Late Modernism. Robert Genter

as the New Criticism “[attached] literature to the university,” the modernist canon became “merely a set of courses in the departments of English and comparative literature.”⁹² Even Lionel Trilling, the high modernist seemingly most attached to his professional identity, expressed his own concerns in a well-known short story, “Of This Time, of That Place,” a semiautobiographical piece about a published poet and university professor whose encounter with a bohemian student precipitates his own anxieties about the demands that scholarship and decorum had forced upon him.⁹³ Trilling realized, as his friendship with many of the emerging Beat writers in the 1950s confirmed, that high modernism lived in part with a bad conscience.

      Just as problematic was the fact that high modernism at times collapsed into mere elitism. The subtle theoretical position of Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, for instance, was not matched by other promoters of high modernism such as Dwight Macdonald who lacked their sophisticated vocabulary with which to make aesthetic comparisons. Adorno’s essays on music and poetry and Greenberg’s commentaries on modern art were thoughtful discussions of these respective mediums. Macdonald’s cultural criticism, however, was less a sustained analysis of artistic developments than an angry diatribe against “a too ready acceptance of the avant-garde by the public.”⁹⁴ Having no notion or definition of the good, the beautiful, the sublime, or the transcendent and no understanding of the problem of form, Macdonald was unable to make convincing arguments about particular works of art. Claiming that high culture’s major contribution was not its aesthetic practices per se but its “desperate effort … to erect again the barriers between the cognoscenti and the ignoscenti that had been breached by the rise of Masscult,” Macdonald offered no explanation for his adoration of Pablo Picasso over Jackson Pollock or James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man over his Finnegan’s Wake.⁹⁵ Instead, as the numerous revisions of his famous essay “Masscult and Midcult” demonstrated, Macdonald offered only the restoration of “the cultural distinctions that have become increasingly blurred since the industrial revolution.”⁹⁶ Consequently, his defense of high culture was easily lampooned by the middlebrow producers he chastised. Writing in Harper’s magazine, editor Russell Lynes noted that the newest form of “snobbishness” in American society was no longer based upon wealth or family ties but on “high thinking,” emblematic of those intellectuals determined to divide the country into castes based upon levels of cultural consumption: “All middlebrows, presumably, would have their radios taken away, be suspended from society until they had agreed to give up their subscriptions to the Book-of-the-Month, turned their color reproductions over to a Commission for the Dissolution of Middlebrow Taste, and renounced their affiliation with all educational and other cultural institutions whatsoever.”⁹⁷ Appropriating Lynes’s schema and his sarcasm, Life magazine presented photographic images of the three cultural types—one gazing at a Picasso, one enjoying a Grant Wood reproduction, and one ogling a calendar pinup—and provided a classification chart for readers to plot their own cultural tastes according to their preferences for specific reading material, clothes, furniture, games, and even salads.⁹⁸

      While such playful denunciations were mildly troubling, high modernists faced a third, and more difficult, problem. Their defense of modernist artworks as absolute commodities—their uselessness, their purposelessness, and their status as completely surplus labor—meant that such works were easily appropriated by bourgeois consumers for ulterior purposes. Willem de Kooning once proclaimed that “it is exactly in its uselessness that [art] is free,” but he soon realized, like many of his fellow painters, that such freedom came at a price.⁹⁹ Feted within mass-market publications, abstract art was appropriated, as Harold Rosenberg explained, by “educational and profit-making enterprises” for use in “color reproductions, design adaptations, [and] human-interest stories.”¹⁰⁰ For instance, Jackson Pollock’s art dealer, Betty Parsons, allowed Vogue photographer Cecil Beaton to pose fashion models in front of the artist’s abstract paintings for a magazine spread.¹⁰¹ The photographs, which appeared in a 1951 issue, were one of many growing links among the fashion industry, modern advertising practices, and abstract art. Modernism also became decoration. Noting that “the blossoming of art galleries” had led to an “increasing interest” in private collections for the home, Betty Pepis, the home editor at the New York Times, offered a series of articles on proper display techniques for abstract art in the home, giving advice on proper framing, wall locations, lighting, and furniture arrangements.¹⁰² Modern art was soon promoted in a number of advertisements as the perfect accessory for the modern home and as a symbol of cultural sophistication. Similarly, the editors at Playboy magazine refashioned the modern urban bachelor as a discriminating connoisseur of modern art and music. Modernism had become the latest form of conspicuous consumption.

      Finally, in the ultimate moment of appropriation, high modernism was “borrowed” by politicians and intellectuals as a cultural tool in fighting the Cold War. Along with American symphonies, modern jazz, and Hollywood films, abstract art was one of many cultural exports federal agencies sent abroad as political propaganda in the 1950s.¹⁰³ Seemingly devoid of radical politics, antithetical to the social realism of the Popular Front era, outwardly universal while simultaneously very American, abstract expressionism became the perfect symbol of the intellectual, artistic, and personal freedom inherent to Western democracies and was seemingly antithetical to the oppressive cultures of totalitarian regimes. Unable to use federal funds directly because of negative publicity but determined to use abstract art as a symbol of American individualism in an ever-expanding cultural Cold War, the U.S. Information Agency and the CIA turned to anti-Communist supporters within the Museum of Modern Art for assistance. Under an expanded International Council branch, the Museum of Modern Art arranged a variety of exhibits of American art, including a major show of abstract expressionism titled “New American Painting” that traveled through European countries in 1958 and 1959. Former director Alfred Barr, in his catalogue introduction to the exhibition, reaffirmed the connection between the expressive freedom of abstract painters and the political freedom in Western countries: “They defiantly reject the conventional values of the society which surrounds them, but they are not politically engaged even though their paintings have been of freedom in a world in which freedom connotes a political attitude.”¹⁰⁴ Despite the politics of many abstract artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, which often ran counter to American foreign policy aims, the apolitical and purposeless nature of modernist works left them quite vulnerable.

      Compromised, diluted, and appropriated, high modernism consequently suffered under its cultural success. By the end of the 1950s, literary critic Harry Levin considered it more than appropriate to ask in a Massachusetts Review article “what was modernism?” According to Levin, the success of the movement had tempered its original revolutionary impulse, so much so that “the enfant terrible” of the movement’s early years had matured into “the elder statesman” of the mid-century scene.¹⁰⁵ Noting that the Institute of Modern Art in Boston had recently changed its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art and that a new apartment building in Manhattan had been christened the Picasso, Levin remarked that “we Americans have smoothly rounded some sort of cultural corner” (274) in which the bohemian had become fashionable, if not respectable. The official notice that the project of high modernism was in trouble was Lionel Trilling’s well-known 1961 essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” written as a personal response to the introduction of a required course on modernist literature within the core curriculum at Columbia University. Noting the all-too-easy acceptance of the existential anguish of Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche by his students, Trilling wondered if the contemporary adoration of such literature had merely resulted in “the socialization of the antisocial, or the acculturation of the anticultural, or the legitimization of the subversive.”¹⁰⁶ Under such conditions, high modernism was open to severe criticism.

      Beyond High Modernism

      Two challenges to the hegemony of high modernism appeared in the 1940s and 1950s. The first was an appropriation of earlier and more spontaneous forms of artistic practice that attempted to overcome the rigid divide between art and life. The rise of romantic modernism began innocently enough in a Harlem apartment one summer evening in 1948 when a 22-year-old Columbia University undergraduate