BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

By Alexandra A. Jopp In the July-August 1940 issue of Partisan Review , the Marxist-Trotskyist intellectual journal, there appeared an essay on modern art by Clement Greenberg titled Towards a Newer Laocoon . The arguments in this essay, T.J. Clark writes, “stake out the ground for Greenberg’s later practice as a critic and set down the main lines of a theory and history of culture since 1850 – since Courbet and Baudelaire.” 1 The essay, then, is a historical explanation of the course of avant-garde art since the mid-nineteenth century. Most of the arguments in the essay reappear in Greenberg’s 1960 theoretical study Modernist Painting . Greenberg’s conservative writing reflects on artistic “quality,” “taste” and value. He essentially links “high modern” art with artists who worked to perfect a medium, who took a specific approach to their work. Although he does not mention names, he prefers, above all, Abstract Expressionist painters. For Greenberg, the highest form of art was t...

By Alexandra A Jopp In the 1930s, Surrealism ceased being merely a Parisian phenomenon as political instability and impending war in Europe led members of the movement to travel overseas. Andre Breton, for example, moved to Latin America to promote French culture and continue his efforts to build the Surrealist movement internationally. While in Mexico, Breton and other members of his group worked with Leon Trotsky to try to create a worldwide political and ideological movement in which Trotsky would be the chief player. Their “International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art” was short-lived, however. Some of the Latin American Surrealists, in addition to transferring the experience of the French school to their native lands, wrote in French. This commitment to the movement’s Gallic origins made it more difficult for Surrealism to deepen its roots in Spanish-speaking countries. For instance, when I think of Latin America, I associate it with Colombian novelist Gabriel Ga...

By Alexandra A Jopp When the innovations of a movement become routine, artists, poets and writers look for new motifs and sources of inspiration. For instance, Picasso developed an interest in primitivism and colonialism after his 1907 visit to the Musee d’Ethnographie du Trocadero in Paris (now the Musee de l’Homme). As the artist wrote: The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things. … I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism-painting. (Foster 91) The connection between Surrealism and primitivism – African masks, in particular – is not, however, as direct as it might, at first, seem. Unlike Cubism, which had its roots in the discovery of African objects, the automatism that is at the heart of Surrealism has nothing in common...

By Alexandra A Jopp “I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant,” 1 the formalist critic Clement Greenberg writes in his 1965 essay “Modernist Painting.”  I am inclined to agree with Greenberg that Kant and his ideas provided a revolutionary introduction to the self-critical power in philosophy. Kant, who hated Romanticism, detested every form of extravagance, fantasy, exaggeration, mysticism, vagueness and confusion. His philosophy asserted that it is our reason that invests the world we experience with structure. In his works on aesthetics, he argues that it is our faculty of judgment that enables us to experience beauty and understand our experiences as being part of an ordered, natural world with a purpose. While Kant focuses on perception, Greenberg focuses on painting, and he sees enormous potential in the concept of essential limits when applied to the history of painting. ...

By Alexandra A Jopp The complex relationship of love, sex and marriage that Thomas Hardy explored more than a hundred years ago is a very modern theme. The hardest thing for many persons in the modern world is to deal with their desire for personal independence and how that relates to the structure of mutual dependency in a relationship within the constraints of pooled finances and sexual restraints. In the last fifty years women have had jobs outside the home, university degrees and other credentials, professional careers and economic advances putting unprecedented stress on the institution of marriage and the willingness of women to bear children while advancing their careers. The nineteenth century understanding of marriage that formed the backdrop for Jude the Obscure was a relationship with the man working in a factory or office and bringing home the income while the woman stayed at home keeping house. Under this view of marriage, the woman’s sphere was her home where her pr...

The Kaiser Geodesic Dome, at the American National Exhibition, Moscow 1959  Photograph                                                      By Alexandra A. Jopp One can argue that all exhibitions have political aspects to them; some, though, are more politically driven than others. One such example was the 1959 “American National Exhibition” in Moscow. The International Cultural Exchange and Fair Trade and Participation Act that was enacted in 1956 established a cultural diplomacy program in the United States, and the American National Exhibition was the most ambitious project implemented after the signing of an East-West cultural exchange agreement in 1958. The exhibition, which was held in Sokolniki Park, was perhaps most famous for hosting the impromptu “kitchen debate” between U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet...