New York Art New York's Post WWII Essay

New York Art

New York's Post WWII Art Scene

After World War II, so many parts of Europe were in ruin. Economies were shattered, new governments worked to gain mandates for their authority and the people of Europe's countless and once rich cultural centers struggled to establish new identities. And following more than a decade of fascism, genocide and territorial war, many of the intellectually and culturally elite talents had departed the content for a context more hospitable to freedom and creativity. Relative to what they found in the spread of fascism, the United States would prove itself not just as the newly dominant military and commercial power in the world but also art center of the world. With devastation persistent throughout the great cities of Europe, New York emerged as the capital of the modern art world and so many of the innovations that would extend there from in the ensuing decades.

In many ways, what began to occur in New York in the years immediately and eventually following the war represented a continuity from the evolution taking place in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That is, a focus on the abstract processes of the psyche, of the mind, of emotion and of the human condition would enter into this mode of visual expression. From Picasso's cubism to Duchamp's dadism to Dali's surrealism, the focus of European art before and during the war had largely been to find ways of visually expressing internal processes. This exact notion found flight in the works of those artists who made New York their home following the war, but in a mode that was inherently more American in its material abstractions. And on this point, artists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock began to move abstract expressionism into a place of dominance. The Dayton Art Institute characterizes the work of Rothko, Pollock and their colleagues as Abstract Expressionism and the output of this group of painters would define the next phase in visual art.

This would include such figures as Norman Lewis, whose Twilight Sounds (1947), used highly complex, tightly intertwined and irregular geometric shapes to create fields of abstract imagery (http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/action_abstraction/jm-aa_08_04.htm); Willem de Kooning, whose Fire Island (1946) recklessly defied conventions of visual appeal to express human tumult (http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/willem-de-kooning/fire-island) and Arshile Gorky, whose The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1943) offers an arrangement of colored shapes tangled in a circus of compelling visual forms (http://calitreview.com/5339). A contrast to the colors used by Gorky, Franz Kline's Chief (1950) offers stark black figures of menacing ambiguity (MoMA); Barnett Newman whose Onement 1(1948) experimented with shading textures in individual shades, brown in this case (http://paulcorio.blogspot.com/2008/07/paintings-i-like-pt-21.html) and Clyfford Still, whose Untitled 1957 work (http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/310) employs simple shade variants on a small set of correlated colors to bring out aggressive emotional responses.

In these examples, abstract expressionism was finding myriad different incarnations, though most shared a similar point of ideological origin. According to the Dayton Art Institute, this group of artists "recognized that while abstract art might lack a recognizable subject, it did not have to give up content. And like the age in which they lived, that content was complex: they drew upon diverse philosophies, myths, Freudian and Jungian psychology and even the symbolism of native peoples. The resulting works were rich with meaning. As Rothko stated, these artists 'favor[ed] the simple expression of the complex thought.'" (DAI, p. 1)

Certainly, evidence of this claim…