Page 50 - Studio International - February 1965

The Grossman Collection

U.S. collectors of modern art-2 by Kenneth B. Sawyer

One of humankind's more agreeable myths is that of a if full blown from a nation that had seemed in its
Golden Age-some moment in time when aspiration aesthetic infancy a scant decade before.
and accomplishment coincide toward a particularly The new art has been called variously 'abstract
fortuitous end. Splendour, its cruelties softened by the expressionism·. 'action painting·. 'American type·. and
patina of time. seems oddly flawless: all causes are 'New York school'. Each is partially justified, none is
just. all lovers true. all Corydons divine. America, above entirely adequate. Abstract Expressionism has proved
all places. is a land where frogs are princes. Rapunzels the most durable and for purposes of clarity I shall use
sleep unshorn. and pumpkins may be rented from it without quotes. While few Abstract Expressionists
Hertz or Avis for a nominal fee. But there are no are native New Yorkers. Abstract Expressionism deve­
Golden Ages. loped in and about New York during the 1940s. with a
The moral crisis of the hydrogen bomb. the com­ strong western outpost in San Francisco after 1946. It
pounded political lunacy of McCarthyism, the public represented a break with those traditions of Cubism
irresponsibility of the 1940s and 1950s. make the era a then so powerful in American avant garde circles
, dim nightmare. But who among us concerned with art (Surrealism has never been solidly entrenched on this
can fail to respond with warmth to memories of that side of the Atlantic). It was not a ·school' in that it
In the Grossman apartment. painting that seemed. as if miraculously, to be every­ adopted no programme and admitted unlimited variety
art is really lived with where? For the first time in its history the United States within certain limits (those limits were located after the
was producing major vanguard art. While critics were fact by critics). While much Abstract Expressionist
2 debating its merits. while museum officials were un­ painting suggests speed of execution, many of the
Robert Motherwell
Wall painring IV. 1953 easily reviewing their aesthetics, while collectors were artists associated with it are painstaking craftsmen who
54 X 72 in. revising their alignments. young artists in France. devote months to each canvas. Kandinsky and Mir6
England, Italy. Japan. and Latin America were succumb­ provided early sources. but subsequent development
3 ing to the spell of the new American painting. Its depended on strictly American concepts of space and
Willem deKooning impact was unquestionable. its quality towering. Most light. It has engendered the first entirely new direction
Leaves in Wee Hawken. 1958
oil on paper. 48 x 50 in. surprising of all it was uniquely American. springing as in painting since the Renaissance.
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