What are we to make of the art of the Seventies? Are we in a position to write its history? Some people obviously think so. For we have now been given two enterprises which take the art of the Seventies as their subject: Corrine Robbins’s book, The Pluralist Era: American Art, 1968-1981,[1] and the exhibition, “A New Beginning: 1968-1978,” organized by Mary Delahoyd, professor of art history at Sarah Lawrence College, at The Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York.[2]
Once it was thought that fifty years was the minimum amount of time that was needed for viewing “recent” art with the necessary detachment. That was the rule in effect at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, for example, until very recent times. Yet even though this rule and what it implies have long since passed out of favor, the general approach to the recent past tends even today to be highly selective rather than comprehensive, concentrating on individual artists or groups rather than attempting to encompass an entire historical period.
What is remarkable about these two recent efforts at instant history is that they attempt to go beyond the usual decade-end hodgepodge survey mounted by museums and ask to be taken as full-dress scholarly studies of a period scarcely five years in the past. Are we to believe that there is something particularly fascinating, even haunting, about the art of the Seventies for those who were closely involved with it at
