Nothing is more remarkable about the art of the last quarter-century
than the diminished role played by abstraction in defining the course
of contemporary artistic thought. Where abstraction had not so long
before been the mark of an “advanced” aesthetic sensibility, it was
now increasingly said by critics, curators, and artists of many
different persuasions to represent a conservative or academic or even
reactionary attitude toward art and culture. Abstraction, which for
decades had loomed as a vehicle of aesthetic emancipation, was now
declared to be too idealistic, too formalistic, too metaphysical, too
elitist, or too political—or else, in some cases, not political
enough— to be accorded the high place that had formerly been ceded to
it in the hierarchy of cultural achievements. Where in the past it
had been denounced by reactionary politicians as part of the
Bolshevik menace, abstraction was now dismissed by left-wing academics
and their allies in the museums as an instrument of the
Cold War
against Communism.

At times, indeed, it has been difficult to know the exact nature of
the case against abstraction. The charges emanated from so many
diverse quarters and served such a wide variety of artistic and
ideological interests. Did abstraction’s alleged delinquencies
derive, as some now claimed, from an excessive reliance on the
Idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant—which in art circles was
usually a code term for the critical views of the late Clement
Greenberg—or from an unconscionable complicity in the Cold War
ideology of Nelson Rockefeller and