The Vanguard Artist

In 1961, with the New York School of Painting already an international phenomenon in its influence on artists around the world, the authors undertook a study of twenty-five men and women who were painters or sculptors, in an attempt to catch the essence of that particular vanguard, and perhaps to say something useful about the nature of artistic vanguards in general. The artists that Rosenberg and Fliegel interviewed were chosen from among the obviously successful painters and sculptors, those who were known to the public and to whom the reputation of American art everywhere might reasonably be attributed. The artists turned out to be the most individual, though a good proportion of them had shared experience of working for the WPA; after earning their living by the American equivalent of social realism, they felt a sense of liberation in turning to abstraction in painting and sculpture. The individualists were certainly united in that sense, and sometimes also in their express distaste for the middle class–the class into which the largest of them had been born. This is a single instance of a rich and stimulating texture of genuine insights into the psychology of a creative minority, at work in a country that is on the whole not much interested in art.