Hot Art, Cold War – Western and Northern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990

Claudia Hopkins, Iain Boyd Whyte, Claudia Hopkins, Iain Boyd Whyte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780815393757
• eBook ISBN: 9781351187657
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Hot Art, Cold War – Northern and Western European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 is one of two text anthologies that trace the reception of American art in Europe during the Cold War era through primary sources.

With the exception of those originally published in English, the majority of these texts are translated into English for the first time from eight languages, and are introduced by scholarly essays. They offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (FRG), Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural, and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations.

This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences.

Whilst many are fluent in one or two foreign languages, few are able to read all twenty-five languages represented in the two volumes. These ground-breaking publications significantly enrich the fields of American art studies and European art criticism.

This book, together with its companion volume Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990,, is a joint initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the editors of the journal Art in Translation at the University of Edinburgh. The journal, launched in 2009, publishes English-language translations of the most significant texts on art and visual cultures presently only available only in their source language. It is committed to widening the perspectives of art history, making it more pluralist in terms of its authors, viewpoints, and subject matter.

Part 1

United Kingdom

A “Special Relationship”: British and American Art 1945–1989

David Hopkins

Ever since Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri of 1946 outlining the postwar political structure of the Western hemisphere, politicians have talked of Great Britain and the USA having a “special relationship” based not just on ideological affinities but on shared historical roots, as well as a shared language.¹ To assume, however, that their cultural and artistic attitudes in the Cold War period were consistently aligned would be a mistake. This essay examines a history of unequal cultural relations, an interplay between Britain’s need to “catch up” artistically with its former colonial possession and its desire to retain a firm grip on its own native traditions.

In the late 1940s Britain was compelled to forge a new relationship with the USA. As Britain’s decisive ally in defeating fascism, the USA was set to take on a key role in the new Western World Order. In the aforementioned speech of 1946, Churchill also famously spoke of an “iron curtain” separating Western Europe. In this Cold War situation, with communist Russia as the new common enemy, it was vital for Britain and America to establish coordinated political agendas. After the Soviet Union’s blockade of Berlin in 1948, the need for an increased US–European alliance also became pressing, leading to the formation of NATO in 1949. The USA committed considerable economic aid to Europe under the terms of the Marshall Plan of 1948; Britain, which received some $1.263 million, was the second biggest recipient of money after France.² In this climate, in which Britain, having been crucial to the defeat of Nazi Germany, had become deeply beholden to the USA, British attitudes to American culture were understandably ambivalent. By the mid-1950s, while Britons increasingly consumed imported American films and TV programs, cultural theorists such as Richard Hoggart talked scathingly about the inroads Americanized mass-culture was making into traditional British working-class culture. Complaining about the “new style in sex-novels spreading from America,” Hoggart wrote:

The new-style stories are recognizable, first by their terse, periodic titles. Almost every one is a complete phrase or sentence[:] Sweetie, Take it Hot … The Lady Takes a Dive … The authors are usually American or pseudo-American, after the manner of the American shirt shops in the Charing Cross Road. Most of them have “tough” names, with forenames in the style of Hank, Al, Babe, Brad, and Butch.³

The importation of American advertising techniques was also widely debated. In his book The Truth about Advertising (1943) Robert Brandon had argued that the modernization of the British economy after the war would depend on the growth of advertising, on the American model.⁴ The early 1950s, though, saw considerable criticism of American “Admass” culture.⁵ The introduction of commercial advertising on British TV in September 1955 was also seen as a sign of creeping Americanization; the American author Vance Packard’s populist The Hidden Persuaders (1957) was widely taken up as an exposé of the insidious effects of American selling methods. Commercial mass culture in the Britain of the 1950s was beset by something of an identity crisis.

In terms of high culture, the British government turned to the arts and sciences to bolster the nation’s sense of its own identity and achievement with the Festival of Britain ­exhibition—in which architecture figured prominently—held in London in 1951. The Arts Council of Great Britain was formed immediately after the war. Kenneth Clark, its chairman from 1953, began to build up a publicly owned Arts Council collection, which offered a newfound state acknowledgment of the cultural importance of the fine arts. But, if we look more closely at the question of the production of innovative painting and sculpture, how was Britain to compete with the USA’s more full-blooded engagement with modernism? While many of Britain’s most prominent artists around the time of the Second World War had been caught up in a spirit of Neo-Romanticism (an essentially nostalgic return to pastoralism, which understandably spoke of a need to shore up a sense of nationhood), the most progressive artists in New York had been developing Abstract Expressionism, a tough abstract language in which the unprecedentedly large scale of their canvases spoke of aesthetic ambition. Arguably innate national differences between Britain and America were at stake. Writing in the 1950s, the critic Lawrence Alloway certainly thought so, identifying a residual lack of ambition and conservatism at the heart of British art and culture: “in London artists settle into small colonies and pat each other on the back … artists get away with mediocre, low temperature works for years in London because not enough people notice or care.”⁶

British art had admittedly assimilated avant-garde currents from Europe prior to the Second World War, but the process had generally been a cautious one.⁷ The Britain of the early 1950s looked decidedly parochial in respect to European modernism with only a few isolated pockets of activity. While Britain’s national collection of largely Parisian modern art languished in the Tate Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), founded in 1946, was the main institution in London that actively promoted avant-gardism. This institution was dominated by the patrician tendencies of Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, both instrumental in running it, who were still preoccupied with the legacy of Surrealism. By contrast, in line with Socialist Realist currents in French and Italian postwar painting, a gritty realism was practiced by a few painters such as John Bratby and promoted critically by John Berger. At the other end of the spectrum, a small grouping of British abstractionists, for whom Naum Gabo’s presence in Britain had been decisive, had gathered in the war years around St Ives in Cornwall (Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and subsequently painters such as Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon). This was a ­tendency that Herbert Read largely supported.

Difference of outlook among these groups came to the fore when, in the early 1950s, ­American abstraction began to appear in British exhibitions. The ICA mounted the first key exhibition Opposing Forces in early 1953. This was followed by Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York at the Tate Gallery in early 1956, and The New American Painting at the Tate early in 1959. The Abstract Expressionists, the ­trailblazers of American avant-gardism, initially had a modest showing in Opposing Forces, a show that had been inaugurated in Paris by the French critic Michel Tapié, with the intention of comparing the work of the likes of Pollock with French tachistes such as Mathieu and Michaux; Pollock, it must be said, came off best, with his huge One (no 31) of 1950 dominating the exhibition. In the 1956 show, the Abstract Expressionists were confined to a single room, since the purpose of the exhibition was a much broader survey of modern American art (Ben Shahn, for instance, was given close attention). However, some key works were displayed, for example de Kooning’s Woman 1 (1950–1952) and Pollock’s Number 1 (1948).

By the time of The New American Painting—an exhibition that had been organized by the “International Program” of the Museum of Modern Art and had already been toured to eight European countries prior to its arrival in Britain—there was an impressive showing of Abstract Expressionists (some 81 paintings by 17 artists) and it was clear that the postwar USA was a ­cultural force to be reckoned with. The critical reactions to Abstract Expressionism, deriving from the varying aesthetic camps in Britain, were largely negative, with one of the more intelligent reviews of the 1959 show coming from John Berger, who, as a supporter of politically committed art such as Shahn’s, regarded the random marks of action on the canvases as merely equivalents of a “‘biological necessity’ for which shepherds have a lewder name.”⁸ However, a few younger critics were positive, primarily Robert Melville, and Lawrence Alloway, a significant voice at the ICA. Alloway quickly came to perceive the formal achievement of Abstract Expressionism: “a picture is not painted according to preexisting ideas but … it is a structure that results from the activity of its making.”⁹ Alloway was scathing about the narrow-mindedness of the British response to the new American art. Convinced that British taste, like its art, was inclined towards the parochial and timid, he ridiculed populist newspaper critics such as a conservative writer in the Daily Telegraph who had talked of “scrawls, smears … muck, lucrative muck.”¹⁰

Herbert Read, the pillar of Britain’s progressive art world, was, despite his appreciation of European modernism (particularly Surrealism), slow in appreciating the virtues of the new painting. In one important mid-1950s text he admitted that, on initially seeing Pollock’s work in New York in 1946, it had reminded him, anachronistically, of “the marbled patterns that one finds on the end papers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books.”¹¹ By contrast, he supported American abstractionists such as Sam Francis and Mark Tobey, both of whom came from the West Coast and had closer visual affinities with European art. Ironically, both artists would later be seen by American critics such as Clement Greenberg as far less consequential than New York School painters. It is interesting, though, that Francis, who lived in Paris during the 1950s, garnered considerable critical support in Britain. Among artists, the Scottish-born painter Alan Davie came upon Pollock’s work as early as 1948 on a visit to Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery in Venice (Guggenheim’s collection was an important conduit for the European reception of postwar American art). By the early 1950s, Davie essayed aspects of Pollock’s style, as well as employing analogous mythic and primitivizing subject matter, and was to meet Pollock just before the latter’s death in 1956. The English abstractionist William Scott also became aware of Abstract Expressionism while teaching in Canada in 1953. He conveyed news of the style to fellow painters in Britain, notably Patrick Heron, one of the abstractionists linked to St Ives, who, as we have shall see, was already aware of Pollock’s work.

The critical advocacy of Alloway continued to be crucial in terms of an informed reception of American art, and the late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed its increasing acceptance. Indeed the reputation of certain Americans, notably Barnett Newman, was solidified more quickly in Britain than the USA. Pollock in particular galvanized attention: after his debut in Opposing Forces a dramatic photograph of him in action by Hans Namuth had featured in the ICA Parallel of Life and Art show in late 1953. He was to have a key solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in November 1958, which featured a Constructivist-style overhaul of the main gallery space by Trevor Dannatt—including freestanding breezeblock walls, black panels, footlights and a “ceiling” of suspended fabric—and presented a new conception of painting-as-environment to the British public (Plate 1). The gallery’s director, Bryan Robertson, was particularly supportive of American art, and the Pollock show would later be followed up with highly influential shows of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in 1964. Robertson was later to recall that police had to be called in to control crowds queuing for Pollock.¹² Given that only 14,000 people visited The New American Painting show of a year later—which John A. Walker has contrasted to the 250,000 who visited the Royal Academy to see Annigoni’s traditionalist painting of Queen Elizabeth II in 1955—it seems that the summary image of Pollock as paint-hurling genius quickly seized the public imagination.¹³ Critics, too, were drawn to Pollock. The painter Patrick Heron, one of the most incisive writers on the new American art (he produced an important review of the 1956 show, which was published in the New York-based Arts magazine and thus represented a key British endorsement of Abstract Expressionism in the place in which it was produced¹⁴), had made shrewd technical observations on Pollock as early as Opposing Forces: “Though sometimes possessing drama, such works lack the personal nervous vibration a brush may impart but poured liquid denies.”¹⁵ Even John Berger, in an essay of 1958, was forced to concede that Pollock had something, although he still concluded his essay with the conviction that the artist mirrored “the disintegration of our culture.”¹⁶

Alloway was to leave Britain for the USA in 1961, precisely at the point when British art began to fully register the formal implications of the new American painting. In 1959 and 1960 he had helped to organize two innovative exhibitions in London, Place at the ICA and Situation at the RBA galleries, in which a new generation of British abstractionists (notably Robyn Denny, Richard Smith, John Hoyland, William Turnbull, and Gillian Ayres) were compelled, by virtue of curatorial policy, to work on a large scale, as a direct response to developments in the USA. In April 1963, London’s Kasmin Gallery held the first solo exhibition of Kenneth Noland, one of the American critic Clement Greenberg’s main protégés in terms of the turn away from Abstract Expressionism towards what Greenberg called Post-Painterly Abstraction. From this point on the Robert Fraser and Rowan galleries in London increasingly marketed American artists such as Noland (but also Neo-Dadaists such as Rauschenberg and Johns) alongside British artists such as Peter Blake or David Hockney, in a cool “swinging sixties” mélange of abstraction and Pop art.

The effects and reception of Greenberg’s criticism around this time is a key topic. In essays such as “‘American-Type’ Painting” (Partisan Review, Spring 1955) Greenberg had argued for the development of a distinct Modernist aesthetic in the new American art, characterized by technical innovations such as all-overness, insistent flatness, and so forth. Alloway was friendly with Greenberg, having met the critic on his European visits; Greenberg had been instrumental in getting him a regular column in the New York based Art News.¹⁷ It is not surprising, then, that Alloway was fundamental to the way a Greenbergian aesthetic was taken up in Britain; indeed Alloway was central to the promotion in the UK of the trend towards increasing flatness and compositional clarity which would become known as “Hard-Edge painting” (often thought to be Alloway’s coinage).¹⁸ He was even regarded by some as “Greenberg’s man in England.”¹⁹ Other British artists, educationalists, and critics, however, began to evince a mixed regard for both Greenberg and his critical ally Michael Fried, not only in terms of their aesthetic prescriptiveness, but in terms of their oft-declared conviction of American artistic superiority.

Two episodes, both occurring within the same key British art school, illustrate how divided art-world attitudes to Greenberg could be. In the early 1960s the critic’s modernist credo was especially dominant at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, where the sculptor Anthony Caro—one of the few British artists whom Greenberg and Fried wholeheartedly supported, seeing him as deve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Editors’ Introduction
• PART 1: United Kingdom
• PART 2: Ireland
• PART 3: France
• PART 4: Belgium
• PART 5: The Netherlands
• PART 6: Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)
• PART 7: Austria
• PART 8: Switzerland
• PART 9: Denmark
• PART 10: Norway
• PART 11: Sweden
• PART 12: Finland
• Text copyright
• Index