In the years following the end of World War II, a number of artists began to wonder how art could still be meaningful in the aftermath of such a tragic period in world history, a period that encompassed the horrors of the Holocaust, the enormous loss of life on the battlefield, and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What visual language could possibly describe a world so transformed? Many artists in the United States felt compelled to create art that was unmistakably different from what had come before. One of the great artists of this period, Barnett Newman, wrote about his response and that of his fellow artists: “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been devices of Western European painting.”
In their attempt to abandon European influences, the American artists created Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement to gain international acclaim. In moving from figurative art to abstract art, the New York School of painters—notably, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko—and their colleague Morris Louis were taking a reductionist approach. That is, rather than depicting an object or image in all of its richness, they often deconstructed it, focusing on one or, at most, a few components and finding richness by exploring those components in a new way.
These New York artists of the 1940s and 1950s were surrounded by an exciting and influential group of intellectuals and owners of art galleries. Many European psychoanalysts, scientists, physicians, composers, and musicians—as well as the artists Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst—had come to New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s to escape the war in Europe. They arrived soon after the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 and the Guggenheim Museum in 1939 and the rise of affluent, farsighted gallery owners such as Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons. These museums, galleries, and émigré artists actively promoted the New York School as the first avant-garde school of painting that was authentically and emphatically American—in its spirit, its expansive scale, and its expression of individual freedom.
As a result, the center of modernist art shifted from Paris to New York. Thus, while Paris had been the New Jerusalem of the art world in 1900, New York became the New Jerusalem in the late 1940s. Mondrian, a pioneer reductionist who escaped from Europe when World War II broke out, described this shift in a virtual manifesto for abstraction in art: “In the metropolis, beauty is expressed in more mathematical terms; that is why it is the place . . . from which the New Style must emerge” (Spies 2011, 6:360). Roger Lipsey, a student of modern art, calls this period in the 1940s the “American epiphany,” a revelation of the sacred qualities inherent in art. In fact, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, and Louis openly referred to the spiritual nature of their art.
The impact of the modernist movement was enhanced by the presence in New York of a contemporaneous school of art critics, particularly Harold Rosenberg of
The New Yorker and Clement Greenberg of the
Partisan Review and
The Nation. These critics responded to the new art by developing a novel way of thinking about it. They focused almost exclusively on form and gesture, finding in the space, color, and structure of a painting the basis for a complex and satisfying critical perspective (Lipsey 1988, 298). Their enthusiasm for the New York School of painting was shared by Meyer Schapiro, professor of art history at Columbia University. He was the most important art historian of his time and the first art historian to appreciate the importance of the new American approach to art. As Barnett Newman pointed out, Schapiro was the first major scholar to defend American painting abroad.
1.1 Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
Rosenberg (
fig. 1.1) rose to prominence in 1952 with the publication of his essay “The American Action Painters” in
Art News. He saw American art as moving along new lines. Painters, he wrote, were no longer concerned with the technical aspect of art, but were focused on treating the canvas as an “arena in which to act. . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” According to Rosenberg, the formal qualities of an artwork were not important. What was important was the creative act.
As a result of this highly influential essay, which offered the first coherent overview of “gestural abstraction,” Rosenberg emerged as one of the important art critics of the early 1950s. Although he did not single out any individual artist, his analysis lent itself particularly well to de Kooning and to Pollock; it applied much less well to the color-field painters, such as Rothko, Louis, and Kenneth Noland.
1.2 Clement Greenberg (1909–1994)
It was Greenberg (
fig. 1.2), however, who ultimately formulated the aspirations of the New York School. He recognized and advocated not just for de Kooning and Pollock, whom he saw early on as moving abstraction to a dominant position in avant-garde art, but also for the color-field painters, who focused on combining colors to elicit strong emotional and perceptual responses in the beholder. Greenberg’s almost single-handed defense of the new directions in what he termed “American style painting,” at a time when modernism was almost categorically defined as the School of Paris, gave him unmatched credibility (Danto 2001).
Unlike Rosenberg, Greenberg did not see Pollock, Rothko, and the color-field painters of the New York School as breaking with historical tradition. Instead, he recognized in their work the culmination of an artistic tradition that had begun with Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley, then evolved through Paul Cézanne into analytic Cubism. In this progression, painting became increasingly focused on what Cézanne saw as its essential nature: the making of marks on a flat surface (Greenberg 1961). In the late 1950s and the 1960s, particularly in his 1964 essay “After Abstract Expressionism,” Greenberg placed progressively more emphasis on the color-field painters, whom he saw as developing an even more radical approach to conventional easel painting.
1.3 Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996)
Schapiro (
fig. 1.3),
unlike Greenberg and Rosenberg, did not identify with a particular school or painter, but brought his rich knowledge of art history and theory to bear on the contemporary art scene. As a result, he exerted a dramatic influence on contemporary artists, notably de Kooning. In the 1950s and 1960s, the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, Schapiro, Rosenberg, and Greenberg were leading voices on art in the United States.
Despite their later revolutionary intentions, the painters of the New York School were rooted in the figurative art of the 1930s. They all emerged during the Great Depression and began their careers painting in styles that were influenced by both social realism and the regionalist movement. Many of them, including de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, and Louis, benefited from the Federal Art Project, which operated from 1934 to 1943. This was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a plan to jump-start the national economy during the Great Depression by giving people work. The Federal Art Project recruited and supported numerous artists during those lean years, putting them to work on public projects. As a result, the artists interacted with and influenced one another extensively throughout their careers. The networks they formed were very much like the interactive, productive networks often formed by scientists.
The New York painters not only influenced each other, they also influenced subsequent generations of artists, including Alex Katz and Alice Neel, who returned to figuration using reductive approaches. The painters of the New York School also influenced Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the emergence of Pop Art. Finally, along with Neel and Johns, they influenced Chuck Close in his successful efforts to follow reduction with synthesis.
