314
PARTISAN REVIEW
this quarter of a century? The answer must be found not simply in what was
happening in New York but in the country as a whole, for the history of the
arts in New York during this period was, to a remarkable degree, the story
of the arts
in
America. The booming prosperity and domestic tranquility of
the United States after the war contributed to the boom in culture, partly as
an ornament ofwealth and power, partly as an object ofleisure and self-en–
hancement. This was not the politicized culture of the 1930s, with its inward–
looking regionalism and homespun Americanism. It was a far more cos–
mopolitan culture that suited America's new activism and influence on the
world stage, a culture flaunting its own succession to the great European art
of the past.
Because of its throngs of immigrants and its links to Europe, New York
had always been seen by the heartland as a vaguely un-American city, a
den of urban sin and sophistication - at the same time foreigners saw it as
the epitome ofAmerican dynamism, moderity, and ethnic pluralism. The
in–
flux of emigre artists and intellectuals added to the city's cosmopolitan atmo–
sphere at a time when the country was gradually ending its isolation. The
regionalists and populists of the thirties, including composers like Aaron Cop–
land, dancers like Martha Graham, novelists like John Steinbeck, and painters
like Thomas Hart Benton and the government-sponsored muralists, were
looking to create a distinctively American art. Above all they were looking
for recognizably American subjects, especially rural subjects like the farm and
the frontier. By contrast the cosmopolitans of the forties, retreating from
overt political themes, renouncing naturalism, took up the lost links with Eu–
ropean modernism and abstraction that were first forged by American
expatriates in the 1920s.
The new art of the forties was often an abstract art, urban in its forms
and rhythms rather than in its subject matter. "Most ambitious painters had
disembarrassed themselves of specific city imagery by 1950," writes Dore
Ashton in her superb essay on the art of the period, "but the spirit of the city,
with its chaotic masses and unpredictable events, informed their work." Just
as Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning made painting more purely gestural,
George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham made movement itself the sub–
ject of the dance. Grounded in the classic traditions of Russian ballet, says
Lynn Garafola, "Each season, scissors in hand, Balanchine snipped away at
the decorative appendages, until, by 1951, with the scenery gone and the
dancers dressed in leotards, he had bared the very bones of his chorogra–
phy."
But to see these works in terms of "the spirit of the city" is an argu–
ment from an analogy that can look like special pleading. Thus Ashton re–
marks of de Kooning's very busy 1950 painting,
Excavation,
that "many
commentators saw analogues with the city's hectic rhythms in both its organic
and geometric shapes and in its densely populated surfaces. Although de
