During the period from 1946 to 1968, American art and architecture came into its own. For the first time, American painters, sculptors, and architects became trendsetters on the international art scene. New York was suddenly the center of the art world, rather than Paris or Rome. This was arguably the most exciting and complex period in the history of the visual arts in the United States. Scholars still vigorously debate how the United States came to dominate the art world at mid-century and why that domination ended two decades later when many new artistic styles, new media, and new art markets began to emerge across the globe.
Some historians have argued that it was inevitable that the United States would lead the art world by the late 1940s because New York had become the locus of so much financial and political power. Others maintain that the United States only seemed to be leading because New York critics such as Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro were so forceful in claiming that New York’s new abstract expressionist movement was the culmination of everything that European artists had been working toward for half a century. Other scholars give the full credit for the United States’s rising influence in the art world to the groundbreaking ideas and works of men like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and David Smith and women such as Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Louise Bourgeois.
Abstract expressionism was seen, by the critics at least, as an amalgam of three movements that had emerged in Europe over the previous 50 years or so: abstract art, German expressionism, and surrealism. In abstract expressionism, the goal of the artist was to express the totality of his or her existence, both conscious and subconscious, on the canvas. Pollock is probably the best-known figure of the abstract expressionist movement. With his “drip” paintings, in which he literally dripped paint onto a canvas lying on his studio floor, Pollock tried to express the totality of his being as he experienced it at given moments. For him, art was an attempt at complete self-revelation or self-expression. Art was not, in the end, about pretty shapes and colors or about telling a story. Creating art was a cathartic experience, and viewers could have their own cathartic experiences, which need not be the same as the artist’s.
Abstract expressionism caught on partly because it was heavily promoted by important New York critics and patrons such as Peggy Guggenheim, but it also expressed how many Americans were feeling after World War II. In their art, as well as in their personal lives, Pollock and De Kooning wanted to express their anger and grief about the war. The paintings of these “action painters,” as Pollock and De Kooning were also called, may have helped Americans to process more effectively the historical events of recent times. Pollock and De Kooning were the art-world equivalents of James Dean or Elvis Presley, asserting their individuality and feelings at a time when many others were afraid to do so.
Abstract expressionism never became the predominant art style in the United States, though, because it was seen by most Americans as inaccessible or too difficult to understand. After all, it was nonrepresentational (that is, nonrealistic) in a country that has always had a strong preference for representational, narrative art. Abstract expressionism, meant to be interpreted in any way that the viewer chose, was just too unsettling for an audience used to a painting or a sculpture having one clear meaning. To make matters worse, the abstract expressionists and their spokespersons tended to dismiss representational art as insincere or not weighty enough in subject matter to be dignified with the title of “art.” This led, inevitably, to a challenge from younger artists who wanted to prove them wrong.
Pop Art, the movement that dominated the United States in the 1960s, began as a challenge to the elitism of abstract expressionism. Pop Art was all about accessibility and creating a dialogue between the artist and the viewer (or among the viewers). Artists such as Larry Rivers, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg began asserting that representational art was just as valid as nonrepresentational art. Art should open up discussions about current events, they said, rather than being a separate disjointed experience. With little or no recollection of World War II, these artists focused their attention on the consumer culture of the late 1950s and the early 1960s and questioned whether the United States really was benefiting from economic prosperity and technological innovations. They wanted to engage the public in a discussion about the nature of everyday American life and culture. As their spokesperson John Cage once said, the Pop artists wanted to wake viewers up “to the life that we are so excellently living.”
Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein challenged the idea that fine art was inherently better than commercial art, or that museums and concert halls were superior to Hollywood movies and comic books. Warhol made depictions of Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and boxes of Brillo pads; Lichtenstein appropriated images from Popeye comic books. The pop artists embraced all forms of artistic expression, as long as that expression was sincere. Art, they said, should not be defined by its materials or by criteria such as uniqueness, authenticity, or conformity to an accepted style. This openness led to the pluralistic art scene of later decades, when
Explosion, by Roy Lichtenstein, 1967 (Library of Congress)
No style dominated and artists were encouraged to express themselves in any manner that seemed fitting.
American architecture in the 1950s was, to a large extent, an echo of European high modernism, with its emphasis on rational, ideal forms and its fascination with concrete, glass, and steel. Indeed, many of the leading architects in the United States were of European origin, among them Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Eero Saarinen. The exception was Frank Lloyd Wright, the Wisconsin-born maverick and genius who, in his 90s during the 1950s, was creating one-of-a-kind structures such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Beth Sholom synagogue outside of Philadelphia.
Around 1960, however, “postmodern” architecture began to emerge. A new generation of architects began to question, or challenge, everything that the High Modernists had held so dear. The high modernists had placed a premium on functionalism; the postmodernists wanted form and function to be of equal concern to the architect. The United States was on the cutting edge of this movement, with Philadelphians Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown in the forefront. The Vanna Venturi House, which Venturi built for his mother in the early 1960s, returned to pre-20th-century materials and an architectural vocabulary that would have been detested by the modernists. Postmodern architects challenged Mies van der Rohe’s slogan “Less is more” (Venturi’s slogan was “less is a bore”). They sought to combine the best of commercial and fine architecture. Venturi was a friend of Warhol and shared his goal of breaking down the barriers between fine and commercial art.
Venturi was very controversial among his colleagues at first, because he advocated the idea of architects as facilitators, rather than as demigods or heroic figures who grudgingly bestow wisdom upon a chaotic, benighted public. But Venturi’s method of creating consensus among the client, building users, and neighbors has since become standard procedure.
Further reading: Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1996); David Joselit, American Art since 1945 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003); Michael J. Lewis, American Art and Architecture (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006).
—Mark Sullivan
World History
