Movements in Art since 1945 [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE 'Late modern' In 1945. a world war ended. Such dates form convenient dividing lines for the historians of art. In this case, the hne is more than merely 'convenient', as it coincides with a genuine crisis in the development of twentieth-century painting and sculpture. It was at about this time that the visual arts embarked on a new course, whose direction might have been difficult to predict in 1939. In part, the changes were due to the war itself Where so much had altered, art could not expect to survive untouched by events. Europe was battered and exhausted. In the countries invaded by the Germans, modern artists had had great difficulty in surviving. The energies of the Ecole de Paris had been drained by a massive emigration. Meanwhile, the United States had been estabhshed (together with Russia, where Stalinism and sociahst realism still reigned) as one of the two world powers, and the richer and more powerful of the two. From the early 1930s onwards, the artistic life of America, and especially of New York, had been enriched by wave upon wave of émigrés, in flight from the Nazi terror. These new arrivals were absorbed more easily than they would have been elsewhere, because the population of the United States was itself an amalgam from all the European homelands. It would be too much to claim, however, that post-war art represented something wholly new and unprecedented. Its roots lay deep in the rich soil of modernism, which had got its start as the century dawned. Indeed, the art we now see being created by our contemporaries seems to me 'late modern' almost in the sense that Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is 'late baroque'. If one accepts that modernism can be regarded as a stylistic category - like mannerism, the baroque, or neo-classicism - then it has certainly had a remarkably long run.