FROM MODERNISM TO POST-MODERNISM POST-WAR ART IN AMERICA After the Second World War, the art world was characterized by “triumphalism” in New York and a feeling of having won, not just a military war but also a cultural war. The French and their School of Paris had...
How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art: Abstract Expressionism and Content To work as an artist in New York City during the 1940s was to work in what the Chinese curse called “interesting times. The Abstract Expressionist artists of the New York...
The Historical Context of Abstract Expressionism The historical context of Abstract Expressionism can perhaps best be mapped out according to the theories of Pierre Bourdieu who coined the phrase “the field of cultural production.” What was the “field” which...
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF The Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 1939 by Clement Greenberg What is life? If one paraphrases the painter, Ad Reinhardt, “Life is everything that is not art or art is everything that is not life…” which means that much has been excluded from...
THE ART SCENE SHIFTS FROM EUROPE TO AMERICA In 1983, art historian, Serge Guilbaut, wrote a provocatively titled book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. How, indeed? While the first chapter of this book discusses the politics of the New York intelligentsia...