Existing comment:
1960-1969
The sixties began in earnest with the presidential campaign, Kennedy's defeat of Nixon, and the sense of optimism that filled the air. His assassination in 1963 changed the decade's trajectory. The Civil Rights Movement had finally reached national consciousness with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but within months the Gulf of Tonkin resolution gave President Johnson the power to commit the United States to a full-scale war in Vietnam. Despite the passage of major Civil Rights legislation, systemic racism, combined with the Vietnam War and the unsustainable living conditions of the poor, exposed our country's mistaken priorities-fighting overseas while our neighborhoods were on fire.
1968 is the pivotal year in "the long sixties." The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4 was followed by demonstrations in downtown Washington that left hundreds of burnt-out buildings in commercial districts and residential areas that would not be rebuilt for a decade. Shortly after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and then the cataclysmic 1968 Democratic Convention, where demonstrators were assaulted by police officers on live television, President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew were elected. Appealing to the anxious "silent majority," they succeeded in capturing the White House by promising to restore "law and order." Soon after the '68 election, the "Peace" movement began to turn violent out of deep frustration over its inability to effect change. The violence came to a head in 1970 with the killing of Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard.
It became clear in the late sixties that all attempts to bring peaceful change would fail. Mainstream artists began to embrace the counterculture and its invocation to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." Most chose to depoliticize their art, exploring form instead of content. A few younger women painters, like Cynthia Bickley-Green, first embraced the direction set by Frankenthaler and then found their voices in the feminist movement.
The more critically and financially successful, predominantly White male artists in Washington and across the country continued their disengagement from socio-political realities. Gene Davis' art is the perfect expression of the Washington Color School. Its commercial and critical success may have had more to do with its separation from politics than its strictly decorative qualities. Here was the perfect corporate art, born of an art movement whose content did not have to be explained because it had none. It avoided controversy by being only about itself and could be shown without risk of embarrassment. To understand the great divide that existed in sixties Washington art between the White male mainstream and many women and artists of color, one need only compare two paintings made in 1969.
Grid #6 by Tom Downing demonstrates that what started as a liberating moment for artists inspired by the Washington Color School ended in an aesthetic lockdown. In contrast to Downing's work, Freud's Dog by Joe Shannon is impolite and impolitic, exploding out of the times in which it was made. He has no problem challenging Washington's dominant sensibilities. Shannon's challenging figurative work addressed social, political, and professional ills. But in a city so dedicated to the buttoned up and uncontroversial, Shannon's painting would not be a big influence on the figurative art just then beginning to flower in Washington. |