The New York Art Scene in the 1960s

Abstract

With the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, many of the leaders of European modernism emigrated to the United States, thereby freeing American artists from their traditional feeling of inferiority. The result was an uprush of creativity, as American art first assimilated and then moved beyond the European inheritance. In the Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s, such as one associates with the names of Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning and Mark Rothko, and in the 1950s assemblage art of Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, American art acquired a confidence, an inventiveness, a largeness of ambition, that matched the nation’s assumption of the custodianship of the western world. The USA replaced France as the country towards which international avant-gardists gravitated; New York replaced Paris as the art capital of the world.