Why Did New York Became the Center of the Art World
© ALEX KATZ / VAGA
Alex Katz, "Ada Ada" (1959)
It'southward a commonplace to say that after 1940 the majuscule of the art globe moved from Paris to New York. Simply commonplaces are usually distortions created by looking in a rearview mirror, and this ane is no exception. Near 7 hundred European artists immigrated to the Usa after Paris fell to the Germans, in 1940, and nigh settled in New York City. Since people assumed that Paris would remain under Nazi command for the long haul, it looked like New York had get the de-facto heart of avant-garde art.
That supposition turned out to be mistaken, of grade, and when Paris was liberated, in 1944, about of the exiles returned to France as fast as they could, and the fine art world reverted to its prewar pattern: young American artists went to Paris. More than iii hundred of them studied and worked in Paris after the war, including Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell, Larry Rivers, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski.
New York did become the center of the art globe eventually, simply it took another ten or 15 years. The reason is that an "art globe" is not an abstraction. Information technology refers to an bodily world, a customs of people who foster the production, exhibition, appreciation, and, ideally, sales of gimmicky art. It ways a network of galleries, dealers, collectors, curators, museum officials and trustees, and critics. A network did emerge in New York Metropolis after 1945, just not overnight. In 1955, there were a hundred and 20-three galleries in the city; in 1965, in that location were two hundred and twoscore-six. "Inventing Downtown," a fascinating exhibition at New York Academy's Grayness Art Gallery, tells office of the story of how that happened, how New York developed an fine art world. The show is guest-curated by Melissa Rachleff.
The focus is on artist-run galleries—co-ops—mostly on or around Tenth Street (although other types of galleries are represented) and on the period 1952 to 1965. That year marks the betoken at which American avant-garde fine art went mainstream (i.e., moved uptown). Virtually of these downtown galleries had the lifespan of a snap on Snapchat: City Gallery, on Sixth Artery, from November, 1958, to May, 1959; Reuben Gallery, on Fourth, from October, 1959, to June, 1960; 112 Chambers Street, from December, 1960, to June, 1961. The last was the accost of Yoko Ono's fourth-floor loft, an of import space for musicians, such every bit La Monte Young, as well as for artists, the best known of which is probably the sculptor/performance artist Robert Morris.
You can read in books about these figures and these spaces, of course. What is revelatory about the Grey Gallery bear witness are the dozens of works on display from that flow. Two things jump out. The first is the number of women artists. Although it took years for some of them to be recognized, there were notable women artists amidst the Abstruse Expressionists—the showtime group of American painters to striking the large time subsequently 1945. But the narrative of postwar American art tends to be populated by male envelope-pushers: Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. In "Inventing Downtown," we see the envelope being pushed, in a wide variety of artistic styles, by women: Jane Wilson, Martha Edelheit, Mary Frank (represented by a stunning forest sculpture, "Reclining Figure"), and many others.
The other striking impression—again, something it helps to run into to appreciate—is how much formal experimentation and theoretical ferment there was in New York art between 1952 (the year by which the Abstract Expressionists had established themselves) and 1965. You can come across these downtown artists attempting solve a problem inherent in the term "Abstract Expressionism" itself. That term is an oxymoron: if something is abstract, it can't express. So there arose a push-pull between abstract forms and figuration (the aforementioned thing was happening in Europe) that yielded a rich variety of original work.
It's moving, really, to see virtually all the contemporary art modes that would become mainstream by the mid-nineteen-sixties being adumbrated in these tiny gallery spaces x years before: Pop, Minimalism, performance, Conceptual art, poster art, political art, found fine art. And that fine art, the fine art of the mid-sixties, is basically the ground from which gimmicky art yet grows. At the Grey, you lot can see how, in fugitive spaces scattered around a city that had yet fully to embrace advanced art, dozens of artists, most now largely forgotten, sowed the seeds.
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Source: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/thirteen-crucial-years-for-art-in-downtown-new-york
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