1940s: Impetus

This resentment towards culture is to be found where the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and Puritanism, and latest of all, in fascism. Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood's health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-smashing commences. - Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch

1930s

1936 – The first of Stalin’s Soviet Show trials take place, creating an international schism between Stalinists and Trotskyites.

1936 – Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in Paris while exiled from his native Germany. In 1936, Benjamin had written The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction while exiled in Paris. He used the essay to examine the role of mass art, and particularly film, by charting the historical uses of art in relation to (and service of) the state and the community. Art, he argued, and especially visceral pre-literate visual art, was effectively a form of manipulative emotional governance. It had served that purpose in the church and it was serving that purpose in the state, eventually helping to solidify the totalitarian regimes he was fleeing. In the climate of 1930s Europe, this was not only a logical use of culture, it was an inevitable one. Public art was designed to reproduce, either accurately or idealistically, the world as it was or as it could be, an instinctively understood and recognizable reality. Private art, on the other hand, could only challenge and disrupt that understanding. The notion of “art for art’s sake” – unhitched from practical function, unaccountable to the state, and answering solely to its own aesthetic demands and satisfactions – was an explicit rejection of the traditional (subservient) relationship between the art and the state, and had no place in the all-inclusive totalitarian regime. The totalitarians instinctively understood the socio-political power of mass art.

     Not only was art political, the political had become art, and to accuse Hitler of cynicism in this regard is to misunderstand his vision of the Reich. He sincerely believed himself to be “German’s Sculptor” and his aesthetic concerns extended beyond mere political manipulation. Throughout his reign, he routinely expressed his power through pageant and spectacle, art, architecture, film and design. As Albert Speer later commented: “I had long through that all these formations, processions, dedications were part of a clever propagandistic revue. Now I finally understood that for Hitler they were almost like rites of the founding of a Church.” As with a church, Hitler’s vision was collective and ritualistic. What he offered and demanded from his people was total complicity in his utopian aesthetic superstructure, orchestrated by his own aesthetic sensibilities, all in service to his state. “Fascism,” Benjamin wrote, “sees its salvation in allowing the masses to find their voice … Fascism seeks to give them a voice in retaining that structure unaltered. Fascism leads logically to an aestheticization of political life.”

Germany's Sculptor: "Bulls and Greeks and naked broads..."

     The totalitarian regime also saw the potential thread of an unaccountable avant-garde for what it was. Hitler pledged to “wage a merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of cultural disintegration … all those cliques of chatterers, dilettantes, art forgers will be picked up and liquidated.” Every aesthetic function was necessarily a political function as well, and so any art that shrugged off its service to the state by stressing impressionistic or expressionistic – both inherently individualistic – viewpoints was a deviation from the collective whole and thereby corrupting, suspect, and undermining. Individualism was antithetical to the whole, and any art that contradicted the collective narrative of National Socialism was to be eliminated, a point later echoed by critic Robert Hughes: “That which was inward must be outlawed. This was the essence of Totalitarianism.”

1937 – Degenerate Art Exhibition, Munich.

1938 – Clement Greenberg’s “Avant Garde and Kitsch” appears in the newly-formed “Partisan Review,” itself a decisive move away from the more didactically Marxist left in New York.

Greenberg recognized this political manipulation.

Where today a political regime establishes an official cultural policy, it is for the sake of demagogy. If kitsch is the official tendency of culture in Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not because their respective governments are controlled by philistines, but because kitsch is the culture of the masses in these countries, as it is everywhere else. The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.

1939 – Hitler invades Poland, World War Two begins.

1940s

1940 (August) - Trotsky killed in Mexico City.

1940 (September) – Walter Benjamin commits suicide on the Spanish border. By 1940 Hitler had begun making good on his threats. Of those chatterers, dilettantes, and art forgers, those that could leave did, many for the United States. Others didn’t make it, among them Walter Benjamin. In September 1940, he shot himself on the French/Spanish border, believing escape to be impossible. Germany had taken Paris that June, and France was no longer distance enough to save him. He was forty-eight years old.

1943 – “By 1943, Pollock, I know, was taking it for granted that any kind of American art that could not compete on equal terms with European Art was not worth bothering with.” – Clement Greenberg

1941 – Peggy Guggenheim arrives in New York on a Pan Am Clipper, bringing with her a collection of Avant-Garde European art and Avant-Garde European artists, including Max Ernst and Andre Breton. They quickly re-create a Parisian art scene in exile.

Their biggest problems were air-sickness and boredom.

1943 – Peggy Guggenheim commissions Jackson Pollock to paint a wall-sized “Mural” for her Manhattan townhouse, a work which he famously completed in one day.

1943 – Jackson Pollock’s first one-man show, at the “Art of This Century” gallery (owned by Peggy Guggenheim).

1943 – Allies land in Italy.

1943 - Sam Shepard, nee Steve Rogers, born in Ft. Sheridan, Illinois.

1944 (June) – Allies land in Normandy.

1944 – Liberation of Paris.

1944 – Lucien Carr, a Columbia University friend of Kerouac and Ginsberg, stabs David Kammerer to death in Riverside Park, before rolling his body into the Hudson River. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and William Burroughs are all implicated in the crime.

1945 – Allen Ginsberg expelled from Columbia University, where he had met Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr as fellow undergraduates, after writing anti-Semitic graffiti on a dorm-room wall and for suspected homosexual activity.

1945 – Second World War ends in Europe (April) and Asia (August).

1946 – Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs meet Neal Cassady in New York. Beginnings of the “Beat” Movement.

1946 – After returning home from the Pacific, Frank O’Hara begins studies at Harvard. There he meets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Beginnings of the “New York School.”

1946 – De Kooning moves takes a studio at 85 4^th Avenue.

1947 – Jane Jacobs and her family move into 555 Hudson Street, a former candy store with an apartment above, in a then-still-working-class stretch of Greenwich Village.

1947 (October) – The first three hundred families move into Levittown, in Nassau County.

1947 – The State Department, in an attempt to answer Soviet charges that America was a cultural desert, organizes an international exhibition of Abstract Expressionism, “Advancing American Art.” The pushback from Washington D.C. is immediate. A congressman declared: “I’m just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash.” President Harry Truman remarks, famously: “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot.” The tour is cancelled.

1948 – De Kooning has his first one-man show at the gallery of his dealer Charlie Egan (who has as much interest in de Kooning’s wife, Elaine, as he does in de Kooning’s work), on East 57^th Street. There were ten paintings on exhibition, not one sold. Egan extends the exhibition run, but to no avail and to de Kooning’s embarrassment. He was forty-four years old.

1949 (August) – “Life” magazine, owned by Henry Luce, publishes a two-page color spread featuring Jackson Pollock and entitled “Is This the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” Luce, whose own artistic tastes are far too conservative to embrace Abstract Expressionism, is a reluctant booster of the avant-garde. However, he is convinced by Nelson Rockefeller, a politically conservative but aesthetically daring figure in the world of New York politics and art, that to support Pollock is to support American advances and freedoms.

     In August 1949, Henry Luce’s Life Magazine published a two-page spread profiling Jackson Pollock, entitled “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” This wasn’t the first exposure Abstract Expressionism had in Life Magazine, but it was the first time a single artist from that still-obscure school was given such celebrity status in such an unabashedly middle-brow publication. Life’s uncredited writer attempted to capture in fascinated detail the unorthodox methods by which Pollock worked, the athleticism of his technique as well as the philosophy behind his approach. That was the story.

Working on the floor gives him room to scrabble around the canvas, attacking it from the top, the bottom or the side (if the pictures can be said to have a top, a bottom or a side) as the mood suits him. In this way, “I can … literally be in the painting.” He surrounds himself with quart cans of aluminium paint and many hues of household enamel. Then, starting anywhere on the canvas, he goes to work. Sometimes he dribbles the paint on with a brush. Sometimes he scrawls it on with a stick, scoops it with a trowel or even pours it straight out of the can. In with it all he deliberately mixes sand, broken glass, nails, screws or other foreign matter lying around. Cigarette ashes and an occasional dead bee sometimes get in the picture inadvertently … Once in a while a life-like image appears in the painting by mistake. But Pollock cheerfully rubs it out because the picture must retain “a life of its own.”

     The extent to which Pollock’s works were ever allowed a life of their own, divorced from the dramatic novelty of their creation or the enveloping mythology of their creator, is unclear. It’s remarkable the extent to which the artist’s own image was used in the marketing of his art from the beginning. Forever after, Pollock would be portrayed as an archetypical Western primitive man: unrefined and unspoiled, inarticulate and uncompromising, and an absolute rejection of pre-war European cultural dominance. Much was made of his Wyoming background, of the fact that he never visited Europe and apparently never felt the need to. He declared that he was nature, and the public agreed. Pollock exploited these Western tropes, striding through lower Manhattan in paint-splattered jeans and challenging other painters to barroom brawls in the Cedar Tavern. He may have been coarse (and rarely sober), but he was also ambitious and shrewdly self-aware. He played the part.

     In contrast to the great deal written about Pollock’s process in the Life article, almost nothing was said about the finished paintings themselves, perhaps for no other reason than that, in 1949 and outside the pages of The Partisan Review, a language didn’t yet exist to describe them. Crucial to the success of this coverage were the photographs that accompanied the article, taken in the artist’s rural Long Island studio and featuring not just the painting but the artist himself, posed brooding and cinematic, arms crossed and leaned up against one of his works (de Kooning was immediately sceptical of the pose; “Look at him standing there. He looks like some guy who works at a service station pumping gas”). This was to be a permanent feature of interest in Pollock’s work, throughout his career and beyond. Rosenberg had argued that biography was essential to the creation of this new art. It would prove to be just as essential to its reception. With the Life article, the notion of celebrity entered into the arena of the American avant-garde.

     The article was a well-timed and well-placed commercial boost for an artist who had until then only operated within the rarefied circles of downtown art and uptown wealth. Abstract Expressionism was becoming both commercially attractive and politically useful to a previously bemused middlebrow audience, now that the value of its authorship was established. Difficult Bohemianism was a commodity worth investing in, and many artists were quite willing to become as much the story as the art they produced. The paintings may have been abstract, but there was nothing abstract in the story of an uncompromising young artist starving in his garret. It was La Bohème on 8^th Street, and irresistible to the readers of Life Magazine. When Pollock’s one-man show opened at the Betty Parson’s Gallery on East 57^th Street in November, the opening night crowd was evenly divided between the Cedar Tavern set (including de Kooning) and curious new patrons there with an eye towards entering the market. As the critic Edwin Denby recalled: “Suddenly, there were people we didn’t know … and they were wearing suits, and there were ladies there with jewellery. These were people from somewhere else.” By the end of the evening, eighteen of Pollock’s twenty-seven paintings had been sold, and his reputation among the mainstream (albeit the Manhattan mainstream) had been solidified.

1949 – De Kooning, along with Franz Kline and Milton Resnick, form “The Club” at 39 East 8^th Street.

1949 – Andy Warhol moves to New York.

1949 (November) – Jackson Pollock’s one-man show at the Betty Parson’s Gallery on E. 57^th.