{"id":84002,"date":"2016-05-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/americaas-modern-art\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:18:46","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:18:46","slug":"americaas-modern-art","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/americaas-modern-art\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s modern art"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/font><\/a><\/a>he originality and potency of American art from the years after World War II<\/small> cannot be disputed. Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and David Smith, to name only a few of Abstract Expressionism\u2019s giants, are today acclaimed as modern masters. Nor can the international influence of American post-war art be questioned, pace<\/i> the persistent theory\u2014unsupported by fact\u2014that worldwide attention was paid to this work only because of a cia<\/span>-headed propaganda campaign. Yet explanations of the origins of Abstract Expressionism can be misleading, although most are less extreme than Barnett Newman\u2019s self-aggrandizing assertion, in a 1970 interview, that \u201cabout twenty-five years ago . . . painting was dead. . . . I had to start from scratch as if painting didn\u2019t exist.\u201d Usually, the history of post-war American art is recounted as the tale of a generation of gifted New York\u2013based artists, the majority of them young, who translated the innovations of such important European predecessors as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Joan Mir\u00f3 into a radical, expansive language of emotionally charged abstraction. That is to say, the Americans invented an unprecedented kind of modernist painting and sculpture, and shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York.<\/p>\n

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The international influence of American post-war art cannot be questioned.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Little credit has been given to the formative influence of the Abstract Expressionists\u2019 immediate precursors on this side of the Atlantic, the adventurous American artists who embraced and advanced modernist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of us obsessed curators and art historians have long striven to correct this and give these pioneers their due. One of the most notable of these scholars is my distinguished colleague William C. Agee. Since the late 1960s, he has organized numerous revealing exhibitions and written persuasively about American modernists in an awe-inspiring list of projects that includes, among many others, \u201cThe 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America\u201d at the Whitney Museum; a Stuart Davis retrospective at the Metropolitan; the touring exhibit \u201cAmerican Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning and their Circle, 1927\u20131942\u201d; and the Stuart Davis catalogue raisonn\u00e9, plus equally important studies of other American masters such as Hans Hofmann, Sam Francis, and Kenneth Noland. (Full disclosure: I\u2019ve collaborated with Agee on many of these exhibitions and publications.)<\/p>\n

Now Agee has summed up his lifetime\u2019s preoccupations in Modern Art in America: 1908\u20131968<\/i>, an insightful, idiosyncratic overview of the most provocative painting and sculpture made by Americans during roughly the first half of the twentieth century.1<\/a><\/span><\/span> Agee describes the time span under review as \u201cthe richest, most dynamic period of American art.\u201d His book is intended to survey \u201cthe best of modern art in America made by four generations of exceptionally talented artists\u201d during these years, illustrated both by familiar examples \u201cexamined in new contexts\u201d and \u201clittle or virtually unknown works.\u201d The concentration is on painting and sculpture, with a nod to photography and architecture, and some attention to key exhibitions, dealers, and institutions that focused on modernist art. It must be pointed out that sculpture gets rather short shrift, compared to painting, and that, despite Agee\u2019s inclusiveness, there are a few surprising omissions. Frustration sometimes arises because specific works of art that are mentioned and discussed are not always illustrated, the many large and small plates in the handsomely produced book notwithstanding, although, in compensation, the color in the included images is usually very accurate. But these are minor annoyances. Part wide-ranging history and part rumination on deeply held convictions, lucidly and evocatively written, Modern Art in America<\/i> first impresses us with its high aspirations and then impresses us even more by largely fulfilling its ambitions.<\/p>\n

M<\/i><\/font>odern Art in America<\/i> is organized by decades, yet it is not a straightforward, linear history. Throughout the book, Agee circles back to the work of particular artists, to examine what, for example, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, and Hans Hofmann were doing at various stages of their long careers. He concentrates on relationships among artists, at times noting direct cause and effect, such as the teenage Davis\u2019s being sent out to discover the modern city\u2014his lifelong subject\u2014by his teacher, the Ashcan School painter Robert Henri. At other times, Agee makes subtle conceptual and visual connections across time, alerting us to, say, the pervasive allusions to landscape and light, in various guises, in John Marin\u2019s Cubist-inflected seascapes, Mark Rothko\u2019s color-based abstractions, and Hopper\u2019s late interiors. Agee is sensitive to how particular works of art can affect the artists who study them, detailing, for example, Davis\u2019s changing responses to Matisse\u2019s The Red Studio<\/i> (1911), when he first saw it in the 1913 Armory Show, and after its acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art in 1949.<\/p>\n

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The path to modernism in America was different than in Europe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Agee defines modernism in painting as a shift from recording the visible to \u201ca charting of internal, emotional experience,\u201d with \u201cthe life of the paint, its energy and dynamism\u201d becoming an important aspect of the work. He notes that the path to modernism in America was different than in Europe and suggests that its trajectory in the United States embraces a number of categories and themes, which he traces over the book\u2019s half-century or so: color, light, landscape, abstract vs. figurative, realism, and the spiritual and the cosmos. Agee explains his choice of starting date by asserting that in 1908 \u201cAmerican art began to forge a specific, coherent and definable modern identity,\u201d citing the work of Marsden Hartley, Alfred Maurer, Arthur Dove, John Sloan, and George Bellows, and pointing out the effect on American artists in Europe, that year, of Matisse\u2019s short-lived school and the Stein family\u2019s opening their startling collections to visitors. (Note to my friend Bill: you might have given more credit to Michael and Sarah Stein as collectors, particularly of Matisse\u2019s work, and their salons. Gertrude wasn\u2019t the only game in town.) In 1908, too, Alfred Stieglitz held his first, admittedly modest, exhibition of European modernism; the Ashcan School painters, known as The Eight, had an important show; and Henry Ford\u2019s Model T<\/small> was being mass produced. The choice of 1968 as the closing date of Agee\u2019s survey was dictated, he says, by the way social change, here and abroad, disrupted the established order, including the course of American art.<\/p>\n

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Hans Hofmann,\u00a0<\/em>The Gate, 1959\u20131960, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Agee constantly considers the bigger picture, drawing threads between large continuities of ideas over time and in different places, and noting, as well, disruptions and changes in attitude, such as the new interest in neo-Classicism following the cataclysm of World War I<\/small> or the combination of triumphant bravado and Cold War anxiety that helped define America after World War II<\/small>. Agee contextualizes the pioneer American modernists by acknowledging the influence of European innovators such as Paul C\u00e9zanne, Matisse, the German Expressionists, and the Cubists on such well-known artists as Marin, Hartley, and Max Weber, all of whom were in Europe early in the twentieth century and absorbed first-hand the lessons of the most advanced art of the time. But he discusses, too, the work of some of their less familiar colleagues, such as Alfred Maurer, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Arthur B. Carles, innovative painters and inventive colorists who also were part of the European avant-garde of the period. Agee is distressed by the lack of attention paid to such deserving but still relatively obscure figures and, throughout Modern Art in America<\/i>, reminds us of their achievements, pointing to the machine-inspired abstractions of Morton Livingston Schamberg in the Teens, and to Janet Sobel\u2019s calligraphic webs and Arnold Friedman\u2019s eerie, richly textured landscapes in the 1940s. This omnivorous approach can produce wonderful surprises, such as a reproduction of a tough synthetic cubist still life, Untitled (Still Life with Artist\u2019s Portfolio and Bowl of Fruit)<\/i> (ca<\/i>. 1914\u201318) by Andrew Dasburg, <\/i>all densely textured, layered planes in a sophisticated, original palette of pinks, oranges, red-browns, and grays, sparked with green. Since Dasburg is best known for the less-than-inspired, angular landscapes and pueblo scenes that he produced after moving to Taos, New Mexico, in 1918, the image in Modern Art in America<\/i> makes us think differently about its author.<\/p>\n

A<\/font>dmirably broad as Agee\u2019s reach is and careful as he is to recognize the worth of under-acknowledged, accomplished practitioners, he is most informative and eloquent about the artists whose work most deeply engages him. He is enthusiastic about the Synchromists, the Paris-based young Americans Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald Wright, who showed their color-based geometric abstractions at the prestigious Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in 1913, and issued a manifesto that, we learn, \u201cchallenged the supremacy of French art, claiming their own art was far more advanced than any other, and proclaiming Impressionism and all other recent art movements outmoded relics of the past.\u201d \u201cOne can only admire their brashness,\u201d Agee adds, deadpan, \u201cthe first frontal attack on French art in American history.\u201d He expands the discussion to include the Synchromists\u2019 contemporaries, both European\u2014Robert and Sonia Delaunay\u2014and American\u2014Patrick Henry Bruce and Marsden Hartley\u2014declaring that the Synchromists should be seen \u201cin the context of a growing use of pure color in the service of a modern abstracting art.\u201d To support this point, a brushy, luminous 1913 abstraction of Hartley\u2019s\u2014a favorite of Agee\u2019s\u2014is vividly evoked. He describes the way the painting\u2019s varied hues are \u201cvibrant with textures of different sorts as [Hartley\u2019s] hand moves over the surface, reacting like a Geiger counter to momentary records of energy and feeling.\u201d Agee characterizes Hartley\u2019s touch as \u201csublime,\u201d noting that \u201cthe depth of feeling recorded in the paint itself can be said to be at the heart of all his best work.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Stuart Davis, <\/em>The Mellow Pad, 1945\u201351, Brooklyn Museum<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Stuart Davis\u2019s complex evolution and achievement is exhaustively discussed\u2014more so than just about any other artist in the book. Agee describes Davis\u2019s \u201cmost profound contribution to modern art\u201d as \u201cthe development of a full-blown Cubist vocabulary that took many distinct turns throughout his life.\u201d But he reminds us, too, that Davis \u201chad an impact on, and was in turn affected by, virtually every movement in modern art, from Ashcan Realism to Dada, Cubism, Matissean color construction, mural painting, Abstract Expressionism, color field, and Art and Language, in a career that extended from 1910 until his death in 1964.\u201d (It\u2019s interesting that Agee doesn\u2019t mention Pop art, which Davis\u2019s syncopated, brilliantly colored improvisations on modern life, including supermarket products, are often seen as anticipating.)<\/p>\n

Agee is fascinated by the variousness of American art in the 1930s, from the social realism of the American Scene painters, such as Thomas Hart Benton, to Davis\u2019s jazz-inspired, home-brewed Cubism, to the audacious Surrealist-inflected abstraction of David Smith. Agee sees the forward-looking artists of this era as planting \u201cthe seeds for the explosion of painterly abstraction after 1940, while producing a body of work of exceptional quality.\u201d One remarkable group of eager, ambitious painters and sculptors, centered around the brilliant, erratic John Graham (born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski in Europe), included Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, Smith, Adolph Gottlieb, and Pollock. Graham, an adventurous painter who went often to Europe as a private dealer and authority on African sculpture, provided important information about advanced European art for his New York colleagues, most of whom did not have the means to travel. But Agee also stresses the significance of Graham\u2019s own work\u2014Cubist in the 1930s and, after 1942, meticulously figurative, in the manner of Ingres. He discusses Graham\u2019s figures not as a rejection of modernism, but as a variant, linking Graham\u2019s eerie self-portraits and busts of women to the haunting, non-literal figures and portraits painted by his close friends Gorky and de Kooning a decade earlier, as well as to de Kooning\u2019s later notorious Women<\/i>. Provocatively, Agee includes in this context the much older progressive figurative painter Walt Kuhn (who was still active throughout the 1940s and whose work Graham admired) and adds the apparently guileless, rigorously structured domestic scenes of Fairfield Porter, our latter-day Vermeer, as a return to figure painting in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

Full attention is accorded to the paintings of the German \u00e9migr\u00e9 Hans Hofmann, who is often discussed primarily as an important teacher. Agee observes that in the 1930s, when Hofmann, recently arrived in America, returned to painting after years of concentrating on drawing because of the demands of running a school, \u201ccolor poured on to, down and across Hofmann\u2019s paintings of interiors as if a torrential flood of paint had been let forth from the depths of body and soul.\u201d Discussing Hofmann as a colorist seems inevitable, given the way he constructed his paintings with contrasts of surface, shape, and hue; it\u2019s less expected to find Hopper\u2014\u201ca more conservative aspect of modernism\u201d\u2014treated the same way. But, Agee points out, light and color are equivalent, and Hopper, in addition to achieving in his paintings \u201can overwhelming feeling of quietude, of stillness and silence,\u201d was also a master manipulator of indoor and outdoor light. Witness the eerie Rooms by the Sea<\/i> (1951). \u201cThe most compelling element,\u201d Agee writes, \u201cis the block of light, as physical as the architecture.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The quirkiness of Modern Art in America<\/i> is part of what makes it so valuable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Agee exults in the high achievement of the best American artists of the 1950s and bravely tackles the increasing multivalence of the art of the 1960s, dealing with everything from Helen Frankenthaler\u2019s floods of lush color to Dan Flavin\u2019s fluorescent light installations, to Donald Judd\u2019s minimalism and Robert Smithson\u2019s land art, while also acknowledging the challenge to traditional sculpture proposed by Eva Hesse\u2019s soft, organic assemblages. At the same time, he reminds us that Davis, who lived until 1964, was producing some of the best paintings of his life in the first part of the decade.<\/p>\n

M<\/i><\/font>odern Art in America<\/i> is so comprehensive and generally so strong that it seems churlish to complain about anything. But the excellences underscore the few infelicities. Sculpture, it seems, is not Agee\u2019s strong suit. He\u2019s more responsive to the nuances of shape, surface, and color in paintings. Although he discusses David Smith at some length, as this extraordinary sculptor\u2019s remarkable work deserves, he falls back on general description, rather than calling attention to the way the sculptures are articulated as three-dimensional, confrontational objects. Smith\u2019s evolution as a sculptor is only hinted at. Agee focuses on his use of color\u2014something the artist admittedly set great store by, hoping to combine painting and sculpture into a new art form that, he said, \u201cwould beat either one,\u201d but that wasn\u2019t Smith\u2019s main achievement. Similarly, given Agee\u2019s admirable broad-mindedness in the artists he chooses to discuss, it\u2019s strange that Philip Guston receives only a brief mention for an early figurative work. And while I\u2019m at it, where is Stephen Greene, whose brooding, ambiguous abstractions of the 1960s and \u201970s, with their unstable hints of figuration, now seem prescient of the concerns of many of today\u2019s artists? Or Larry Poons? But these are quibbles. The quirkiness of Modern Art in America<\/i> is part of what makes it so valuable. It\u2019s not only a heroic effort, but also an intensely personal record of the meditation of one of our most acute and thoughtful observers on the art he cares most about, over a lifetime. That\u2019s a lot.<\/p>\n

\n
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1<\/a> Modern Art in America: 1908\u20131968<\/i>, by William C. Agee; Phaidon, 352 pages, $99.95.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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