Why Did New York Become the New Center of the Art World in the 1940

Development OF PAINTING
For more nearly movements and
styles, see: History of Art.
For details of specific styles,
come across: Art Movements.

Art Works

Lavender Mist (Number one) (1950)
National Gallery, Washington DC.
By Jackson Pollock. An iconic
example of his gestural painting:
a manner known every bit "activity painting".

Orange And Yellow (1956).
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
By Mark Rothko. Another icon
of American modern fine art.

Seated Woman (1943).
Metropolitan Museum, NYC.
By Willem de Kooning. An early
prototype of his "Woman" series.

In A Nutshell

The phrase "New York School" is an umbrella term normally practical to the loose-knit group of 20th-century painters based in New York Metropolis during the 1940s and 50s. Although it embraced several differing styles of painting (notably "Action-Painting" and "Colour Field"), the term has become synonymous with the art motility known as Abstract Expressionism, which was embodied past European immigrant artists such equally Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) and Arshile Gorky (1905-48), and by American painters similar Jackson Pollock (1912-56), Marker Rothko (1903-70) and Willem De Kooning (1904-97). Owing its success to a fusion of European aesthetics and American desire for social relevancy, the New York Schoolhouse was i of the almost influential modern fine art movements, and helped the city to replace Paris as the world's centre of avant-garde fine art, reflecting the creativity and financial musculus of the New Earth. Many of its works are ranked alongside the greatest 20th century paintings.

Influence of European Surrealist Painters

With the French and British archway into World War II in September 1939, artists and intellectuals began fleeing Paris, which had been the earth's art uppercase for more than a century. Surrealism had dominated the thriving interwar art scene in Paris, only by 1942 the critical mass of the motion's cardinal figures - Andre Breton (1896-1966), Salvador Dali (1904-89), Max Ernst (1891-1976), Andre Masson (1896-1987), and Yves Tanguy (1900-55) - had all gone to New York. In add-on swell cubists, abstract artists, and others from the School of Paris had come over, too, amongst them Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Marc Chagall (1887-1985) and Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973). Of the major artists only Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and the 73-yr-former Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) remained in Paris for the duration of the war. By 1940, the heart of the art world was already shifting to New York, preparing the basis on which the nascent New York School would most immediately seize the leadership of the avant-garde.

Surrealism evolved out of the controversial Dada move around 1924, under the management of the poet Andre Breton. Influenced past Freudian psychoanalysis, the surrealists looked to the unconscious mind as the source of artistic discipline matter. In the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) Breton defined surrealism every bit "pure psychic automatism by which ane intends to express verbally, in writing or past other method, the real functioning of the mind."

The French surrealist painter Andre Masson created his "Battle of Fishes" (1926, MOMA, New York) by spilling glue on the canvas and and so pouring on sand; the sand stuck where the glue fell and he used the forms produced in this random fashion as a springboard for costless association. He and so modified these take chances shapes with paint to accentuate the subject matter of his associations. The finished painting reads similar a poem rather than a narrative; instead of interacting in logical ways, each image moves off into seemingly different trains of idea. The underlying pregnant in the piece of work relies on metonymy, as in the symbolism of a dream where ideas are represented, often cryptically, by associated ideas. This is a typically surrealist application of "psychic automatism. Automatism would go a central source of form for the artists of the New York School.

After 1930 many surrealists undertook a more literal, illusionistic rendering of dream images. In a work similar "The Voice of Space" (1931, Guggenheim Museum, New York) by Rene Magritte, for example, the free-associative element resides in the choice of the imagery rather than in the technique or way (which, in this instance, is academic illusionism). Despite its conservative fashion illusionistic surrealism continued the movement's radical exploration of the content and workings of the unconscious mind, although it was the abstract wing of the surrealist movement that influenced members of the New York School in the forties.

In a nutshell, European Surrealist artists provided the intellectual and aesthetic ingredients upon which the New York School was founded. The other half of the mix - the creative bulldoze and sense of social obligation - came from the strong Protestant work ethic instilled in American artists past the experience of the Depression and the Federal Art Project of the 1930s. The Project was responsible for producing hundreds of thousands of works, and past 1936 it employed some six,000 artists, most living in New York. It triggered the formation of a real community of artists for the showtime time, especially in Greenwich Hamlet. Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, David Smith and Marking Rothko - that is, most of the leading members of the New York School - all worked on the Project. Indeed, those (like Barnett Newman) whose employment staus disqualified them from participating in information technology, felt like outcasts.

The Influence of European Modernism

Despite the desire of many prominent figures on the interwar New York fine art scene to throw off the weight of European modernism (some 2 decades later the hugely successful Armory Show of 1913), the latter's presence grew dramatically in the 1930s. The founding of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 fabricated available magnificent works by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Georges Seurat (1859-1891), Van Gogh (1853-1890), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Picasso and Leger, also equally special exhibitions of abstract art, and members of the Bauhaus design school. In 1939 the Valentine Gallery, which had held especially notable shows of Matisse and Brancusi in the twenties, exhibited Picasso'southward enormously influential painting "Guernica", after which the Museum of Mod Art kept it on display continuously for virtually forty years. His other equally influential masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, MOMA) had arrived in New York the previous year.

The New Art Circle gallery, founded by J. B. Neumann in 1923, was among the earliest simply by no ways the only place where young artists might run across German expressionism - including works past Max Beckmann (1884-1950), Paul Klee (1879-1940), and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). In add-on the Gallatin Drove - with works by Cezanne, Seurat, the cubists, Mondrian, and such artists of the Russian avant-garde as Naum Gabo (1890-1977) and El Lissitzky (1890-1941) - went on loan to New York University in Washington Foursquare; and although the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later to get the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) did not open until 1939, Guggenheim regularly opened his definitive collection of Kandinsky'south abstruse paintings to young artists in his New York apartment from 1936 on.

Picasso's "Guernica" had particular importance to younger painters because it combined a powerful political statement with the best European formal composure. The awe-inspiring calibration and powerful expressionism of the piece of work, and the employ of a cubism vocabulary for a tragic theme, gear up an important precedent for American artists. Its influence tin exist seen in the use of a thou scale with a shallow cubist depth in the great drip paintings of Jackson Pollock; it underlies de Kooning's black paintings of the mid forties and Motherwell's "Elegies".

Meanwhile, European surrealism had already affected younger artists fifty-fifty earlier the arrival of the surrealists themselves. Some of it had been imported secondhand into America in the thirties past such painters equally Peter Blume and Louis Guglielmi, who had studied in Europe. At the end of 1931 the Julien Levy Gallery began exhibiting the European surrealists' work and publishing translations of their writings; from 1935 the Pierre Matisse Gallery showed Miro and Masson; and the Museum of Modern Art's of import "Dada, Surrealism, and Fantastic Art" exhibition of 1936 fabricated available a stunning display of their paintings, objects, and writings. In 1942 the "Artists in Exile" show at Pierre Matisse and Duchamp'southward "Beginning Papers of Surrealism" show, staged in a old mansion in New York, celebrated the arrival of the artists themselves in New York.

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell, the American creative person in assemblage and collage, began showing at Julien Levy's gallery with the surrealists, and from his first collages of 1931 Cornell demonstrates the influence of surrealism - although, as he wrote in 1936 to Alfred Barr (the Manager of the Museum of Modernistic Fine art who organized "Dada, Surrealism, and Fantastic Art"), "I do not share in the subconscious and dream theories of the surrealists." Cornell told complex, mesmerizing stories with found objects, assembled in the self-contained magical worlds of his boxes. He plant inspiration non only in the fantastic collages of Max Ernst, which he saw at the Julien Levy Gallery when it opened in 1931, but also in the souvenirs and old cards he saw in the shops around Times Foursquare, in the constellations painted on the ceiling of One thousand Central Station, and in any number of other mutual things that a less imaginative mind might overlook every bit ordinary.

In Cornell's "The Hotel Eden" (1945, National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa), for example, the Hotel Eden seems to be a stopping place in a magical dream voyage, filled with exotic birds and strange scientific devices. Cornell seems deliberately to advise a tattered Paradise subsequently the Fall, linking the work to other boxes which refer to punished lovers - Adam and Eve, Paul and Virginia (from the eponymous French novel, popular in the nineteenth century), Paolo and Francesca (from Dante). The swirling spiral in the upper left may refer to the Rotary hemisphere of Marcel Duchamp, whom Cornell befriended after Duchamp's return to New York in 1942. Cornell read widely, especially in French literature, and had a fascination with Hollywood stars. But externally he led an utterly simple life. He lived on Utopia Parkway in Queens with an invalid brother, his mother, and his grandad. He largely supported all of them, taking routine jobs in the garment industry.

The Arrival of European Artists in New York

When the Europeans finally arrived in person in New York, Marcel Duchamp and the surrealists held the limelight. They were self-confident and lived bohemian lifestyles, equally if money never worried them (though many of them were exceedingly poor). They communicated a sense of conviction about the importance of fine art and of New York as the centre; indeed they made it seem that wherever they were was ipso facto the centre. Moreover, Breton and the other surrealists had a potent sense of belonging to a unified avant-garde that comprised artists exterior surrealism too. When Breton edited the kickoff catalog for Art of This Century gallery endemic past Peggy Guggenheim, in 1942, he included texts and manifestoes by futurists, by Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner (1884-1962), by Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), and Mondrian, in addition to those by surrealists like Jean Arp (1886-1966) and himself.

Breton was also the champion of a young Afro-Cuban painter named Wifredo Lam (1902-82), who had come to Paris via Spain in 1937 at the age of 25. Picasso was taken with Lam and introduced him into artistic circles in Paris in the late thirties. This is where Lam befriended Breton, and afterward 1941, when Lam returned to Cuba, he remained in shut impact with Breton. In Cuba in the 1940s, Lam fashioned a highly original, hybrid surrealism that melded traditions from his Afro-Carribean ancestry with both stylistic and theoretical aspects of French surrealism. In "The Eternal Present" (1945, Museum of Art, Rhode Island), for example, the femme cheval (woman-horse), of which there are three in this painting, is constituted through a partial metamorphosis from a woman into a horse, axiomatic hither specially in the heads. This transformation is quite surrealist in its genesis through unconscious association and dream-like mutation. But it also has a dynamic blackness spirituality with connections to the Afro-Cuban voodoo practices in which a adult female, in a state of spiritual possession past the orisha (or saint), is said to exist ridden past the orisha like a equus caballus; the surrealist film maker Maya Deren actually documented a Haitian voodoo rite of this kind in "The Divine Horsemen" (1947-51). Breton's continuing links to Lam not only reverberate the internationalist perspective that Breton and the other Europeans brought to the New York art scene in the early 1940s, but Lam'southward piece of work and even the person of the artist himself (whose father was Chinese) also exemplify the rich mix of cultures in the New World that increasingly shaped the second half of the twentieth century and its fine art.

Then, having the Europeans personally on the scene in New York was very dissimilar from just looking at works by them in a prove or drove. The European moderns not merely connected New York in a very vital way to a more international globe, but they also provided a compelling new model of what an artist was. To the Europeans, art and life were inseparable and they lived this heightened existence for 24-hours a mean solar day. In conversation with the younger Americans they as well imparted their insight into the more than subtle formal concerns of painting, thereby implicitly encouraging them to match the aesthetics of European modernism. Associating with artists is a time-honoured style for the immature to learn not just the craft, but what it ways to exist an artist. The presence of the Parisian vanguard in New York finally gave young Americans an opportunity to come across this immediate, creating the fertile soil out of which the new American avant-garde grew.

The Europeans found life in New York quite different from that to which they were accepted. Paris is a city of neighborhoods and the vitality of each neighborhood radiates from its cafes. Conversation over a ii-hour cup of coffee was an indispensable ingredient of Parisian intellectual life. The members of the Ecole de Paris had e'er frequented particular haunts in Paris; and for the surrealists information technology was above all the Buffet Cyrano near Pigalle, at which they would see one another virtually daily and engage in protracted discussions. Any immature artist interested in surrealism could simply drib past and attach himself to the group. New York had no such tradition: the pace of life was too fast and the city as well populous to make a buffet gild possible. In addition the artists had to scatter to observe housing chop-chop when they arrived, which finer meant that no one neighbourhood could exist identified with a detail movement, although Greenwich Village would become a focus for the New York School.

The immature Museum of Modern Fine art opened its doors to the surrealists, and to some extent the Julien Levy and Pierre Matisse galleries helped recoup for the loss of the established Paris coming together places. Merely the most of import gathering spot was the private gallery of Peggy Guggenheim, chosen Art of This Century. In 1942 lone she showed piece of work by Arp, Ernst, Miro, Masson, Tanguy, Magritte, Dali, Brauner, and Giacometti. Only the Fine art of This Century also gave i-man exhibitions to the Americans Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Marker Rothko, Clyfford Still, William Baziotes, and Robert Motherwell. In addition in that location was by so a tradition of American "little magazines" that were actively publishing vanguard fine art, and the surrealists started upwardly some of their ain. View and VVV were particularly significant. The commencement effect of View came out in September 1942 under the editorship of Charles Henri Ford. At first it was generally literary in graphic symbol, but past 1944 information technology provided an important forum for visual artists. VVV - though it only lasted for iii issues - get-go appeared in June 1942 and was edited past a young American sculptor named David Hare. The editorial staff of VVV included Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Claude Levi-Strauss, Andre Breton, and the Americans Robert Motherwell, Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Abel, and William Carlos Williams. Through such collaborations in the galleries and journals, the presence of the European moderns soon flowered into a close liaison with the Americans.

A New Art Movement in New York

By 1943 talk of the emergence of a new movement had already begun to spread in the New York fine art world. In the spring of 1945 the Art of This Century gallery mounted a show chosen "A Problem for Critics," challenging the fine art printing to place this new "movement." The show included works by the abstract surrealists Jean Arp, Andre Masson, and Joan Miro, besides as past the Americans Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, and Marker Rothko. Between 1942 and 1950, the Americans in that prove - together with others, of whom the well-nigh important were Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Even so, and David Smith - produced a body of work which placed American fine art at the forefront of the international avant-garde for the first time. Equally a group (which they never were in any systematic sense) these American artists came to be known as "abstract expressionists" or, every bit the artists themselves preferred, "the New York School." For an early instance of the work of the New York Schoolhouse, run into the 'all-over' Pasiphae (1943, Metropolitan Museum of Art) by Jackson Pollock.

Characteristics of the New York Schoolhouse

Art historians had begun using the term "abstruse expressionism" at the stop of World War I to refer to Kandinsky and other Europeans who painted abstractly with expressionist brushwork. In a 1946 review for the New Yorker, Robert Coates applied the term for the beginning fourth dimension to the work of an American creative person of the forties when he described the paintings of Hans Hofmann as "abstract Expressionist." He capitalized the E to indicate that he regarded Hofmann's work equally a type of "Expressionism" in the tradition of Kandinsky, which is precisely how Hofmann had been describing himself for some time. Ironically Hofmann, of the major New York Schoolhouse artists, had the least in common with the balance. In add-on to the difference in age and background, he connected to exist preoccupied with the formal principles of European modernism over and to a higher place any conscious concern with an introspective subject matter.

Except for Hans Hofmann, who was 50 when he left Federal republic of germany and 65 by the mid-1940s, the artists of the New York Schoolhouse faced many of the same formative cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic issues. These included: the imperative of social relevance; existentialism; the surrealists' interest in the unconscious mind leavened past an American affair-of-factness; the Mexican influence; and the formal vocabulary of European modernism - specially Kandinsky's abstruse expressionism of 1910-14, Mondrian, Picasso's Guernica, interwar cubism, and abstract surrealism. From cubism they took the shallow motion picture infinite and the business organisation with the picture plane. The biomorphic forms and automatist elements came from surrealism and Picasso'southward work of the thirties. Early Kandinskys inspired some of the freedom of brushwork and the painterliness, and his moral tone fueled the ethical seriousness of purpose. To these American artists of the forties Kandinsky represented romantic emotionalism and spontaneity, as opposed to Mondrian, who stood for strict planning, the denial of personality, and intellect.

Although each of the New York Schoolhouse artists reacted differently to these sources, they were at roughly the aforementioned phase of personal development in a item time (the forties) and place (New York). Except for Hofmann, they were all students in their twenties and early thirties when Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and Mexicans like Diego Rivera (1886-1957) were prominent in New York. As immature men and women, many of them worked on the Federal Art Project, although between 1942 and 1949 all the major artists of the New York School except Hofmann transcended their early influences to achieve a distinctive personal style, and all placed paramount accent on content or meaningful subject thing in their art, which was predominantly abstract. They took this opinion in opposition to the widespread do of what they regarded as a banal formalist abstraction dominated by the American followers of Mondrian such as Uya Bolotowsky and Burgoyne Diller. In add-on they all believed in the absolute individuality of the artist, for which reason they unanimously denied the thought that they coalesced into a movement. Indeed all but Hofmann objected to the term "abstract expressionism," which, they felt, linked them to the expressionist and abstract artists of preceding generations; past dissimilarity they saw their work as arising out of unique acts of private introspection.

The artists in this circle as well had an interest in myth as a source of art. They looked to aboriginal Greek literature as well as to "primitive" cultures for a more than authentic connectedness with the underlying forces of nature, especially human nature, than contemporary Western club seemed to provide. Around 1940 Pollock and Rothko in particular had begun reading the theories of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who postulated "archetypes" in the private unconscious which belonged to a "commonage unconscious," connecting all of humankind. These archetypes, he idea, manifested themselves in myth. Pollock had undergone some Jungian therapy, and in general the writings of both Jung and Freud were a major topic of discussion amidst educated people in the forties and fifties. Myths of rebirth and renewal had a particularly nifty attraction for the artists of the New York School as a metaphor for their increasingly spontaneous methods of painting.

Yet for all that they had in mutual, the leading figures of the New York School had of import philosophical differences besides. Hofmann, for instance, disliked surrealism and shunned the psychological orientation of most of the others. Gorky centered his aesthetic on a hidden but predefined subject area matter, which he transformed through psychic metamorphosis (using surrealist automatism). This process was directly at odds with the premises of his friends de Kooning and Pollock, who used painting as an human action of discovery rather than representation. Run across also: Jackson Pollock'south paintings (1940-56). Motherwell'south persistent sense of formal continuity with French modernism, especially Matisse, fix him autonomously from the others, and only de Kooning centered his attention for most of his career on the human figure.

The art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906-78) (who was as much a part of the grouping every bit any of the artists) once remarked that the simply thing on which these artists could all agree was that there was nix on which they could agree," and in hindsight the differences in their styles and theories of art seem as pronounced every bit the similarities. In a broad sense their radical individuality stood in opposition to the emergence of mass culture, which Rosenberg discussed in a 1948 essay entitled "The Herd of Contained Minds."

Automatism and Action-Painting in the New York School

Automatism seemed to be the ideal device for artists and then concerned with radical individualism. The artists of the New York School viewed it as a technique for generating form that did non impose style. In the offset Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, and Gottlieb used automatism to create forms which they would develop through free clan as the abstract surrealists Matta, Miro, and Masson had done. And so in the mid-forties Pollock, and increasingly Motherwell too, departed from the surrealist concept by using automatism as a device for objectifying an intense conscious experience every bit it was unfolding, rather than as a means of bringing forth unconscious material for association or of using unconscious thought processes to modify imagery. (For more, please run into Automatism in Art.)

Rothko abandoned automatism entirely every bit he entered his mature manner in the tardily forties; and it remained but in a more limited role in Gottlieb's work. In Gorky'due south mature work (from 1944) he was selecting his discipline matter in a deliberate classical mode, using automatism but to camouflage and enrich the images. Hofmann, de Kooning and Franz Kline (1910-1962) had never picked up on the surrealist technique, although the spontaneity of their improvisations resembled the gestural liberty which Pollock and Motherwell gleaned from automatism in the after forties. In the mid-forties the artists of the New York School gradually stopped evoking classical myths (to which both surrealist artists and the existentialist writers made frequent recourse) and they looked across surrealism toward a subject matter of fifty-fifty more firsthand and personal introspection.

Where the surrealists attempted to disorient the viewer and provoke unconscious revelations, for which they sought parallels in the myths of antiquity, the artists of the New York School turned abroad from the viewer altogether and wiped out the surrealists' theatrical distance. Increasingly Pollock, Motherwell and Smith viewed automatism only as a more than direct means of conveying the subjective experience itself. For them content was intrinsic to the human action of painting (or welding steel forms together, in the example of Smith) in that the process unearthed a vein of intensely felt experience on which the artist deliberated in pigment. The artist lived the painting entirely in the present, and the object was left over every bit an artifact of that outcome.

In this sense a painting by Pollock, de Kooning, or Kline embodied a spontaneous act of inventiveness that divers the style of the painting, the identity of the artist, and fifty-fifty art itself, in the process of painting. These artists turned the conceptual enactment into an object. They conceived each work as an uncompleted idea, still in process, and their canvases engaged the immediacy of the present with such directness and spontaneity that today, half a century subsequently, they look as if the paint is withal wet.

In 1952 Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting", modelled on his intimate noesis of de Kooning'southward working process. His essay, "The American Action Painters," brought into focus the paramount concern of de Kooning, Pollock, and Kline in particular (though Rosenberg did not unmarried them out by proper name), with the human activity of painting. Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and other remarkable women at the time also shared these aspirations in their piece of work only, as Ann Gibson has pointed out, "they were not seen." The social hierarchy of the forties and fifties, even in the art world, just wasn't open to the full participation of women or indigenous minorities. This began to change only at the end of the sixties. Nevertheless, for some of these women of the New York School, as for the activity painters, the canvas was not a representation only an extension of the mind itself, in which the creative person thought by changing the surface with his or her brush. Rosenberg saw the artist'south job as a heroic exploration of the most profound issues of personal identity and experience in relation to the big questions of the homo condition.

Action and Existentialism

The Depression and the Federal Art Projection, the Spanish Ceremonious War, and World War Ii gave rise to political activism and a mentality of action. Pollock, de Kooning, and others in their circle sought to express this with a style in which the artist defined art in the act of making it. No part of the process in an action painting is purely technical; everything is a meaningful gesture inseparable from the artist's biography, according to Rosenberg. Likewise, in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, activeness was the means of knowing oneself in relation to the world.

In an essay of 1944 Sartre (the leading postwar existentialist) explained: "In a word, man must create his ain essence; it is in throwing himself into the world, in struggling with it, that - little past little - he defines himself." In his book "The Wall" (a archetype short story of 1939) Sartre describes how confrontation with expiry causes the characters to reexperience everything as if new. This thought of starting from scratch with merely immediate experience parallels the attitude of the New York School artists to the act of painting.

From the point of view of postwar American art, existentialism had its well-nigh meaning influence from 1945 and 1946, when the works of existentialists similar Kafka, Sartre, and then Heidegger began to appear in English. Works by others similar Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche were all available in translation earlier and had already had an enormous effect on modern art and thought.

Colour Field Painting

Emerging slightly after than "Activity-Painting", and in consummate contrast to the latter's frantic gesturalism, Colour Field was a more passive, more than reflective and more than emotional style of abstract expressionist painting pioneered past Marker Rothko, Barnett Newman (1905-70) and Clyfford However (1904-eighty). Characterized by enormous works featuring broad expanses of colour, Colour Field paintings were designed to create an intimate relationship with the individual spectator. Equally Rothko said, "I paint large to be intimate." For more data nigh Colour Field, run across: Marker Rothko's Paintings (1938-lxx).

Painters and Critics: In and Around the New York School

The painters of the New York Schoolhouse met frequently in sure bars (like the Cedar Tavern but above Washington Square), in automats and cafes, or in studios around Greenwich Village. The critics Clement Greenberg (1909-94) (noted for his afterward theories almost Post Painterly Abstraction), Thomas Hess and Rosenberg, as well every bit the art historian Meyer Schapiro, were an integral role of this oversupply. [Encounter besides John Canaday (1907-85) and Leo Steinberg (1920-2011.] Greenberg - writing chiefly for the Nation and Partisan Review - liked Hofmann'south "laws" and attacked surrealism for reversing the anti-pictorial trend of cubism and abstract art. He criticized Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie" (1944, MOMA) as wavering and bad-mannered and denounced Kandinsky for his non-cubist picture show infinite. Writing in the Nation in 1944, he admonished: "The extreme eclecticism at present prevailing in art is unhealthy and it should be counteracted, even at the take a chance of dogmatism and intolerance." Though he seemed to desire everyone to march in step, he often demonstrated a keen eye for formal quality.

Rosenberg came from a literary background and loved to defend intellectual values deep into the night. Similar the existentialists he championed individuality and the unexpected and he felt genuine sympathy with the creative struggle of artists. Instead of laying downwardly the law to artists, every bit Greenberg increasingly tried to practise, Rosenberg, more than than any other writer, entered into a dialog with them. By identifying closely with their work, Rosenberg successfully extended the bug they raised pictorially into the realm of words and at times caustically took them to task when he plant their ideas ethically questionable or intellectually shallow. Both Rosenberg and Greenberg had their ain creative agendas as writers, and neither can be taken as a spokesman for the artists' intentions. Hess provided a more objective account of the artists only probably influenced them and the scene less as a result. Schapiro'southward great contribution was as a instructor and friend whose eye the artists respected. Schapiro'south lectures at Columbia, as Motherwell had pointed out, made art seem important and worthy of serious thought; as a friend, he talked with artists in their studios near their piece of work and oft introduced them to new ideas as well as to ane another.

At that place was also much abstraction on the New York scene in the thirties and forties that had nothing to do with the motives backside the New York School, fifty-fifty though many artists had personal ties which crossed these boundaries. Burgoyne Diller, for example, took his inspiration from a formalistic reading of Mondrian and of the Parisian Abstraction-Creation grouping; yet in the early on forties he was an of import friend to Jackson Pollock. The classes of Hans Hofmann also turned out many formalistic abstruse painters - indeed the hard core of geometric brainchild was a group founded in 1936 and called "The American Abstract Artists," more than half of whose organizers were one-time pupils of Hofmann'south. Advertizement Reinhardt, who became a prophet of the sixties style of minimalism, was perhaps the virtually articulate and interesting fellow member of this group.

Mark Tobey, who founded his abstract style on Zen Buddhism, had lived primarily in Seattle and Europe rather than New York. He was nonetheless a gimmicky of the artists of the New York School and showed at the Willard Gallery aslope David Smith. Like them he reacted confronting the materialism of the burgeoning mass culture of the late forties. "Nosotros have occupied ourselves also much with the outer, the objective," he said, "at the expense of the inner world." Born in 1890 Tobey traveled to the Far Eastward in the thirties where he studied Zen calligraphy in a Japanese monastery. During the forties he adult his so-called "white writing" and acquired a major international reputation.

Past the 1950s the New York School was widely recognized as the leading edge of the international avant-garde and many younger artists adopted its stylistic grammar. But the starting-bespeak of these 2d-generation artists tended to be an appreciation of the painterly quality of the abstruse-expressionist brushstroke rather than existential motives of the sort that prompted the work of the artists of the New York School. In this sense the truthful heirs of the New York School were not the gestural painters of the fifties only the writers of the "beat" generation and the funk assemblagists, who metamorphosed the New York School's romantic imagery of the alienated genius into the militant social pariah, as exemplified by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Norman Mailer. By 1960 other movements with their own radical ideas had emerged, and the New York School had turned into a disparate handful of old masters. Nevertheless David Smith fabricated some of his about innovative work between 1960 and 1965, and the late styles of Philip Guston (1913-80), de Kooning, Motherwell and his partner Helen Frankenthaler went on to interruption important new ground in the sixties and seventies. For more about such trends in contemporary art, see: Lyrical Brainchild and Hard Edge Painting.

Abstract expressionist works by members of the New York School can be seen in some of the all-time art museums in the world.

REFERENCES
The above article includes textile from the book Fine art Since 1940 (Laurence Rex Publishing, 2000): an invaluable work for all students of 20th century visual art. Nosotros gratefully acknowledge the employ of this material.

• For a chronological guide to the development of the visual arts, see: History of Fine art Timeline.
• For more well-nigh modern American painting and sculpture, see: Homepage.

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