Page 25 - Studio International - June 1967

The American invasion and the

British response

Alan Bowness

Rightly or wrongly, it is widely accepted in Britain today that New York has replaced Paris both as
the main source of new ideas and as the measuring rod for modern art. Indeed, the shift of orientation
that this recognition involved is probably the major event in mid-twentieth century British art. But how
exactly did this happen? What follows is an attempt to get the relevant facts straight before the record
is too obscured by the passage of time.
This article is based on the first part of an essay, Some Recent History, printed in the catalogue
of the exhibition London: The New Scene, organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in
1965. I have tried to be as objective as possible, and write mainly from personal experience, having
seen almost all the postwar exhibitions mentioned. Norbert Lynton's article British Art and the New
American Painting in Cambridge Opinion 37, 1965, unknown to me when I first wrote, gives a
comparable account.

Jackson Pollock Number 1 1948
Oil on canvas, 68 x 104 in. Coll: Museum of Modern Art, New York
One of Pollock's key pictures. Bought by the Museum of Modern Art
in 1950, and shown in the 1956 Tate exhibition with The She-wolf of 1943