THE,N AND NOW
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new art could be made . Europe is again alive and well. The furious polemics of
the old days (when one had to fight passionately to defend the new, whether
Kline, whose work to some looked only like chimpanzee scrawls, or Lichten–
stein, whose work to others looked only like dumb replicas of comic strips) are
over, and artists, like spectators, can embrace a far wider range of experience.
Personally, I am happy to be able to enjoy both Philip Pearlstein and Richard
Estes, Richard Tuttle and Dennis Oppenheim, without deciding who is
winning an imaginary race, just as recent revisions of the history of nine–
teenth-century painting have made it possible to respond to the varied
pleasures and viewpoints of both Constable and Friedrich, Courbet and
Holman Hunt, Manet and Gerome, Monet and Fattori, Whistler and Alma
Tadema, without disqualifying a priori the lesser or the seemingly peripheral.
We may miss some of the battles and mountain climbing of New York's past,
but it may be high time to settle down and enjoy, from the historical summit
of the 1970s, the rich and multiple views of art both now and then.
JACK TWORKOV
In the 1950s modern American painting achieved its indepen–
dence from European modernism. The exhibition "New American Paint–
ing," which was circulated by the Museum of Modern
Art
in 1958 among all
major European capitals, established the prestige, one could almost say the
dominance, of American/New York painting throughout the non-Commu–
nist world.
It
was also just about then, 1958-1960, that American critics
declared the death of abstract expressionism and young painters began to
abandon a torpedoed movement.
It
was not too long after non-painterly
painting, pop, and photo-realism replaced abstract expressionism that the
line was open to the" death of painting" and to conceptualism, performance
and body art, video, and so on. What is not very clear is who was decisive in
leading the parade of movements after abstract expressionism-the artists or
the museum curators and the critics.
The chief difference between then and now is not primarily in aesthetics
and taste but in the size of the art world. The artist's role, specifically his
ability to influence what reaches the public as art, is miniscule, surrounded as
he is by the overwhelming size of the peripheral art world dominated by the
museums, the art journals, and the critics.
It is, however, too simple to exaggerate and heroicize the fifties. Abstract
expressionism, while originating in this country, was after all only one in the
whirlygig ofmovements that characterizes the entire century . What is impos–
sible to ignore is the influence the art market-under which must be included
the internal needs of museums and art journals-has on the succession of art
movements .
