The avant-garde artists of the New York School instead embraced an “inherently ambiguous and unresolved, an open-ended modern art… which encouraged liberation through personal, autonomous acts of expression.” The works of the Abstract Expressionists were “revolutionary attempts” to liberate the larger American culture “from the alienating conformity and pathological fears that permeated the post-war era.” Rothko claimed that “after the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb you couldn’t paint figures without mutilating them.” His friend and fellow artist Adolph Gottlieb, declared that: “Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. … With New Deal dreams of reform in ruins, and the better “tomorrow” prophesied at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair having seemingly led only to the carnage of World War II, it is not surprising that post-war artists largely abandoned the art styles and political cultures associated with the Great Depression. Corporate liberalism triumphed: together, big government and big business forged a planned economy and engineered a new social contract based on free market expansion. the multicultural project), ‘a broad and inclusive culture’ in which cultural differences were esteemed.” Doss notes how this ideological shift manifested itself among the artists who became the Abstract Expressionists:Īs full employment returned, New Deal programs were terminated - including federal support for the arts - the reformist spirit that had flourished in the 1930s dissipated. Willem de Kooning defied the trend - though had to ingratiate himself with the Jewish intellectual and cultural elite focused around the journal Partisan Review which was “dominated by editors and contributors with a Jewish ethnic identity and a deep alienation from American cultural and political institutions.” įor Jewish writer Alain Rogier, it seems “hardly a coincidence that Jews made up a large percentage of the leading Abstract Expressionists.” It was an art movement where the culture of critique of Jewish artists, frustrated that the post-war American prosperity prevented the coming of international socialism, turned inward and instead “proposed individualistic modes of liberation.” This mirrored the ideological shift that occurred among the New York Intellectuals generally who had “gradually evolved away from advocacy of socialist revolution toward a shared commitment to anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism (i.e. Prominent gentile artists within the movement like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell married Jewish women (Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler). It was a movement populated by legions of Jewish artists, intellectuals, critics, and patrons. Abstract Expressionism and the Culture of CritiqueĪbstract Expressionism was disproportionately a Jewish cultural phenomenon.
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