“How Quickly Does Avant-garde Age?”
Review of exhibition Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960 on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 8 - September 12, 2012.
Published in Studija 87, no. 6 (2012): 8-17.
Photo: © Alise Tifentale.
Info about the exhibition Art of Another Kind on the Guggenheim museum website.
Watch a video of the curators discussing the show on YouTube or below:
How Quickly Does Avant-garde Age?
Excerpt:
The exhibition Art of Another Kind offered a retrospective of the ideals of postwar American art, which are related among other things also to the establishment of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The 1950s were the heyday and triumph of American Abstract Expressionism in the so-called free world, and a general belief in abstract art as the ultimate manifestation of an individual’s creative and political freedom. A time when the artist, the lonely genius, suffers while creating wonderful pieces of abstract expressionism or color field painting which not only reflect an individual’s emotional experience and vision, but are also able to reassert, the whole world over, the reputation of the USA as the land of individual
freedom.
From a contemporary perspective, however, things are not as simple as they seem, and art researchers and historians have invested considerable effort in explaining the phenomenon of abstract art in the USA and Europe. The Guggenheim Museum, looking back to its first exhibition, is literally returning to the 1950s, as if the past half-century hadn’t been.
Photo: © Alise Tifentale.
Photo: © Alise Tifentale.