Existing comment:
1957-1959
"The long sixties" began, for me, in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1957. I was in the third grade watching the funeral of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, seen here with his Chief Counsel and "fixer," Roy Cohn. Even then, I knew the term "McCarthyism" referred to their "Red Scare" interrogations, their practice of making unfounded accusations against federal employees, artists, and others they suspected of being communist sympathizers, and the skillful fanning of our fears. of a nuclear nightmare.
Just as the world was changing in the fifties, so, too, was art. In 1957, Abstract Expressionism was the dominant art movement in the US, characterized by huge canvases, strong gestures, and emotional content. The art historical canon of the early fifties tells us of artist Helen Frankenthaler's experiments in her studio and her discovery that thinned oil paint would soak into and "stain" unprimed canvas. There was no need anymore for a brush manipulated by the artist's hand; thinned paint flowed where directed by the artist's manipulation of gravity. "Advanced" painting would be declared by critics, notably Clement Greenberg, and dealers alike to be stained painting, making possible Color Field painting and the rise of the Washington Color School. Frankenthaler later remarked, "yes, I was 'a bridge' and they walked over me."
The Washington Color School was acclaimed by some as the climax of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century, while others saw it as modernism's dead end, disconnected from the socio-political disorder of the sixties. It imposed very strict limitations on the artist. Only art's purely visible aspects were important. The artist's intentions had no place, nor did gestures of the artist's hand, drawing, subject matter, pictorial illusion, narrative content of any kind, or any relationship at all to the visible world.
Robert Franklin Gates and other Washington artists went in the opposite direction, turning back from abstraction towards figuration and retaining their expressionist brushwork. They were part of a larger resistance which included artists in the Bay Area Figurative School coming out of San Francisco in the mid-fifties. David Park is credited with originating the "school" when he took all his Abstract Expressionist paintings and deposited them in the Berkeley dump. Park was soon joined by other artists, including Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn.
Gates taught in American University's Department of Art, where Helene McKinsey Herzbrun was his student and then his teaching colleague. She was also immediately drawn to Abstract Expressionism, and never did abandon strong gesture and emotional content. Gates, Herzbrun, and the AU Art Department were largely responsible for the continued relevance of figurative and expressionist painting in Washington for the next three decades. |