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Abstract:
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This following is a study on abstract painting : the critical reception and analysis of painterly practice - -performative , experimental , dissenting - -in New York from 1936 to 1951 . By metonymy , this study also looks at the figure in the political realm via the critiques offered by socially -oriented critics at this time (some of whom were also art critics ) . As the boundless secondary literature on this period has noted , the painting of the New York School would "triumph" with "stunning success" by the late 1950s . In other regards , the subject of this dissertation is that of failure . The revolution (or , "the idea of Revolution" ) that had been hoped for by so many left -wing radicals in the 1930s never quite came to pass or , later , went horribly wrong : first in Spain and then elsewhere . "Modern art , like modern literature and modern life ," Clement Greenberg concluded in a 1948 essay on the Old Masters "has lost much ." Greenberg's essay on the Old Masters appeared in the same number of Partisan Review as Hannah Arendt's essay , "The Concentration Camps ." This is the generation of critics , intellectuals and artists who bore the brunt of articulating the unspeakable horrors of the Camps and the Bomb - -manmade places and events that were "beyond human comprehension ." This study is also about belief , of kinds : a Modernist belief in the agency of the artist , in the discernment of the critic , and of a "superstitious regard for print ," to which Greenberg referred with irony in a 1957 essay (artists didn't always believe what they read , he would conclude ) . Irving Howe , the founder of Dissent in 1954 , supposedly once quipped that , "when intellectuals can do nothing else , they start a magazine ." The dissertation at hand contains a number of kinds of critical statements : ones of ambiguity and of skepticism , and others of crisis and disinterest , directed towards art objects and elsewhere , and expressed by writers at mid -century , some especially subtle and acute . Modernist belief , even if betrayed too often , allowed these critics often to escape velleities , or other empty gestures , in their writing . |