The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s

A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds

Catherine Dossin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317017677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

In The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s, Catherine Dossin challenges the now-mythic perception of New York as the undisputed center of the art world between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a position of power that brought the city prestige, money, and historical recognition. Dossin reconstructs the concrete factors that led to the shift of international attention from Paris to New York in the 1950s, and documents how 'peripheries' such as Italy, Belgium, and West Germany exerted a decisive influence on this displacement of power. As the US economy sank into recession in the 1970s, however, American artists and dealers became increasingly dependent on the support of Western Europeans, and cities like Cologne and Turin emerged as major commercial and artistic hubs - a development that enabled European artists to return to the forefront of the international art scene in the 1980s. Dossin analyses in detail these changing distributions of geopolitical and symbolic power in the Western art worlds - a story that spans two continents, forty years, and hundreds of actors. Her transnational and interdisciplinary study provides an original and welcome supplement to more traditional formal and national readings of the period.

1

“Art … a language that should unite”: The Diversity of the Postwar Art Worlds

In the preface to the catalogue of the 1948 Venice Biennale, Giovanni Ponti declared: “Art invites all mankind beyond national frontiers, beyond ideological barriers, to a language that should unite it in an intense humanism and a universal family against every Babel-like division and dissonance.”¹ The world in which the first postwar Biennale was taking place was indeed in dire need of unity and solace. World War II had split the world open, creating breaches between countries that did not close when the fighting ended. The physical and moral situation of post-Nazi Germany and post-fascist Italy could not be compared with the situations in liberated France and Belgium, which were equally very different from that of England or the United States.

As the reality of the Cold War progressively took hold, the separation between the countries widened, even within the Western bloc, because in each country the implications and meanings of the Cold War differed. In France or Italy, communism had an aura of prestige due to its role in the resistance, and consequently it became an important political force. Within Belgium, the zone of influence of the Parti communiste de Belgique (PCB) was limited to the industrial areas of Wallonia. The opposition between communists and non-communists was thus lost within the larger division between Wallonia and Flanders. In the United States, communists were not seen as heroes of the resistance but as enemies. As the image of the Red Menace prevailed, McCarthyism officially deemed members of the Communist Party traitors. When Pablo Picasso joined the Parti communiste français (PCF) in 1944, he received a letter signed by a number of American artists and intellectuals begging him to reconsider his decision. Picasso was reportedly puzzled by the Americans’ fear of communism: in his village, everybody was a communist—the butcher, the baker, the teacher—and they were all charming people.² In Germany, the situation was even more different. There, the division of the world into two opposing ideologies was not an abstract, political concept but a reality that tore families apart.³

In this divided and divisive context, art—more precisely abstract art—was often presented in the West as a universal language able to overcome national divisions and unite humankind. But could and did art overcome the divisions engendered by the experience of the war and Cold War? Could and did American Abstract Expressionism serve as the West’s shared language against Soviet Social Realism? Even if abstract art had dominated Western postwar art scenes, would it not have assumed different forms and meanings on each national scene? All the more so, since the interruption of international artistic exchanges between 1939 and 1945 had led to independent and singular artistic developments: while French artists had developed a national style based on the Cubist grid of Georges Braque and the Fauvist palette of Henri Matisse, American artists had taken on the techniques of the Surrealists and German Expressionists exiled in the United States.⁴

To respond to these questions, the geopolitical method requires us to consider the specific situation of the different Western countries in the immediate postwar period, and to examine how these different situations affected national artistic practices and polemics.⁵

Rebuilding, Re-educating, and Redefining Germany

In the smoking ruins of postwar Germany, basic living conditions were terrible and seemingly not at all conducive to the practice of art. The country was divided and occupied. Its ravaged industry could not meet the basic needs of a population exhausted by years of totaler Krieg. Millions of Germans had been made homeless by bombings, and populations continued to be displaced in the years immediately after the war. In many cases, city dwellers still lived underground in the bunkers they had used during British and American air raids. The cities above them were almost uninhabitable, and construction materials were scarce. German museums and art collections offered the same image of desolation even as they began, against all odds, to rebuild.

In 1948 Prolog, a group of Germans and Americans, published a report on the condition of German museums. The picture they drew was tragic, as museums were categorized according to such rubrics as “repairable,” “perhaps capable of repair,” and “lost.”⁶ The scale of destruction cast doubt on the feasibility of reconstruction. In 1951 Bernard Myers reported:

When I visited Germany in the summer of 1947, it was an unforgettable experience of desolation with city after city standing in absolute ruin. By 1950, during my second post-war trip, things were just beginning to be cleaned up and although in some areas strenuous efforts were being made to put things to rights physically, there were many places indeed where rebuilding seemed virtually impossible.⁷

Though the museum of Düsseldorf reopened in 1947, the majority of German museums remained closed until the mid or late 1950s, with the lucky ones still possessing collections that had been moved to safety in mines and catacombs rather than bombed in situ. Art schools had also been victims of air raids and needed to be rebuilt. The famous Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf, for example, after being bombed in December 1943, had only two rooms left intact. Art galleries and artists’ studios had also been destroyed, and, in the general shortage of livable spaces, their reconstruction was not a priority. Producing art supplies required a chemical industry that no longer existed or that was dedicated to reconstruction. In the postwar era, therefore, most exhibitions took place in private homes. In Stuttgart, which had been heavily bombed, Ottomar Domnick, a neurologist and art lover, organized exhibitions in his apartment. In 1948 Rudolf Springer opened a gallery in two rooms of his parents’ house in Berlin. In 1949 the Zimmergalerie Frank opened, as its name indicates, in a room in its owner’s home in Frankfurt.

The condition of the art collections was as disastrous as the state of Germany’s buildings. Many artworks that had not been removed had been destroyed, and those that had been removed were dispersed throughout the country in repositories. As Edith Appleton Standen explained in the College Art Journal, the recovery of these artworks from their remote locations was itself a colossal endeavor, but necessary if further damage and losses were to be avoided:

Publically-owned collections are now being laboriously returned from their war-time repositories, painfully re-assembled, and in some part, placed on exhibition. What this operation implies in a country where almost every museum building is badly damaged, where transportation is exceedingly scarce, and where such things as glass, thumb-tacks, plywood, paper, paint, are almost unobtainable, is hardly to be imagined.⁸

Gathered in collection points, these works awaited the Allies’ verdict concerning their future. In most cases, the museums that had originally housed them were no longer standing, so they could not simply be returned. In addition, some in the international community thought these artworks should be used as war compensation. Others believed that the German people needed to earn back the right to own such treasures.⁹ As a result, German art collections were threatened on many levels. And those fears were justified. In April 1946, for example, the Soviets removed some of the most important artworks located in their zone of occupation, such as the Treasure of Priam and the Pergamon Sculptures, and sent them to Russia, where some of these items remain today. In 1948 the Americans removed 202 masterpieces from German museums and sent them to Washington for “safekeeping.” This created a huge controversy in the United States, and the works were eventually returned, in March 1949. Some Americans proposed to exchange municipally owned artworks for “building materials and other consumer goods”; this idea was strongly rejected.¹⁰

This is not to forget that the Nazi government itself had removed around 16,000 artworks from German museums. German museums, which had often been the first to collect examples of avant-garde movements, had lost major parts of their modern art collections. These, too, needed to be reconstructed. Libraries also needed to be rebuilt. As Myers noted in 1951: “The shortage of books and periodicals on art is so serious that museum and university libraries are often less equipped than the average American university teacher’s private library.”¹¹

If reconstruction (Wiederaufbau) was the first priority in Germany, re-education (Umerziehung) was the second. The Nazi government and the war had not only destroyed artworks and museums, but had also prevented people from creating, discussing, and seeing modern art—or, let’s say, from seeing it in a positive way and speaking of it in terms untainted by Nazi influence.¹² In the art worlds of postwar Germany, there was thus an urgent desire to recover and restore the image of those artists the Nazis had defamed as degenerate. Millions of visitors had seen the Entartete Kunst exhibition. Something needed to be done.

This is the specific context in which the documenta exhibition in Kassel was conceived. Once an important economic and cultural center and strategically located in the middle of Germany, after the war Kassel was a ruined city at the periphery of West Germany. Eighty-three percent of its dwellings and 65 percent of its industry had been destroyed in the 1943 bombings. Its closeness to Soviet borders did not encourage active reconstruction. Dr. Arnold Bode, an art history professor at the University of Kassel, wanted to do something both to help the cultural revival of the city and to reconnect Germany with the history of modern art. With some friends, he decided to organize an art exhibition to coincide with the Bundesgartenshau that was to take place in Kassel in 1955. Millions of visitors would be coming to this garden show as a sign of German normalization. An art show would be an opportunity to draw people’s attention to Kassel as Kunstmetropole as well as to modern art. Bode and his colleague Werner Haftmann planned a retrospective (Rückshau) of modern art from Impressionism to 1940, intended to rehabilitate the reputations of artists who had been denigrated by Nazi propaganda, and to replace Germany within the history of modern art.¹³ As Haftmann wrote in the introduction to the catalogue, the ambitions of the documenta organizers was to educate the new generations of artists, poets, and thinkers about modern art and thereby help them to create the art of the future.¹⁴ Documenta opened in June 1955 and received 130,000 visitors (the Bundesgartenshau attracted 3 million). The show was regarded as such a success that its organizers decided to do it again in 1959.¹⁵

The retrospective approach adopted for the first documenta was representative of the German postwar attitude toward its art heritage. After the Nazi experience and the war, there was a strong desire to look back at the history of modern art, especially at the German contribution, and make sense of it in a way that would help rebuild the nation’s cultural life. This need to understand the history of modern German art motivated the exhibition program of the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale throughout the 1950s. In 1950, for their first official participation at the Biennale since the war, the Germans asked Eberhard Hanfstaengl, who had been the curator of the German pavilion in 1934 and 1936, to serve again. He organized a retrospective of Der Blaue Reiter, which was followed by a presentation of Die Brücke in 1952. Through these two exhibitions, Hanfstaengl distinguished between the Apollonian (Der Blaue Reiter) and the Dionysian (Die Brücke) poles of German Expressionism. In 1954 he opposed the abstract and figurative trends of modern art through a retrospective exhibition of Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer. In 1956 he examined the Surrealist vein with Max Ernst. These exhibitions...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From the “Fall of Paris” to the “Invasion of New York”
• 1 “Art … a language that should unite”: The Diversity of the Postwar Art Worlds
• 2 Véhémences Confrontées: The Limits of Postwar Artistic Exchanges
• 3 “We will always have Paris”: The Domination of Paris in the 1950s
• 4 “The future is in New York”: The Strength of the U.S. Art Worlds in the Late 1950s
• 5 This Is Tomorrow: The Triumph of the American Way in the 1960s
• 6 I Like America and America Likes Me: The European Domination of American Art in the 1970s
• 7 A New Spirit in Painting: The European Comeback of the 1980s
• Epilogue: Consequences of the European Comeback
• Annotated Index of People and Institutions