Since the founding of the Republic,  American painters had echoed the styles of Europe and struggled to match the skills of European artists and artisans.  This perennial second rate status began to chafe as the United States gained political and economic power. When a small group of abstract painters garnered international acclaim at mid-century, the United States could at last declare “victory” over Europe’s influence.  Americans had managed to turn their lack of extensive training and deep fine arts tradition into an advantage.  This was a success that needed to be celebrated. Tracing the path to that victory became the new paradigm for writing the story of American art. 

Painters from the first half of the 20th century were now evaluated in terms of their relationship to abstraction. How did they foreshadow it?  What did they contribute? Those who could not be linked to the emergence of Abstract Expressionism were marginalized, if not erased entirely.  This was the beginning of a cascade of losses precipitated by the privileging of abstraction. American painters had barely begun to master the craft of painting when they were told it no longer mattered. Perhaps the most significant loss was a diminished appreciation for the psychological complexity of illusionism in art. This reenforced the conceit that Europe’s centuries long painting traditions were no longer relevant to American artists. Such a reductive history was not required, however, in order to acknowledge the achievement of America’s new abstract painters.

An alternative narrative can be found in Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, written by ARTnews editor Thomas B. Hess and published in 1951.  Hess discusses abstraction in the same way that previous aesthetic movements such as Impressionism or Romanticism had been analyzed, as a style that originated in Europe and was then reinterpreted by Americans. In this narrative, the dramatic new developments in American painting can be understood as the late, great flowering of European modernism.

Hess begins by describing the underlying organization of forms in four paintings by the 17th century Dutch artist Pieter de Hooch.  He continues with references to a wide range of figurative art, then segues into a discussion of abstraction which, he explains, is a distillation of the underlying language of painting.  This is “the life of forms in art” that E. P. Richardson was referring to when characterizing his own approach to art history.  Prioritizing the language of painting apart from subject matter allowed Hess and Richardson to understand abstract painting as an affirmative expansion of painting’s possibilities rather than a rejection of Europe’s fine arts tradition. This point of view was shared by many well educated observers of the contemporary art world including Fairfield Porter and even Clement Greenberg, whom Hess credits with the initial idea for his book. Later art historians may have understood this connection to the past, but it was not retained as a significant element of the dominant new version of modern American art history.

In 1963 a second edition of A Short History of Painting in America was published with a new concluding chapter: From the End of the 1939 War to the Present.  Richardson’s description of the dramatic changes that occurred in contemporary American art within that period is specific and inclusive.  He acknowledges that “The major trend of the nineteen-fifties was toward abstraction.”  But he also notes that: “Toward the close of the nineteen fifties, a revolt against abstraction broke out on a very wide scale…”.   While some realists were reacting against abstraction, many others, including Fairfield Porter, hoped to incorporate the innovations of Abstract Expressionism into new approaches to painting from life.  This “return to figuration”, appearing simultaneously on the East and West coasts, was a newsworthy story first covered by New York critics and then picked up by the national press. 

Porter’s career benefited from this new enthusiasm for figurative painting.  His regular exhibitions at the Tibor Di Nagy gallery received consistently favorable reviews.  Profiles in Life and Newsweek enhanced his reputation across the country.  Sales of his work increased.   He decided to step away from the responsibility of writing criticism under the constraint of publication deadlines because he wanted more time to paint.  In 1960 Sidney Tillim described Porter as “…one of the few artists in America creating a body of permanently significant work.”  In light of the successful careers established by many figurative painters at mid-century, Richardson reasonably asks:  “Why, then, did abstraction almost completely obliterate, critically speaking, the claims to attention of other kinds of painting?” He posits two explanations: politics and the art market.

In 1949 Life magazine’s readership numbered in the millions and extended to every corner of the United States. Thus its feature story on Jackson Pollock essentially introduced the entire nation to his radical new approach to painting. The title of the article was intended as a provocation and it worked. Vigorous debates about the value and meaning of abstract art were no longer confined to art professionals.  A large segment of the population found Pollock’s painting style to be laughable or incomprehensible or simply offensive.  So “foreign” did it appear, that some politicians saw in it an opportunity to enlist the fine arts in their already energetic national campaign against Communism.  They denounced abstract art as “Communist subversion”. Many of their constituents were easily persuaded that it was indeed a threat created to undermine democracy.   Aesthetic choices were now laden with political implications.  

At mid-century, American art institutions had not yet fully embraced American abstract painting.  But pressure from New York’s art world and the outlandish charge that the exhibition of “advanced art” was an endorsement of Communism were enough to motivate them to take a stand.  In the spring of 1950, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston issued a joint statement rejecting the assertion that modern art was “un-American.”  Those inclined to support abstract art also gained rhetorical strength by pointing out that realism was in fact the style of painting mandated by the governments of Communist block countries.

A few years later much more significant support for American abstract painting materialized in the form of The New American Painting, a traveling exhibition organized by the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art.  It consisted of paintings selected from the work of seventeen abstract artists. In 1958-59 the exhibition was shown in eight European countries.  The energy, scale and sheer audacity of the paintings were an impressive display of America’s new confidence and power.  Reviews were not entirely positive, but its impact was indisputable. Embracing abstraction now became a statement about embracing freedom.  

The exact degree to which the American government shaped and funded this particular exhibition might be impossible to prove.  However, scholars who have examined the era more broadly have made a convincing argument that the elevation of abstraction to a “special status” within America’s cultural life was strongly influenced by mid-century Cold War political pressures, thus confirming E. P. Richardson’s assessment.   It is important to acknowledge this reality, not to diminish the achievement of the Abstract Expressionists, but to better understand the distorting effect that politics had on the story of American painting. Here is Richardson’s deft summary of the situation.

The inevitable war of generations was envenomed by political interference; and, in reaction to efforts at thought control by conservative artists and inartistic congressmen, the defenders of the liberty of the mind hardened their stand: they would defend the incomprehensible and unintelligible in modern art at all costs.  We must honor those who fought for freedom of thought and expression on that battleground.  Nonetheless, it may be possible that extreme led to extreme and some breadth of critical sympathy was forgotten in the heat of battle.

Fairfield Porter stood apart from his contemporaries because of his “breadth of critical sympathy”.  Richardson too is exceptional in that regard. The work of both men should be revisited for a more accurate and balanced perspective on the American art world at mid-century.