A taste for triumph. - Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948, by Annie Cohen-Solal - book review

Art in America, May, 2002 by Michelle C. Cone

As the author confronts the 1913 New York Armory Show and its aftermath in Part III of her text, she puts the artists on the back burner and looks at modern art from the point of view of its patrons, dealers, collectors and, finally, its museum directors. As we know, at the Armory Show. works by the Eight and other American artists were eclipsed by the French art on view. Revealing "advanced" formal opportunities not yet exploited in the U.S., the Armory show spawned new galleries and new patrons for modernism in New York, and this growing energy, Cohen-Solal argues, spurred American artists to stronger, more independent efforts. Thus the 1913 Armory Show marked a turning point and, in her view, started the rivalry of France and the United States in terms of the marketability of their respective artistic productions.

Details of how, from the days of the Armory Show onward, America gradually came to dominate the art market, and how things changed for the better for American art when it purged itself of reliance on foreign models and overrefined style make up the remaining pages of Painting American. There is little doubt that, starting in the late 19th century, the financial resources of robber barons and of other newly enriched Americans were so immense as to cause the exodus from Europe of thousands of art works, old and new--and, I would add, both authentic and fake. (Remember the old joke: "How many paintings did Corot paint?"--"Two thousand, three thousand of which are in America.") So it is not surprising that, during the First World War, quantities of European art works were traded in America. Thus, as Cohen-Solal observes, "when peace finally returned, Europeans were dumb-founded to discover that New York had become a major artistic center, and that rather than being hurt by the war, the art market had prospered."

But is there not a difference between the place most active in the commerce of art works and the place most vibrant in artistic ideas? Did the acquisition of art works by wealthy American businessmen and the creation of modern art museums in the U.S.--some 50 between 1933 and 1942 alone, according to Cohen-Solal--suffice to shift the center of the art world to New York as early as the author contends?

Cohen-Solal concedes that the art market was not the only factor responsible for the displacement of Paris as capital of the arts. She rightly notes that American artists had always experienced a contradictory urge to assert their autonomy while also looking for exemplary models in Europe. Consequently, the rise of American art on the international scene was not keyed exclusively to what Cohen-Solal describes as "the construction of a true American art free from European influence." And not everyone would agree that Pollock's success at the 1948 Venice Biennale was related to getting rid of what Stieglitz once called "that damned French flavor."

In point of fact, between the wars, American art (American Scene painting in particular) more or less freed from European influence was rather provincial and could hardly boast successes outside its country of origin. The Paris art world during the same period, though subject to a "return to order" and increasingly nationalistic, gave birth to the Surrealists and fostered Mondrian's Neoplasticism, whose ideas reached far beyond Paris. (2) In a change from earlier times, few young New York artists of Pollock's generation could afford to travel to Europe to observe that vital scene during their formative years. It was the internationalization of the New York art scene in the early `40s--embodied in exiles like Ernst, Masson and Duchamp--that made it possible for American artists once again to assuage their curiosity vis-a-vis their European counterparts, to feed on foreign innovations without having to travel.