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and revert to regional argots (as some pop and photo-realist artists did) ; others
could extrapolate abstract-expressionist proposals to their logical extremes (as
in happenings, environments, and much minimal and post-minimal work) .
The big difference was that suddenly , as it were , young artists could start from
the high road.
This , it seems to me , is the critical change that took place between the
ftfties and the sixties , between, say, Franz Kline and Frank Stella. Other
differences concern collectors, galleries, marketplaces , and other phenomen–
ological trompe-l'oeils . There always have been comers , hot properties , and
has-beens; I'm old enough to understand that. The fantasists , social realists ,
and magic realists promoted by the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1940s
(Darrell Auston, Peter Blume , Jack Levine, for example) were just as angry
when they got jostled out of the sun by the emergent abstract expressionists as
some of the latter have been about pop and color-fteld phenoms (' ' no names ,
please ," as Ad Reinhardt used to shout at the Artists Club).
The point is that New York developed an artists ' community' which
later become international. It took the place of Paris as Paris had of Rome a
century and a half before . "Everything else, " as Barnett Newman once wrote ,
, 'is everything else ."
GEORGE L.K. MORRIS
Official American attitudes toward the avant-garde have never
been known for quick reversals-that is, until the late 1940s. I doubt if there
has ever been so fast a turnabout anywhere as that shown by U.S . museums
and galleries after World War II . In the present decade the trend has been
circling, as it strains to repeat the ftrst salutory shocks.
In prewar days it was next to impossible to obtain more than spasmodic
glimpses of American abstraction : museums mostly refused to show it ; no
critics gave sensible reviews ; it could ftnd no galleries and absolutely no
public. I won't take space to list the few notable exceptions . Offtcial backing
was reserved for a movement in the opposite direction, which depicted Amer–
ican life in the raw. While dragging myself through one of these tasteless
displays , I observed to my companion that when curators are so blind to
quality, God help us if they ever do accept abstractions: God hasn 't helped
us .
What caused the reversal? Obviously the artists had something to do with
it . Secondly, an era of contemporary-museum domination was opening,
particularly in New York. Curators, trustees, and even a few critics had
' The New York artists' community developed in the 1930s, stimulated by govern–
ment-sponsored artists projects. A number of artists, especially Barnett Newman and Philip
Pavia, understood the importance of such a network through which ideas can be exchanged ,
and they both worked selflesslyto encourage it .
