New York, New York

New York, New York

Anyone who has ever lived in New York City, or even visited the town knows the place is unlike any other on earth. Chicago may be America's heartland and Washington where all the noise comes from, but it is New York that is the face of America. The Statue of Liberty is plainly the nose on that face, a work of art appropriate to a city in which the "arts" have congregated largely because of the liberty her glowing torch proclaims. These artists of all kinds are the "makeup" of the city where the beauty they create is as vital as its soaring architecture in masking the ugly pockmarks of this massive, sprawling, urban monster. New York has always had Artists. In colonial times, it was the root, literally and figuratively, of the Hudson River School of landscape painting. But it wasn't until the 1920s when the precious liberty its statue advertises made it a magnet for artists all over the world; and where the roots of the New York School could grab hold.

Those roots sprouted in the moist dirt of John Sloan's Ashcan School. They were nourished by the prosperity, also the social, artistic, and intellectual freedom of the Jazz Age. They were hardened and deepened by tough times in the Depression, but fertilized by the Federal Arts Project of that era. They matured quickly in the face of a world war, ready to flower once that war was over. In 1940 there were 40 art galleries in New York City. By 1946 there were 150. Harper's Bazaar featured the work of Mondrian and Fernand Leger as backdrops for postwar fashion spreads. Salvadore Dali was decorating windows for Bonwit Teller Department Stores. Money, the lifeblood of art, could be heard jingling and crinkling all over the city as its corporate pillars replaced its aging bluebloods as the major collectors of art.

The Museum of Modern Art,
midtown Manhattan

The city welcomed it's emigre artists with open arms.  Its Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1929, exposed and expounded upon their work. It would be almost fifty years before Paris had a similar museum (the Pompidou Center) dedicated to modern art. As a town built upon the garment industry and other small manufacturing concerns, by the 1930s, when most of them went broke, New York had literally thousands of empty lofts simply begging to become artists' studios. The likes of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, and Kline could not have melded into a coherent art movement anywhere else in the world at the time. It was here they found the media and the market and the mouthpieces in the form of critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. Abstract Expressionism and the New York School were not captives of the city.  The movement spread, but always, it retained the gritty essence of that city which shaped it and allowed it the liberty to paint a self portrait.