5/24/2023 0 Comments Patricia albers joan mitchellIt was a kind of highbrow public relations venture, offering endorsement opportunities for American art, hitherto so easily dismissed, in each of the eight European countries to which the exhibition traveled, ending at the Tate Gallery in London in March 1959. “The New American Painting” exhibition had been organized by the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art. Collectively, though, they would become titans, defining a vigorous and distinctly American form of art, Abstract Expressionism, which burst upon the art world in the late 1950s in the landmark exhibition entitled “The New American Painting.” It was the art market’s version of the classic rags-to-riches tale. They were bohemians and misfits they drank and caroused and argued endlessly about the past and the future of art. This little universe of men and women, living and working in squalor up and down Tenth Street in Greenwich Village in unheated tenements and dimly-lighted lofts, was largely ignored by the art establishment. Some of these artists would rise to prominence and fame yet nearly all of them would labor, often for many years, in despair and grinding career uncertainty. This lyrical if dreary tableau from the 1950s captures a moment in time of what would become known as the New York School of painters. Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter “Nowhere on earth was painting lived as intensely as below Fourteenth Street, where, after every night of beery camaraderie, painters still had to face the decrepit walk-ups and the scramble to make rent.”
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