Blackwell Reference Online

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In 1949 art historian Oliver Larkin ended his Pulitzer Prize-winning survey, Art and Life in America , with this optimistic statement: “Nowhere … is there more brilliant artistic technique, more latent creative talent, than here” ( Larkin, 1949 , p. 478). Larkin's paeans to America's cultural exceptionalism were not atypical in the immediate post-World War II era. Indeed, in 1948, influential critic Clement Greenberg proclaimed “how much the level of American art has risen in the last five years, with the emergence of new talents so full of energy and content as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, David Smith.” “The main premises of Western art,” he added, “have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power” ( Greenberg, 1948 , p. 215). For many historians and critics, the second half of the twentieth century has meant the cultural and economic dominance of America's visual arts. Notions of cultural nationalism, first championed in the 1910s and 1920s and supported during the Great Depression by various New Deal arts programs, remained strong in the immediate postwar years. A steady progression of new American art styles, from Pollock's postwar brand of Abstract Expressionism to later movements such as Neo-Dada, Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptual art, Feminist art, and Neo-Expressionism, whetted critical appetites, ... log in or subscribe to read full text