BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

By Alexandra A. Jopp As Dutch-born historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon said, “The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.” [1] Indeed, art can tell us with remarkable accuracy a great deal about lives and cultures, both our own and those in other parts of the world. It can illustrate the tides of social and political change, the strengths and weaknesses of new trends, and the flaws and crimes of oppressive regimes. American artists in the 1960s had the good fortune to be working in a free environment that allowed them the opportunity to change the nature of the creative process. Their revised fields of vision explored the ways in which artists changed the core of formalist aesthetics, which resulted in changes of perception, as well as, to quote Morris, an “attempt to contradict one’s taste.” Morris further remarks in Notes on Sculpture IV that “changes in form can be thought of as a vertical sc...

By Alexandra A. Jopp Modernism was the “cultural outcome of modernity, the social experience of living in the modern world.” [1] Many artists and critics, starting in the 1940s, abandoned traditional historicism and art forms in favor of a search for new standards, leading to an abundance of original writings, actions, reactions and artistic developments. When reflecting on how Modernism influenced art in the 1960s, it is important to note the role of American art critic and formalist Clement Greenberg, who had great influence as an arbiter of artistic quality, taste and value. His “Greenbergian Modernism” linked “high modern” art with artists who worked to refine a medium-specific approach to their work, and he preferred, above all, painterly Abstract Expressionism, especially Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. For Greenberg, the highest form of art was that which concerned itself so strictly with its medium and essential materials that the work was about the medium and noth...