American Art Goes International
Under Adolf Hitler, artists in Germany and in occupied lands quickly realized that any of their number who did not serve the Nazis’ political purposes would be wiped out just as the religious, scientific, and intellectual communities had been. Droves of European artists in every field — literature, music, theater, dance, and the visual arts — fled to the U.S. in the late thirties and early forties. Most settled in New York City, instantly making it the world’s center of artistic creativity. Walter Cook, then head of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University said, "Hitler shook the trees, and I picked up the apples."
This artistic immigration had an immediate and profound effect on American art. Where American artists of the thirties had emphasized folklore and regional subjects and created highly realistic art, in the forties they abandoned this style for entirely different techniques. For one thing, the presence of so many new talents from Europe brought new styles and ideas that American artists wished to try. For another, the war had raised moral questions that artists wished to answer through their art. Thus American artists left off painting cityscapes and the like, as both American and visiting European artists moved away from painting subjects altogether. Art became more and more abstract, as artists tried daring new techniques, asked new questions, and found bold new answers. The resulting impact on the art world was startling.
Chaos on Canvas
It is perhaps foolish to generalize about artists as a group because they work alone and each has a highly individual style. But it is safe to draw a few conclusions about the artists of the forties. Before and during the war, many modern artists explored ancient myths and used psychological theories to create abstract art. After 1945, the atom bomb and all its consequences had an even greater effect on art.
The bomb had obliterated cities, but it had also expanded a way of seeing life. The future had become an uncertain thing. Artists picked up on this idea of fundamental change, and the art they created was just as explosive as the bomb. Artists rejected every artistic tradition that had gone before, searching for a way to express themselves that was completely new.
Popular culture — magazines, radio, movies, and the like — was quick to use positive atomic images, and the public was quick to adopt them. Fine artists, however, saw the bomb as a symbol of obliteration and nothingness — and this is what they painted, danced, or composed. Abstract art bore no resemblance to anything anyone had ever seen or imagined; it was shocking — deliberately so. It was nothing but color, form, texture, or shape. Abstract art, in short, embodied the chaos of modern times. It was a way for artists to say that historical progress was not meaningful, good, or even possible.
In an era of rising anticommunism and HUAC inquiries in Hollywood, abstract art was also a way of commenting on the state of the world without taking an openly political stance: Who could detect an artist’s political views from blobs of black paint? By being utterly baffling, abstract art was a safe way for artists to say something new and unpopular in a highly conformist age. The painter Robert Motherwell summed it up in November, 1944, when he said, "The artist has had to replace other social values with the strictly aesthetic." That is, he believed it was no longer possible for art to have a message; art had to rely strictly on its looks.
