Going on from Picasso? Late modernism and the dynamics of history

The thesis identifies and interrogates the development of a historical sensibility in the work of artists in post-war New York. It argues that scholars’ marginalisation of this question is behind wider failures to account for the development of modern painting, from the limited debates about painting’s ‘return’ in the 1980s (foundered on the question of identity) up to the present day. I ask why, in the decades following World War II, so many painters appeared to forsake aims of progress and innovation, calling instead for some form of return to the highpoints of pre-war modernism. Writing in the 1960s, F.N. Souza railed against abstract expressionism and pop art for ‘giving up after Picasso’. A decade earlier Grace Hartigan made the same point: ‘Why must I go on from Picasso?’. Such postures have always looked regressive: critics at the time dismissed them for misrecognising the advances of abstract painting, for abandoning optical integrity, for reintroducing illusion, content, memory, or space. Even in the 1970s and later, once the high modernist consensus had been overturned, they still looked reactionary. Modernist painting was transformed over these decades. It achieved definitive theoretical and historical formulation as a continuous tradition stretching back over 100 years. The term ‘modernism’ entered general use; the great permanent American collections acquired their definitive forms and were opened to the public. But this newly imagined tradition quickly came under attack for the exclusionary and prescriptive operations it implied. The artists I analyse have seemed to fall between the horns of this divide: neither moving modernism forward, nor departing from it. Even at the time, they were accused of following fashion rather than innovating. Neither side of the debate has had much use for them (it is difficult to decide who out of Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss expressed stronger dislike for Hartigan and Joan Mitchell). They have seemed too proximate, too static, too rooted in the achievements of the immediate past. I think this has things the wrong way round. What shows up in the critical record and subsequent scholarship as regression, belatedness, or anachronism often in practice worked in opposite directions. Artists used demands for conformity to an imagined tradition to interrogate and intervene in modernism’s histories while these were still under construction. They did not need to share a common aesthetic or political programme. No manifestoes here. They did not even have to look similar. Many were unaware of one another’s existence. What matters is that each of them came in different ways to conceive of the history of modernist painting as something huge, definite, and unavoidable, but at the same time to see in that rigidity a source of renewed creativity and critical engagement. Each looked towards history as a source of engagement with the present. As in the various re-stagings of Picasso’s 'Demoiselles d’Avignon' (1907; itself, of course, a crossing-point for multiple traditions) carried out by Hartigan in the 1950s, Souza in the 1960s, and Robert Colescott in the 1980s, they actively diverted and reshaped these histories, turning such reflection into the material for continued painterly practice. The conditions for this kind of reorientation were historically unprecedented, grounded in the situation of the post-war United States: the advancing globalisation of the capitalist economy; the institutionalisation of modernist painting as official high culture; the political and intellectual climate of the Cold War; movements for decolonisation and advancing US neocolonialism; the demands for Civil Rights. Each of my chapters analyses a cluster of such framing factors, the legacies of which are still with us today.