The armory show brought modern art to America's popular consciousness in 1913. Among the artists in the show were the notorious Europeans reminding us, too, of the influence of another continent. But soon, New York became the center of the art universe and an American flavor of modern art was born. Soon, the European-influenced art of America grew into its own. We rode that wave of enthusiasm for quite some time. In 1985, Modern Art was still taught in the classrooms I painted in. And, we still paid a lot of attention to Europe. The one art film we saw over and over in classes was a film about Karel Appel.
But the decades since I started school have been dominated, it seems to me, by a rise in popular American culture and a rising nationalism in general. My loves are probably, now, split between American arts and arts overseas. For a long time, however, having been starved in public school of any encounters with foreign creativity other than British literature, I devoured anything I could get from overseas, and from throughout time, too. When I was a kid, my friends and I were reading Doestoevsky and Proust. I wonder if kids who were reading comic books have fared better as contemporary creators. On the screen, we were watching Bergman and Fellini. If we wanted bad movies or horror flicks, we went for the worst, not the most popular. But, I think some of our current successful filmmakers are more likely the kids fed the popular Hollywood diet, nourishing their body of work on kitsch and blood. As for music, we were listening to Stockhausen and Schoenberg, not Kiss. And for art, we turned to the modern art of Europe and a New York school that was influenced, at least through their teachers, by those Europeans that the American populace first discovered in 1913: Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne.
An art critic I sometimes follow wrote a review of a Matisse show a couple weeks ago in a popular magazine. Filled with ecstatic descriptions of his experiences viewing the work, this article was completely different from his apology for Postmodernism in the following week's issue. Writing about art since the early 90s, he used considerably less poetry and emotion to say that art had shifted to a new beauty revolving around ideas. I liked reading his excitement about Matisse. I think Matisse is still relevant. As for the new ideas, well, I think that if most of the American university scholars who misunderstand Derrida would read some Diderot, maybe, somehow, they'd see that the new ideas are nothing new to the French.
