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I've been thinking about this collection and, looking closer at the art, I've made some discoveries. I've found that the work has connections with important art traditions that some of our contemporary artists seem to have missed or dismissed. And I'm beginning to understand that my alienation from contemporary trends has something to do with my connection to the modernist art represented in Albany and the European traditions that fostered it, however subtly.
I'm not surprised that I feel a connection to the art at the Empire State Plaza. The collection includes abstract expressionism, minimalism, color field painting, and op art, and it hints at pop art. This is the work I grew up on. Within the first week or two of art school in Cleveland, I saw a large show of modernist sculptures from the New York School. It changed my life. A number of the artists I saw then are represented by work in the Albany collection.
But I didn't realize how important New York modernism was to me as a young artist in Cleveland in the 1980s until I started working on an MFA degree online at a West Coast art school. After getting a flavor of the West Coast's take on things, I can see that Cleveland is steeped in the same aesthetic and art history as New York City. These are the artists who taught my teachers and their instructors. And as I continued my undergraduate studies, and as an impressionable young artist, my teachers showed us this kind of work again and again.
But looking closer at the artist biographies confirmed something I've been suspecting for some time: most of the artists in the collection studied realism before turning abstract; many of them produced representational work before becoming non-objective. I think this is significant.
By the time they were chosen to contribute work to the collection, most of these artists were making non-figurative work. Aside from satisfying his modern tastes, Rockefeller probably saw that the non-objective character of the work was very safe for a space that is equal parts public, political, and industrial. But after reading the artist biographies, I realized that much of the work is rooted in academic sensibilities of objective content and realist technique. And the artists who were influenced by the more expressive styles of twentieth-century representational art created work in a similar fashion before turning to more pure abstraction.
This strikes me as a difference between the Albany artists and my teachers—and hence, me. My teachers and I are the first generations that began their studies, and their art making, directly from the standpoint of American Modernism—much of it quite abstract. Though we enjoyed being completely immersed in American modernism, most of the artists in Albany appear to have been born in other countries, or their parents were. Many of them studied in other nations, even if they were born here in the USA. So they were immersed in something very different before creating the work we see in the collection in Albany.
The collection of modern art in Albany illustrates what happens when artists make art in a new environment, drawing on well over a half-century of expressive modern art and long traditions of academic drawing and painting, as well as European, South American, and Asian cultural traditions. The artists in the Empire State Plaza collection brought these past traditions to New York City, and drew on them as they explored new territory in their work.
My teachers didn't study as much realism. They learned some representational drawing and painting technique, and taught us some. But we didn't have the opportunity to bring traditions from other times and places to a new center of the art world and create something uniquely American like these modernists did. We seem to have started where the modernists left off, without going through the process they went through to get there. And perhaps that's one reason we've been struggling with art in America since the 1980s.
The American vernacular that we see in the Albany collection reminds me somewhat of other American art forms that are derived from traditions across the ocean. Music, in particular, yields great examples in jazz and bluegrass. It's no wonder that Rockefeller and others wanted to share New York Modernism with the world as an example of American strengths. But it is worth remembering where our New York Modernism came from.
When Paris fell to Germany in World War II, and when artists fled France and many other countries to come to the United States, New York City became the center of the art world. Much of the work in Albany can be traced back to Italian Futurism and French Art Deco. The creative émigrés who settled in New York brought European abstraction and Surrealism and melded it with American mural painting that had risen in importance with the WPA. The new work reflected American ideals and Rockefeller was keen to re-imagine the modern art traditions from an American standpoint of industry, progress, freedom, and individualism.
A lot of the work in Albany, however, has roots in countries that did not share as rugged a view of individualism as we Americans favor. I am struck, in particular, by the formality present in the Albany collection. For the most part, the work contrasts with that very personal flavor of abstract expressionism that privileges introspection and subjectivity over universality. Over the years, the American spirit of individualism has produced quite a lot of art that is so arcane that the work can only be understood in relation to the personal vocabularies of the artists.
Most of the work in the plaza, however, can easily be read within a collective visual vocabulary. Some of the work can even be traced back to the constructivism of more socialist cultures. I find this to contrast with some of the prevailing trends of self-absorption that I see in much of our contemporary art.
Rockefeller, himself, was very interested in international art. He was active as a philanthropist in France and Greece. He brought French architecture to New York and used ancient Greek concepts in Albany. He approached Matisse, Picasso, and Rivera for the mural commission that eventually went to Jose Maria Sert. He collected European art, which he brought to his office in the Capital and to the Museum of Modern Art in the city.
Rockefeller was shrewd enough to seize the opportunity to appropriate European modernism, encourage its transformation into something uniquely American, and then gift it back to the world. For Rockefeller, the concentration of New York City artists in the Empire State Plaza illustrated that the State was the center of the art world, and showed how international the State was.
The paintings and sculptures in the Albany collection illustrate how long-standing traditions in art can be transformed in innovative ways into a new art form that is uniquely American. But, somehow, I think, this transformation must have been a little too radical for us who followed. Somehow, I think, we may have lost touch with some tradition in our inheritance of modernism.
Perhaps the freedom of modernism made it too easy for us to be lazy with the fundamentals we learned as young modernists in art school—fundamentals that became ends in themselves instead of means to working through difficult representational compositions. W.H. Auden said that our ears crave familiarity while our eyes crave novelty. Maybe that's why visual arts have strayed so far away from the traditions that fed them while jazz and bluegrass seem to me to have kept some of the flavor of West Africa and Ireland. Or maybe it is because the options for visual artists seem so easily to bleed beyond the rules.
The Empire State Art Collection reminds me that, however new and innovative this work was half a century ago, the rules still mattered to the modern artists in the collection. Classical realism, European modernism, ethnic traditions, and centuries of culture fed into this work. And for me, it is validation that my insistence upon constantly revisiting traditions outside my training is worthwhile, and that there is a reason that objective content and the art of other cultures resonates with me in my own work: it was present in the work I cut my teeth on, no matter how simple or abstract it seems to be.
When American art gave us the freedom, in Rockefeller's 1960s, to make something as universal as a circle and call it art, it opened the possibility for artists to reject cultural and historical conventions. As a result, however, many artists are doing work that is neither related to a long tradition nor universal, and which reflects a highly personalized vision. The challenge for me, now, is to hold on to tradition while finding an American vernacular that speaks to me and that I can speak through so that my work genuinely communicates my experience in twenty-first-century America, and does so in fresh and innovative ways.
