This raises the question:
Is it possible to understand modern art without understanding the period in which it was made?
I believe it’s hard to appreciate a piece of abstract art without having some idea of why it was made in the first place. And the vast majority of modern art is abstract. Modernist art critic and art historian Michael Fried explains it thus: “Roughly speaking, the history of painting from Manet through Synthetic Cubism and Matisse may be characterized in terms of the gradual withdrawal of painting from the task of representing reality.” Abstract expressionists took things one step further by removing an identifiable subject matter.
Why would artists choose to do this? Well, it depends on who you ask. Jackson Pollock is famously quoted as saying “New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements… The modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.”
Allen Leepa echoes this statement, writing “The sensitivities and insights that a great work of art offers come out of a unique set of experiential factors that cannot be duplicated. Each individual in each age synthesizes in his own unique way the elements of experience as they relate to a language of communication.”
To fully understand abstract expressionism, one has to travel back to the 1920s, the golden age of modern art in Europe. The French called it Années folles — “the crazy years” in English. “Paris was the center of the artistic universe then,” writes Joseph Berger of the New York Times. Artists from all over Europe were converging on the famed city. Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Henri Matisse were all in their prime then, and they were all working in Paris. If you had any interest in modern art whatsoever, Paris was the place to be — until 1940, when the Nazis came to town.
Modern art came to America in the form of migrant Europeans escaping Nazi invasion. They started leaving Germany as early as the 1920s; Germany wasn’t doing well financially after WWI, and the country’s growing conservatism sent many more liberal Germans running for the U.S. One of these early migrants was Emmy “Galka” Scheyer, an art dealer who promoted European works in L.A. Another was the influential art teacher, Hans Hoffman.
But most German immigrants came to the U.S. after Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933. Based on historical estimates, somewhere in the range of 200 to 700 artists emigrated to the U.S. between 1933 and 1944. This includes many famous artists, not just from Germany, but from all over Europe.
For those that didn’t emigrate, things weren’t going well. In 1934, the Nazis launched an assault on the avant-garde art that had become so popular in Europe during the 1920s. The Nazis deemed these new experimental art forms — expressionism, surrealism, dadaism — “degenerate art.” Avant-garde painters were fired from their teaching positions. This included the famous German expressionists Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Karl Hofer, Paul Klee, and Max Pechstein. The Nazis physically removed all modern art from museum walls, and displayed it in Munich in 1937 as part of their Degenerate Art exhibition.
Things weren’t much better in Stalin’s Soviet Union, which instituted Socialist realism as the official art form in 1932. In 1934, socialist realism was defined as realist artwork that depicts everyday life in Soviet Russia in a positive light. It was essentially political propaganda, and any other form of art was expressly forbidden. Artists responded by either adopting the style of socialist realism or emigrating to the U.S.
The plight of the European modernists didn’t go unnoticed by American artists. After its censorship in Nazi Germany, modern art became more valuable in the U.S., according to art historian Keith Holz. American art museums and collectors started buying and displaying this “degenerate art,” giving American audiences their first taste of modern art.
Those modernists who left their home countries and traveled to the U.S. were making and displaying their own art on U.S. soil. But most importantly, they were teaching. The most important émigré art teachers, according to historian Marion Deshmukh, were Josef Albers, George Grosz, Hans Hoffman, and László Moholy-Nagy. These were the modern art teachers of the American artists who would later become abstract expressionists.
“Since the War every twentieth-century style in painting is being brought to profusion in the United States,” wrote Harold Rosenberg, “thousands of ‘abstract’ painters — crowded teaching courses in Modern Art — a scattering of new heroes — ambitions stimulated by new galleries, mass exhibitions, reproductions in popular magazines, festivals, appropriations.”
Hans Hoffman’s legacy is perhaps the greatest, as many of his students went on to become prominent abstract expressionists whose works still hang in galleries today. Just walking through the Museum of Fine Art’s Acheson Gallery, I could see artwork from two of Hoffman’s students — Perle Fine and Michael Goldberg. Hoffman also taught Allen Leepa, whose work is hanging in the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs.
I wish I could tell you that everyone was excited about all this new artwork coming to the U.S., but the truth is, most people didn’t like it. In 1946, when the State Department bought up a bunch of modern art from American artists — a total of 79 paintings at a cost of $49,000 — people were extremely critical of the government’s purchase.
According to art historian Jane de Hart Mathews, the American Artists Professional League objected to the collection on the grounds that it was “tainted with radical European trends not indigenous to our soil.” Technically, they were right. Although the work was done by American artists, it was also done in European styles that had migrated to the U.S. But my favorite description of the exhibition came from the New York Journal American, which referred to the paintings as “a lunatic’s delight.”
I wish I could tell you that no one tried to censor these artists in the U.S., but that isn’t true, either.
Continue to Part 3, in which we see how modern art got all wrapped up in McCarthyism and Cold War nonsense. And also subscribe to Creative Loafing's weekly Do This newsletter.
This article appears in Jan 3-10, 2019.
