| Synopsis: |
A study by Edward Lucie-Smith considers aspects of European Post-War modernism and Abstract Expressionism created by American Artists in the 1950s. It is based on an exhibition of Picasso Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery and Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy London.The emergence of Abstract Expressionism in America during the war years, and its worldwide triumph in the immediately post-war period, was significant in all kinds of ways, not all of the entirely to do with art. Some of the leading Abstract Expressionist artists were immigrants - de Kooning, for example, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky - but they identified with the culture of America, specifically that of New York, and became part of it.Though New York received a great charge of cultural energy from European refugees during the war, especially from those connected to the Surrealist Movement, which had been the dominant artistic force in continental Europe immediately before the conflict, Abstract Expressionism was felt to have something intrinsically American about it, both in its emphasis on untrammeled emotional freedom and the primacy of the motions of the individual self, and also in its indifference to the social issues that had pre-occupied the pre-war Parisian avant-garde, and which still to some extent continued to preoccupy its survivors after the war. Old style Surrealism retained a nostalgic and largely unrewarded longing for an alliance with the politics of the Communist-leaning left.The CIA recognized this, and recognized, too, that this new American artistic movement represented not only a bid for cultural hegemony but also an immediately effective riposte to the Socialist Realism that was the official artistic style of Soviet Russia and its Eastern European satellites.Ignoring the outrage of American cultural conservatives at home, the CIA therefore did much to promote Abstract Expressionism in Europe through covert support of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.In Europe itself the avant-gardists who had survived the war, often in difficult material circumstances, struggled to re-organize themselves and re-assert the long established dominance of the School of Paris. Much of this effort centered round the personality of Picasso, whose prodigious ability to reinvent himself and his work seemed - to committed admirers at least - to be undiminished.If Pollock, impeccably American, undoubtedly a central figure in the Abstract Expressionist Movement, represented the new world of art in more than one sense of that phrase, Picasso, post-war, stood for what had been inherited from the heroic years of Modernist experiment in the early decades of the 20th century. Experimental art in Europe in the immediately post-war years was also colored by new developments in philosophical thinking that had yet to make an impact in America. Existentialism, in particular, had a powerful influence.Giacometti became, almost without consciously seeking to be so, a standard-bearer for Existentialist art. |