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take their cue from abstraction, and, like our best abstract art,
today's salon modern goes back to the late 1940s and a division of
taste within the avant-garde, that is, the innovation-minded artists
and critics . Most looked to Willem de Kooning for leadership.
Charismatic, articulate, artd European, he seemed more knowing
than his rival, Jackson Pollock, who, while clearly a "genius," made
paintings that looked freakish and kept himself apart. But de
Kooning was only the magnetic center of the new art; Pollock was its
artistic center. The future lay with Pollock, but no one then could see
the quality of his pictures except for a few artists and the critic
Clement Greenberg.
De Kooning sensed that something big was happening and ,
following Pollock's example, became broader and looser in his
handling. The results were disastrous . De Kooning's pictures
became confused and bombastic. Nonetheless, he continued to be
seen as the
chef d'ecole
by almost
all
of the vanguard artists and critics.
By the beginning of the sixties he had evolved the manner that has
characterized his pictures ever since : thick oil paint, bright colors,
and long "artful" strokes. His work has traditional light and dark
accenting and often a figural or semifigural character.
It
is a
simplified and more familiar version of Pollock's ideas and therefore
easier to see and imitate. So it was that de Kooning became the
"Pied Piper" of a new salon epoch. By 1959 Fairfield Porter could
write that "the phrase abstract-expressionism is now seen to mean
painting of the school of de Kooning." De Kooning gave the
impetus to "Tenth Street" abstraction just as his "Woman" pictures
helped spawn a return to realism. Next came pre-pop and pop,
which were tidyings up of the "Woman" idea: flat, loud,
commercial imagery plus the scale and brightness of the new
abstraction . This was the formula that first put the new salon
modern over in a big way in the early 1960s.
The neatness of pop signaled a shift in salon taste from the
rough and painterly to a bright, bare, hard-edged look. This also
came ultimately from the innovations made by the abstract
expressionist generation, especially Barnett Newman. Minimal art,
which began to appear in the salons at about the same time as pop
but which became much more visible toward the middle of the
decade, owed almost everything to Newman's ideas (not his best
ideas either). Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, two of the leading
abstract painters of the "second generation," received attention in
the salons and museums in the early 1960s. Their work was never as
expensive or fashionable as that of the well-known pop or minimal
