Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (102 page)

The study of elementary particles quickly leads back in time, to the very beginning of the universe. The ‘Big Bang’ theory of the origin of the universe began in the 1920s, with the work of Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble. Following the Shelter Island conference, in 1948, two Austrian emigrés in Britain, Herman Bondi and Thomas Gold, together with Fred Hoyle, a professor at Cambridge, advanced a rival ‘steady state’ theory, which envisaged matter being quietly formed throughout the universe, in localised ‘energetic events.’ This was never taken seriously by more than a few scientists, especially as in the same year George Gamow, a Russian who had defected to the United States in the 1930s, presented new calculations showing how nuclear interactions taking place in the early moments of the fireball that created the expanding universe could have converted hydrogen into helium, explaining the proportions of these elements in very old stars. Gamow also said that there should be evidence of the initial explosion in the form of background radiation, at a low level of intensity, to be picked up wherever one looked for it in the universe.
¹⁹

Gamow’s theories, especially his chapter on ‘The Private Life of Stars,’ helped initiate a massive interest among physicists in ‘nucleosynthesis,’ the ways in which the heavier elements are built up from hydrogen, the lightest
element, and the role played by the various forms of elementary particles. This is where the study of cosmic rays came in. Almost none of the new particles discovered since World War II exists naturally on earth, and they could only be studied by accelerating naturally occurring particles to make them collide with others, in particle accelerators and cyclotrons. These were very large, very expensive pieces of equipment, and this too was one reason why ‘Big Science’ flourished most in America – not only was it ahead intellectually, but America more than elsewhere had the appetite and the wherewithal to fund such ambition. Hundreds of particles were discovered in the decade Following the Shelter Island conference, but three stand out. The particles that did not behave as they should have done under the earlier theories were christened ‘strange’ by Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech in 1953 (the first example of a fashion for whimsical names for entities in physics).
²⁰
It was various aspects of strangeness that came under scrutiny at the second physics conference in Rochester in 1956. These notions of strangeness were brought together by Gell-Mann in 1961 into a classification scheme for particles, reminiscent of the periodic table, and which he called, maintaining the whimsy, ‘The Eight-Fold Way.’ The Eight-Fold Way was based on mathematics rather than observation, and in 1962 mathematics led Gell-Mann (and almost simultaneously, George Zweig) to introduce the concept of the ‘quark,’ a particle more elementary still than electrons, and from which all known matter is made. (Zweig called them ‘aces’ but ‘quark’ stuck. Their existence was not confirmed experimentally until 1977.) Quarks came in six varieties, and were given entirely arbitrary names such as ‘up,’ ‘down,’ or ‘charmed.’
²¹
They had electrical charges that were fractions – plus or minus one-third or two-thirds of the charge on an electron – and it was this fragmentary charge that was so significant, further reducing the budding blocks of nature. We now know that all matter is made up of two kinds of particle: ‘baryons’ – protons and neutrons, fairly heavy particles, which are divisible into quarks; and ‘leptons,’ the other basic family, much lighter, consisting of electrons, muons, the tun particle and neutrinos, which are
not
broken down into quarks.
²²
A proton, for example, is comprised of two up quarks and one down quark, whereas a neutron is made up of two down quarks and one up. Ad this may be confusing to nonphysicists, but keep in mind that the elementary particles that exist naturally on Earth are exactly as they were in 1932: the electron, the proton, and the neutron. All the rest are found only either in cosmic rays arriving from space or in the artificial circumstances of particle accelerators.
²³

It was the main aim of physicists to amalgamate all these discoveries into a grand synthesis that would have two elements. It would explain the evolution of the universe, describe the creation of the elements and their distribution among the planets and stars, and explain the creation of carbon, which had made life possible. Second, it would explain the fundamental forces that enable matter to form in the way that it forms. God apart, it would in effect explain everything.

One day in the middle of 1960, Leonard Kessler, a children’s-book illustrator,
ran into Andy Warhol – a classmate from college – coming out of an art-supply store in New York. Warhol was carrying brushes, tubes of paint, and some raw canvases. Kessler stared at him. ‘Andy! What are you doing?’

‘I’m starting pop art,’ Warhol replied.

All Kessler could think of to say was, ‘Why?’

‘Because I hate abstract expressionism. I hate it!’
²⁴

Do art movements really start at such specific moments? Maybe pop art did. As we shall see, it totally transformed not only art but also the role of the artist, a metamorphosis that in itself epitomises late-twentieth-century thought as much as anything else. But if Andy Warhol hated the abstract expressionists, it was because he was jealous of the success that they enjoyed in 1960. As Paris had faded, New York had become the new home of the avant-garde. Warhol would help change ideas about the avant-garde too.

The exhibition
Artists in Exile
at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1943, when Fernard Léger, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, André Breton, André Masson, and so many other European artists had shown their work, had had a big impact on American artists.
²⁵
It would be wrong to say that this exhibition changed the course of American painting, but it certainly accelerated a process that was happening anyway. The painters who came to be called the abstract expressionists (the term was not coined until the late 1940s) all began work in the 1930s and shared one thing: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, and Robert Motherwell were fascinated by psychoanalysis and its implications for art. In their case it was Jungian analysis that attracted their interest (Pollock was in Jungian analysis for two years), in particular the theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. This made them assiduous followers (but also critics) of surrealism. Forged in the years of depression, in a world that by and large neglected the artist, many of the abstract expressionists experienced great poverty. This helped foster a second characteristic – the view that the artist is a social rebel whose main enemy is the culture of the masses, so much of which (radio, talking pictures,
Time,
and other magazines) was new in the 1930s. The abstract expressionists were, in other words, natural recruits to the avant-garde.
²⁶

Between the Armory Show and World War II, America had received a steady flow of exhibitions of European art, thanks mainly to Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was Barr who had organised the show of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Gauguin in 1929, when MoMA had opened.
²⁷
He had a hand in the International Modern show at MoMA in 1934, and the Bauhaus show in 1937. But it was only between 1935 and 1945 that psychoanalytic thought, and in particular its relation to art, was explored in any detail in America, due to the influx of European psychoanalysts, as referred to above. Psychoanalysis was, for example, a central ingredient in the ballets of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, who in such works as
Dark Meallow
and
Deaths and Entrances
combined primitive (Native American) myths with Jungian themes. The first art exhibitions to really explore psychoanalysis also took place in wartime. Jackson Pollock’s show in November 1943, at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, started the trend, soon followed by Arshile Gorky’s
exhibition at Julien Levy’s gallery in March 1945, for which André Breton wrote the foreword.
²⁸
But the abstract expressionists were important for far more than the fact that theirs was the first avant-garde movement to be influential in America. The critics Isaac Rosenfeld and Theodore Solotaroff drew attention to something they described as a ‘seismic change’ in art: as a result of the depression and the war, they said, artists had moved ‘from Marx to Freud.’ The underlying ethic of art was no longer ‘Change the world,’ but ‘Adjust yourself to it.’
²⁹

And this is what made the abstract expressionists so pivotal. They might see themselves as an avant-garde (they certainly did so up until the end of the war), and some of them, like Willem de Kooning, would always resist the blandishments of patrons and dealers, and paint what they wanted, how they wanted. But that was the point: what artists wanted to produce had changed. The criticisms in their art were personal now, psychological, directed inward rather than outward toward the society around them, echoing Paul Klee’s remark in 1915, ‘The more fearful the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.’ It is in some ways extraordinary that at the very time the Cold War was beginning – when two atomic bombs had been dropped and the hydrogen bomb tested, when the world was at risk as never before – art should turn in on itself, avoid sociology, ignore politics, and concentrate instead on an aspect of self – the unconscious – that by definition we cannot know, or can know only indirectly, with great difficulty and in piecemeal fashion. This is the important subject of Diana Crane’s
Transformation of the Avant-Garde,
in which she chronicles not only the rise of the New York art market (90 galleries in 1949, 197 in 1965) but also the changing status and self-conception of artists. The modernist avant-garde saw itself as a form of rebellion, using among other things the new techniques and understanding of science to disturb and provoke the bourgeois, and in so doing change a whole class of society. By the 1960s, however, as the critic Harold Rosenberg noted, ‘Instead of being … an act of rebellion, despair or self-indulgence, art is being normalised as a professional activity within society.’
³⁰
Clyfford Still put it more pungently: ‘I’m not interested in illustrating my time…. Our age – it is of science – of mechanism – of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage.’
³¹
As a result the abstract expressionists would be criticised time and again for their lack of explicit meaning or any social implications, the beginning of a long-term change.

The ultimate example of this was pop art, which both Clement Greenberg and the Frankfurt School critics saw as essentially inimical to the traditional function of avant-garde art. Few pop artists experienced poverty the way the abstract expressionists had. Frank Stella had had a (fairly) successful father, Joseph, and Andy Warhol himself, though he came from an immigrant family, was earning $50,000 a year by the mid-1950s from his work in advertising. What did Warhol – or any of them – have to rebel against?
³²
The crucial characteristic of pop art was its
celebration,
rather than criticism, of popular culture and of the middle-class lifestyle. All the pop artists – Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein,
and Warhol – responded to the images of mass culture, advertising, comic books, and television, but the early 1960s were above all Warhol’s moment. As Robert Hughes has written, Warhol did more than any other painter ‘to turn the art world into the art business.’
³³
For a few years, before he grew bored with himself, his art (or should one say his works?) managed to be both subversive and celebratory of mass culture. Warhol grasped that the essence of popular culture – the audiovisual culture rather than the world of books – was repetition rather than novelty. He loved the banal, the unchanging images produced by machines, though he was also the heir to Marcel Duchamp in that he realised that certain objects, like an electric chair or a can of soup, change their meaning when presented ‘as art.’ This new aesthetic was summed up by the artist Jedd Garet when he said, ‘I don’t feel a responsibility to have a vision. I don’t think that is quite valid. When I read artists’ writings of the past, especially before the two wars, I find it very amusing and I laugh at these things: the spirituality, the changing of the culture. It is possible to change the culture but I don’t think art is the right place to try and make an important change except visually…. Art just can’t be that world-shattering in this day and age…. Whatever kind of visual statement you make has first to pass through fashion design and furniture design until it becomes mass-produced; finally, a gas pump might look a little different because of a painting you did. But that’s not for the artist to worry about…. Everybody is re-evaluating those strict notions about what makes up high art. Fashion entering into art and vice versa is really quite a wonderful development. Fashion and art have become much closer. It’s not a bad thing.’
³⁴

From pop art onward, though it started with abstract expressionism, artists no longer proposed – or saw it as their task to propose – ‘alternative visions.’ They had instead become part of the ‘competing lifestyles and ideologies’ that made up the contemporary, other-directed, affluent society. It was thus entirely fitting that when Warhol was gunned down in his ‘Factory’ on Union Square in 1968 by a feminist actress, and survived after being pronounced clinically dead, the price of his paintings shot up from an average of $200 to $15,000. From that moment, the price of art was as important as its content.

Also characteristic of the arts in America at that time, and Manhattan in particular, was the overlap and links between different forms: art, poetry, dance and music. According to David Lehman the very idea of the avant-garde had itself transferred to America and not just in painting: the title of his book on the New York school of poets, which flourished in the early 1950s, was
The Last Avant-Garde.
³⁵
Aside from their poetry, which travelled an experimental road between the
ancien regime
of Eliot
et alia
and the new culture of the Beats, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler were all very friendly with the abstract expressionist painters De Kooning, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers. Ashbery was also influenced by the composer John Cage. In turn, Cage later worked with painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and with the choreographer Merce Cunningham.