BARBARA ROSE
65
especially Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac , they were (as the latter's
book stated) On the Road ," we begin to wonder where scholarly fact ends
and popular fiction begins. In the first place, the abstract expressionists
were not contemporaries of the Beat generation; and in the second, the only
road they were on with any frequency was the road to East Hampton–
where they often fled to escape the brutal urbanism of New York . The
profound mystical investigations of the group of abstract expressionists
including Pollock, Still, Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb, Reinhardt, and
Krasner (the last two missing from the exhibition) in their search for
universal subject matter has virtually nothing in common with the cheap
drug-oriented "highs" of the Beatniks and their descendants, the Hippies .
It
is a terrible disservice to great art to confuse its themes with those of
mediocre literature, particularly mediocre literature of a different epoch.
Because it served an important idea poorly, "The Natural Paradise"
was excruciatingly frustrating. For ever since John McCoubrey published
his book on
TheAmerican Tradition in Art
in 1961, a suspicion that there is
some connection between postwar American painting and earlier chapters
in the history of American art has been gtowing in force. This notion has
been resisted by institutions like the Museum of Modetn Art and the
Whitney Museum because of their own peculiar histories . For MOMA , the
moment American Art achieved the quality of European painting, it
became annexed to the history of the School of Paris; for the Whitney , the
prejudice of its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, in favor ofAsh Can
painting , meant that abstract art, even so "American" an abstract art as that
produced by the painters of the Stieglitz circle , would be overshadowed by.
the American Scene. Both the Francophilia of the MOMA and the Franc–
ophobia of the Whitney have militated up until this time against any efforts
at establishing a continuity within the history of American Art; and many
critics continue to dismiss the thesis that there is in fact a discernable thread
of continuity connecting the romantic landscapes of the Luminists and
Hudson River school with the visionary art of the Stieglitz circle, as well as
with the metaphysical element of abstract expressionism . Because of such
prejudicies , "The Natural Paradise" was unfairly dismissed as pure hokum
dreamed up by its organizer, MOMA curator Kynaston McShine . For there
is a very real case to be made that this particular topic is the central issue in
American art history, and it is especially significant that the Museum of
Modern Art chose to sponsor such a show.
Despite its many weaknesses, "The Natural Paradise" was a signal
occasion, if only because it indicated a change in the point of view of the
Museum of Modern Art, so influential in shaping established opinion. An
iconographical show at the Museum of Modern Art means recognition of a
