Mark my words: abstract expressionism will soon be the new sofa painting. That was the epiphany I had last night at a gallery exhibition of the works of a minor abstract expressionist, Henry Botkin. By minor, I don’t mean to disparage - I found the works quite wonderful, in fact - but rather to suggest something of a genius of the formula. It’s a formula - or genre if you want to be more charitable - that’s on the verge of middlebrow acceptance, but for now is caught in limbo between highbrow disdain for high modernism’s piety and utopian spirit and popular taste’s preference for representational painting.
I’ve reflected obliquely before on the golden age that the postwar years (1945-65) were for disparate fields of intellectual and cultural life in America. Viewing these only semi-canonical abstract expressionist paintings made me reflect how a golden age of sorts marked American fine arts in the 1950s: despite the lack of representation, a utopian optimism is palpable.
Consider, too, the sale of the Seagrams building: while perhaps hardly the crowning achievement of American or New York architecture, it represented a confluence of American business elite (at the zenith of its confidence) and cultural patronage (at the peak of its utopianism). I don’t know who the new tenants are, or what furnishings are replacing the original ones that Skinner will be auctioning off tomorrow. But I can’t help but surmise that the furniture and art been replaced by the worst sort of mail-order art, shoddy furniture and fake-homey interior decor that stands as an emblem for corporate taste today.
The cultural alignment that could produce the aesthetic confidence of mid-century fine arts seems just as quaint today as a Cinema 16 screening or an intellectual journal that might be readable by a general educated public.
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