{"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 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\n