story © Michael Betancourt | published June 12, 2011 | permalink |  |  

The historical avant-garde in Europe had two sets of detractors, distinct from one another: the academicians and the bourgeois. In responding to these groups, they have been combined and attacked collectively, as in Baudellaire’s essay To the Bourgeois that attacks both groups for their incomprehension of Impressionism and rejection of modern subjects. In the United States, both groups in this cultural conflict would be combined, as would the division between avant-garde and Modernist, creating a different dynamic in the evolution of Modernism.

However, these are distinct groups each of whom had different goals in their criticism of the avant-garde, even though their rejection served to maintain the status quo in nineteenth century France. In the United States, this distinction typically gets lost because the first wave of avant-garde painting in France met with a very different reception. It is not until the Armory Show in 1913 that the avant-garde receives a comparable American response to that in France. But it is not after World War I begins in Europe that avant-garde art shifts its focus from the structures and exclusions of the art world to those of bourgeois culture in particular. It is this shift that alters the relationship of avant-garde and art world and lays the ground work for the ultimate subsumption of the avant-garde into the academy and art world, a transition that began in post-war America.

The birth of Dada in Zurich (and simultaneously elsewhere) is a well documented phenomenon. The artists themselves state that their nihilism came from a direct experience of the carnage on the battlefield. Because the war was so destructive, these artists decided that the culture they had been a part of was no longer fit to survive, and so they proceeded to attack it with nonsense, violence and irrationality. While they also attacked art, the focus of most of these assaults were the values which appeared through that art. This was not work that sought access or inclusion in museums; instead it extended the Futurist cry of “Down with moonlight” to “down with art.” Art historian Renato Poggioli identified nihilism as a continuous part of all these avant-gardes, however, unlike the other movements whose rejection of the past can be understood as a desire to be free from the traditional strictures, and whose desire to eliminate the museums is a sign of their need to make a new space for their art, in Dada these desires are absent. Dada wants to destroy the museums and eliminate art not to replace it with Dada, but to eliminate the culture that museums and art symbolize. Dada demanded destruction, and only after its collapse did the constructive aspect of this elimination of the past emerge as Surrealism in Paris and Constructivism in Germany and Russia. During this same period, the avant-garde in American would remain peripheral to developments in Europe. Only as conditions in Europe moved towards World War II would the avant-garde in the US begin to take a central, constructive position.

The European battle over Modernism developed differently in the United States: it did not emerge as a dominant cultural conflict until after the Armory Show brought the latest works of the European avant-garde before the eyes of an unexpecting public in 1913. This conflict between a conservative, traditionalist public and the foreign artists centered in Paris was never fully resolved; instead, it continues to be an active component in the American culture: the opposition to Modernism (along with the distinction between it and the avant-garde) as a corrupting, decadent influence from Europe came into sharp focus around this exhibition, in particular the painting by Marcel Duchamp titled Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). It is this work—called “an explosion in a shingle factory” in the newspapers—that became the standard bearer for avant-garde art in the United States, and brought Duchamp to international prominence as a result.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp

The International Exhibition of Modern Art held at the National Guard 69th Regiment Armory (“The Armory Show”) came at a particular moment in the development of the American art center in New York, and can be recognized as the dividing point between the period before the “culture war” over Modernism began and the war itself. Prior to this moment, there was little concern with which side of the debate about Modernist art and American culture a writer or artist was on; it was an issue of whether they were in favor of artistic and cultural “reform” or more focused on maintaining the established traditions. After the exhibition, this fluidity of “reformers” vanished and became instead an ideological division based on the acceptance of the avant-garde or its rejection. This transition point is visible in publications such as Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman which published articles on artists such as Maurias de Zayas and writing by Maxim Gorky and Walter Arnsberg: a mixture of designers, decorators and avant-gardists were commonly a part of its program to bring “reform” to American taste; after the Armory Show, this mixture abruptly changes, focusing on more directly useful decorating advice, and less so on the earlier “reform” program.

Nevertheless, the intellectual connections between the “arts and crafts movement” reforms begun by John Ruskin and William Morris in the nineteenth century did have a lasting impact on the development of American Modernism: one need look no farther than the various “gothic” typefaces produced during the twentieth century to recognize both the elimination of decoration (these typefaces are all highly streamlined, avoiding even serifs in their construction) and the direct influence of Ruskin’s proclamation that the Gothic was the highest form of European art. The pervasive presence of gothic flourishes, from the design of archways to the naming of Modernist typefaces, attests to his impact; in the United States the primary promoter of this view of art and culture was Gustav Stickley, whose furniture company fused the attention and concern for hand workmanship championed by Ruskin/Morris’ reforms with the distinctly American application of industrial procedures and machine tools, in the process paradoxically discarding their rejection of industrial and machine-tool production that was the initial focus of their critique. The Arts and Crafts Movement in the United Kingdom was at least initially, a Romantic rejection of the industrial factory akin to William Blake’s poems about demonic mills.

How this distinctly anti-industrial critique was adapted to American production on an assembly line is typical of the transformations of European Modernism that would follow in the twentieth century. The designs of a head designer, guided by the ideals of Ruskin/Morris, would be produced by a shop of workmen, instead of each being the designer as well as the fabricator (as in Morris’ own factory). Instead of focusing on the details of how this critique was developed by Morris, Stickley embraced the ideology it suggested—the refusal of distinctions between high art and low craft. In practical terms this emerged as the fusion of design and art, apparent in the convergence of avant-garde writing and homespun advice that ran through his Craftsman magazine. In spite of the “culture war” that followed the Armory Show these connections become explicit in the postwar period as the art world’s center shifted from Paris to New York and Modernism (and avant-garde art) became part of how the United States’ CIA used art to present a vision of the US as both Modern and Free to the rest of the world.

The commercial expansion of television after World War II served as the disseminator of this Modernist design to a broad public, and the role of early television as the promoter in this transformation of American culture cannot be underestimated. The end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s was a foundational period for broadcast (network) television: it is during this same period that a collection of different groups who were all concerned with Modernism converged to bring it into a central position in the United States—in both art and design. At the same time as the San Francisco Museum’s screening and lecture series on film as an art form was creating a canon of American “experimental” films and filmmakers, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was organizing and promoting a new generation of painters that included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and William de Kooning—the Abstract Expressionists—a process that culminated in the Fifteen Americans exhibition in 1950, the same exhibition that established Thomas Wilfred as the central visual music artist in the United States. This transformation of American Modernism from fringe to mainstream culture happened quickly as after World War II Modernist approaches to art, especially those employed by the avant-garde, were also engaged by graphic designers during this period as a way of demonstrating a collective embrace of modernity.