De Hirsh Margules, Mother Ann Lighthouse, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1946. Gouache on paper. Gift of Jean M. Horblit, 2002. [Acc. #2002.004.002]
New York Review: How American Eyes Got Modern
By Susan Tallman, May 9, 2024
The midcentury ideal of art as a departure into the unknown was not the exclusive property of heroic painters. Printmakers made cutting-edge art on a homier scale—and it was affordable.
In the standard telling, the story of midcentury American art is a saga of hyperbolically talented painters working large and abstractly to manifest an existential encounter between man (notwithstanding the occasional begrudged woman) and material. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event,” in Harold Rosenberg’s catchy 1952 formulation. Canvas-as-event became a publicity magnet, inspiring popular news items like Life magazine’s 1949 “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” along with decades of New Yorker cartoons. On the home front, however, in private houses and apartments, things were different. Rosenberg, in that same essay, noted that “advanced paintings today are not bought by the middle class…. Considering the degree to which it is publicized and feted, vanguard painting is hardly bought at all.”
The disconnect between the art that people choose to acquire in a given moment and the art that later generations find of value is a trope of art history: Van Gogh sold one known painting in his lifetime, Vermeer died bankrupt, and so on. From today’s perspective, though, what is so striking about Rosenberg’s comment is its allusion to middle-class collectors. From the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, America’s rich had gotten richer, enabling folks like Henry Clay Frick, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and J.P. Morgan to build personal museums (though their aristocrat-manqué hearts belonged to old masters rather than vanguard painters). But then came the Great Depression, World War II, and progressive economic policies that redrew the contours of economic entitlement and with them the shape of the art market. A few months before Rosenberg’s essay appeared in ART news, a Time article on print publisher Reeves Lewenthal closed with the observation “The market for high-priced art is dwindling, he figures, and art’s greatest potential patron is the budget-conscious housewife.”
As subjects of art history, self-destructive geniuses are more seductive than budget-conscious housewives, but lately scholars rummaging about in the art attic have been pushing aside those big, genius-laden canvases to uncover a different, homier story of how American eyes got modern.
See the full review on New York Review’s website.
