fine art and the whole environment was existence regarded, reciprocally, past the artists every bit art, also. ²¹

In contrast, Ivan Karp, who dealt in their works, pleaded the case of Warhol, Rosenquist, and Lichtenstein nether the banner "Sensitivity is a bore." "Common Paradigm Art," equally he called it,

is downright hostile. Its characters and objects are unabashedly egotistical and self-reliant. They exercise not invite contemplation. The mode is happily retrograde and thrillingly insensitive . . . Information technology is likewise much to endure, like a steel fist pressing in the confront. ²²

The worship of brutality and the folklore of popular media as legitimate art folklore, both these attitudes, early and contempo, add to rather than misconstrue the record of the move. For Pop fine art was simultaneously a tension-edifice and relieving phenomenon. It processed many of the most encroaching, extreme, and harsh experiences of American civilization into a mesh of grainy rotogravure or a phantasm taken from the dotted pulsations on the face up of a cathode tube. Lichtenstein'southward Torpedo Los, cribbed from a comic about a Nazi sub commander, was placed with jokey topicality in the era of Polaris submarines. Hither was an fine art that could shrewdly feed on the 2d Earth War while keeping present, and yet assuaging, the fears of the Common cold State of war.

On the national level, during those early on years of the '60s, events were almost dislocated. Under Kennedy the social scene had get relatively enlightened, fashion conscious, and permissive, with chichi and fey undergrounds rivaling the White House court. Without extending himself very much toward the arts, the President made headway amongst intellectuals past inviting Malraux and Stravinsky to sup at his table. (The composer thought the presidential pair "a couple of nice kids.") Meanwhile, Harvard professors were industriously planning strategy that would inaugurate ten years of commotion in Vietnam. Culturally there ensued a kind of literate bad faith, the camp attitude, which was never and then bitter every bit cynicism nor so unsophisticated as to allow for moral judgments. It became a necessary emotional veneer for audiences to experience removed from, yet assimilate with full indulgence of their typed, insolent glamorly impulses, events and objects they knew to be hideous and depraved. For having discovered this formula in art, Popular was instantly acculturated and coopted by the mass media upon which it preyed.

The immense publicity and patronage these artists enjoyed was surely no put-on. The masses at large had at last found an avant-garde sensation which they could capeesh quite justifiably on extraesthetic grounds, while its esoteric origins lent piquancy to its appeal. If it had non already had rock music, a whole younger generation could have learned the disciplines of mod cool from Pop art alone. As could never be with Abstract Expressionism, Pop artists and their clients mutually manipulated each other. There were high dividends of communications feedback and product promotion that were hard to overlook, especially during the epoch when consumership was based almost entirely on style, and packaging had tacitly nothing to do with the value of goods received. Yet the upper conservative collectors who boosted Popular art with such adventurism were genuine enthusiasts.

The stereotype that they were parvenu vulgarians on a taste level with the images they and so vocally adored, has to be modified nether assay. It is true that some of them were self-fabricated men of nouveau-riche condition, but this does not distinguish them at all from the field of the postwar monied in America. Professional or in business, most of them had seriously collected the Abstract Expressionists a few curt years before. Pop fine art, oddly plenty, given its exaltation of the standardized, but also explainably, because its glorification of success, flattered their sense of individualism. Moreover, "Now middle-anile or older, they identify the pop move with their children'due south generation. To own these works, they feel, is to stay young."²³ Perhaps an even more than telling consideration was the excitement this art suffused in them every bit an absolutely upwardly-to-the-minute visual miracle, a status they oft interpreted by crowding out even their furniture with a plethora of Popular works that could no longer be looked at singly, but had to be taken in montage mode, with that nonlinear, noncontemplative élan of the trendy Marshal McLuhan.

The Pop artist behaved with aplomb as a celebrity in the New York art world. Such an meridian to stardom, the while he was compelled to carry equally a ascent man of affairs, gave to the artist a recognizably new psychology. It was in a spirit of realism that Allan Kaprow, speaking more often than not of many unlike studio types, described what he idea were their relevant traits in a much-read article of 1964, "Should the Artist Become a Homo of the World?" Kaprow had discerned non only the collapse of Bohemia, and that "the artist could no longer succeed past failing," but that he was a college trained, white collar bourgeois himself, who resembled the "personnel in other specialized disciplines and industries in America."²⁴ Best then, to make a moral adjustment and engage in the politics of culture, for avoiding information technology is never to know whether one has proven oneself in "the presence of temptation or only run away."²⁵ Kaprow managed to make adaptation to the prevailing cultural powers sound still a heroic task (a very clever insinuation), though it was probably an involuntary fait accompli. An echo of Abstract Expressionist high-mindedness lurked in this argument. He admonished the new artists that "Political awareness may exist all men'due south duty, but political expertise belongs to the politician. As with art, only the full-time career tin yield results"—a separatist line strikingly reminiscent of one taken by Rosenberg and Motherwell in 1948! And however, as confronting this, Claes Oldenburg could draw very opposite conclusions three years later: "You must realize cops are just y'all and I in uniform . . . Art as life is murder . . . Vulgar Us civilization now beginning to interfere my art."²⁶

The Kaprow article was published shut in time to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. In that same year, the dealer Leo Castelli printed an ad in Art International showing a map of Europe with footling flags indicating shows past his artists in various cities, an unsubtle anticipation of victory at that summertime'due south Venice Biennale. Earlier, Kennedy had come to see that domestic and third world liberties might not exactly flourish under a United States garrison mentality. He gave signs of lessening Cold War pressures, of curbing the CIA, and of ending racial discrimination in jobs. The August 1963 March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King spoke—"I have a dream"—symbolized the unappeased punishing inequity of the blacks. It was to herald, along with the Free Speech motility and pupil rebellion at Berkeley, the eruptions of the gathering New Left, all the protests, war sit-ins, strikes, guerrilla politics and peace vigils to come. Afterward Kennedy had been killed, the nostalgic flavor of Pop art and the entertainment media in general became particularly evident, as if delineation of the present had all the heart become out of information technology.

The Pop artists became sporadically active on the fringe of dissent. Sometimes supported by their elders, they contributed to CORE, to many peace causes and moratoria against the Vietnam war. Rosenquist's extraordinary F-111 could be read (few did so), equally an indictment of United states of america militarism.(On the opposite, the big furor elicited by this work was caused past the relatively pocket-sized consequence of its exhibition at the Metropolitan.) Rauschenberg secretly financed much of the Artists' Peace Tower against the war in Los Angeles in 1965. Merely he also celebrated the triumph of American space flight technology, the trip to the moon, for NASA in 1969.

The truth was that Pop art, any the angered political sentiments of its creators, was a mode captured by its own ambiguities, and cranked up willy-nilly to limited benign sentiments. It could not have been Pop art, that beguiling invention, if its latencies of critique had not been sapped past its endorsement of concern. Abroad, this flirtatious product of the "Great Society" was framed with maximum panache. At our lavish installation at the 1967 São Paulo Bienal, Hilton Kramer reported that "such a brandish of ability cannot avoid carrying political implications in an international show . . . Some observers here, including the commissioners of the other national sections, have been quite vocal in condemning what they regard as an excessive display of wealth and chauvinism."²⁷ Nether the tutelage of the National Collection of Fine Arts, Popular art could symbolize a continuing American freedom, but ane whose supermarkets and synthetics had roosted in a score of unlike economies, and had come to speak above all of glut and self-approbation.

An entirely different kind of liberty was prefigured by the ultracompetitive color-field and systemic abstractionists of the '60s. One sees in the art of Stella, tardily Louis, Noland, Kelly, Irwin, Poons, and Olitski, an institutionalized analogue of Popular, polarized with regard to it more in idiom than the mechanized manner they both shared. But where Popular was timely and expansive, these artists upheld the timeless and the reductive. The symbolic values latent in such brainchild aspired to a vision of limitless command and ultimate, inhuman perfectibility (which was also a particular aspect of '60s America). The calculator and transistorized age of corporate technology achieved in its striped and serialized emblems, its blocks or spreads of radiant hues, an acrylic metaphor of unsettling ability.

Never, in modern art, had such a "purist" enterprise been deployed without recourse to utopian or "futurist" justifications, and it was maybe because of its very muteness on this point that color-field abstraction now seems to us, in terms of American cocky-imagery on the world scene, the stick behind the carrot.

The antiseptic surfacing, the compressed, two-dimensional designing, the optical brilliance, and the gigantism of this art's scale, invoke a far more mundane awe than the sublime. And nonetheless, no 1 can categorize the sources that stimulated this openness of space, or say of such painting that it refers to a concrete experience. Nothing interferes with the efficient plotting of its structure—in fact, efficiency itself becomes its pervasive ideal. The strength, sometimes even the passion of this platonic, rescues the best of this work from the stigma of the decorative, but just to crusade it all the more to seem the heraldry of managerial self-respect.

Information technology would not exist irrelevant that during this fourth dimension, the conglomerate executives with their lobbyists and bankers, through the efforts of their technical elites, had achieved an unprecedented hold on the economy. "While in the realm of pure logic, a Federal Power Commission in Washington might tell Standard Oil of California what it might or might not do, in bodily fact such an agency is less powerful than the corporation . . . This is the politics of capitalism."²⁸ It is fruitful to suppose that this diffused, invisible, but immensely consequential reality, with its subtle manipulations, would find some correspondence in the sensitized zone of capitalist art. Equally Pop art spoke best to the entrepreneurial collector, and then expensive-looking color-field abstraction blazoned the walls of banks, boardrooms, and those corporate fiefs, the museums. Never as literally readable or cosmetic equally Popular, this art had more appropriately chaste and hierarchical overtones whose stripped operation materialized a code that was more intuitively grasped than rationally comprehended. No deciphering of the conventions of art was necessary for the corporate homage of this art to come up beyond to its patrons. In that sense, though without subject in a strict iconographical sense, information technology was self-sufficient expressively, and by 1964, no later, immediately meaningful equally a consumed signifier.

There is another, larger dimension in which it made itself felt, also. America had become ugly, fouled with industrial wastes, and dissever with divisive forces. As Norman Mailer put it:

America was torn by the specter of civil war, and many a patriot and many a large industrialist—they were so often the same—saw the cities and the universities as a collective pit of Black heathen, Jewish revolutionaries, a minority polyglot hirsute scum of nihilists, hippies, sexual activity maniacs, drug addicts, liberal apologists and freaks. Criminal offense pushed the American public to requite birth to dreams of order. Fantasies of order had to requite mode to lusts for new order. Order was restraint, but new social club would call for a mighty vault, an infrequent endeavor, a unifying dream. ²⁹

Without so intending, American brainchild of the '60s strikes u.s. as the visual anagram of these "lusts for new order." There is something understandable, very gimmicky, and as well spooky in the spectacle this new fine art offered. Equally a psychedelic poster for a whiz-bang at Fillmore East had its definite constituency, and so chromatic abstraction would solace those in upper echelons who could not abide the inertial tugs and the irate spasms in the overheated ghettos of our national life.

None of this, however, can be assumed to take occupied the artists' conscious minds while at piece of work. The gap between their own technical motives, the demiurge of form pursued for its own sake, and the rarefied prestige their art conferred upon its backers, does not seem to accept occasioned whatsoever comment amid them—nor did information technology have to. On the contrary, they had been socially insulated past a critical framework-an explanation of purpose and a means of analysis—called formalism. The ineffable benchmark of this doctrine, the give-and-take "quality," was sparingly applied to those works which were considered to take advanced the possibilities of radical innovation in painting while maintaining vital contact with its tradition. The artists had to contend with professional person standards—none outside ceremonial were allowable—that were at once more ambitious and yet more conservative than those in the business world. These standards were too nakedly authoritarian, but if nervous-making on that score, they at least bodacious a seemingly objective superiority to those that had met them.

Information technology is curious that the word "quality," though more abstract in connotation than, say, "run a risk," is more onerous and big-headed in implication. One went through a rite of passage, a rigorously imposed set of limitations that took the identify of whatever moral opinion, and yet arrogated to itself a historical mission. The enemy here was not the defunct Schoolhouse of Paris, simply upstart "far-out" American competitors. Cloudless Greenberg, critic emeritus of ceremonial, was an intellectual Cold Warrior who traveled during the '60s under regime sponsorship to strange countries with the good news of color-field'southward ascendance. This message, however, proved to be less noteworthy abroad than in our academy art departments, where the styles of Noland and Olitski were perpetuated with a less than becoming innocence.

Meanwhile, if political agitation on the left failed to stir these masters (Stella excepted), the more attenuated, parodistic elements of late Pop sidled into their work. At that place had been finally less animosity betwixt them than hitherto supposed. Just so, the determination of American fine art in general to draw nourishment from its environment has been ane of its nigh natural yet underestimated features. Long later on the war, our artists were still participating in the vitality of American experience, but they likewise had a taste of something darker and more demonic within it, the pathology of oppression. This was an awareness that has come increasingly to motivate their social unrest. Toward the end of this development, the time and space of the art of the '60s having run their course, as had the work of the two preceding decades, the Metropolitan Museum accorded it a giant retrospective, with all the award that venerable establishment is capable of giving. But compared to the projections of fear and desire which underlies our art, that accolade, a kind of regal begetting in state, now looks insignificant indeed.

—Max Kozloff

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NOTES

1. Dean Acheson, in a conversation with the author at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, Aspen, Colorado, Summer, 1966.

2. Quoted in Stephen Ambrose, Ascent to Globalism, Baltimore, 1971, p. 118.

3. Quoted by Barton Bernstein, "The Limitations of Pluck," The Nation, January 8, 1973, p. forty.

4. Quoted by Edward Alden Jewell, The New York Times, June six, 1943, in Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, New York, 1970, p. 33.

v. Quoted in New York Schoolhouse, The First Generation, Los Angeles Canton Museum of Fine art, 1965, p. 11.

6. Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's Earth," Dyn VI, 1944, quoted in Barbara Rose, Readings in American Art Since 1900, New York, 1968, pp. 130–131.

7. Motherwell, ibid.

eight. Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," Art News, September, 1952, p. 37.

nine. Max Kozloff, "An Interview with Robert Motherwell," Artforum, September, 1965, p. 37.

10. Barnett Newman, "The Ideas of Art," Tiger's Eye, December 15, 1948, p. 53.

11. Clyfford Notwithstanding, "An Open Letter to an Art Critic," Artforum, December, 1963, p. 32.

12. Robert Rosenblum, "The Abstract Sublime," Art News, February, 1961, p. 56.

xiii. Rosenberg, p. 48.

14. Rosenberg, ibid.

xv. Philip Guston in "Philadelphia Panel," Information technology Is, Leap, 1960, p. 34.

16. Charles Yost, The Conduct and Misconduct of Strange Affairs, New York, 1972, quoted by James Reston in The New York Times, Jan xiv, 1973.

17. John Foster Dulles, Look magazine, January, 1956, quoted in Ambrose, p. 225.

18. Christopher Lasch, "The Cultural Cold State of war," Towards A New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton Bernstein, New York, 1969, p. 331.

19. Lasch, pp. 344–345.

xx. Fairfield Porter, "The Education of Jasper Johns," Art News, February, 1964, p. 44.

21. Lawrence Alloway, "Pop Culture and Pop Art," Studies in Popular Communication, Panthe Tape 7, 1969, p. 52.

22. Ivan Karp, "Anti-Sensibility Painting," Artforum, September, 1963, p. 26.

23. William Zinsser, Pop Goes America, New York, 1969, p. 24.

24. Allan Kaprow, "Should the Creative person Get a Human being of the World?," Art News, October, 1964.

25. Kaprow, ibid.

26. Claes Oldenburg, "America: War & Sex, Etc." Arts Magazine, Summer, 1967.

27. Hilton Kramer, "Art: U.s.a.' Exhibition Dominates Sao Paulo's ninth Biennial," The New York Times, September 20, 1967.

28. Andrew Hacker, The End of the American Era, New York, 1970, p. 68.

29. Norman Mailer, Of A Fire On The Moon, New York, 1971, p. 65.