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The Evolution of Art in the Mid to Late 20th Century:
As America emerged as both a political and economic world power, artistic dominance shifted from Paris to New York. Art became more focused on abstraction as avant-garde European artists settled in this country following both world wars.
Many of these emigres came to hold prominent teaching positions at America universities. Joseph Albers left the Bauhaus, a progressive school of art, architecture, and design in Weimar, Germany, to teach at Yale, where he would share his philosophies of form, texture, and color with the next generations of artists.
Another Bauhaus professor, Paul Klee, inspired a young Canadian artist, Rolph Scarlett, to turn to pure abstraction. Scarlett would serve as the chief lecturer at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).
Innovative British printmaker, Stanley William Hayter, founded Atelier 17 in New York in 1940, inspiring a renewed energy around the process of printmaking that would lead to a rebirth of that medium. By the 1960s, Pop artists like Andy Warhol sought out commercial printmaking techniques as they juxtaposed art with mass media and pop culture.
The freedom allowed and encouraged during the mid to late 20th century created the perfect environment for a proliferation of new ideas and styles. |