Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  Paris had been the art capital of the world, and when Paris was occupied by the Nazis, New York—much to the shock of American artists—suddenly found that if there was going to be an immediate future for modernist art the world, it was going to happen here. And that has an effect on artists. They try harder; they no longer consider themselves underdogs. They feel it’s their turn. The emigration had a very galvanizing effect on all those artists. Abstract expressionism would not have happened without the war.

  WALDO RASMUSSEN: Because of the connection that was forged between European and American artists, American art became more radical, more open to different trends. The invention of that first generation of abstract expressionists was stronger than anything that was happening anyplace else in the world. It was heroic; it had heart and energy. In Pollock and Newman and Rothko there is a very definite sense of the tragic. There was a lot of tragedy going on with them, troubled lives.

  JOAN WASHBURN: After Life magazine did some articles on abstract expressionist artists, people began to look at them seriously. Life was a great power at that time; it educated the American public to begin to look at their own artists.

  HILTON KRAMER: Time and Life concentrated on Pollock because Clement Greenberg had said he might be the greatest American living artist. There was a magazine article called “Jack the Dripper,” which had models in haute couture with Pollock paintings in the background. Still, the prices for his works didn’t go ballistic until after his death.

  Larry Rivers told a story about someone coming into the Artists’ Club and announcing that a painting of Pollock’s had been sold for eight thousand dollars. That was the end of the Artists’ Club, Rivers said, because no one could imagine that one of their paintings could fetch that much money, and if there was that much money in circulation, there was nothing left to talk about.

  The social circuit of the abstract expressionists revolved around the Cedar Bar. I was there a few times, but the food was atrocious and it didn’t amuse me to see guys getting drunk and being violent to each other. That was part of the scene, Pollock tearing off the door to the men’s room. To say they were Gauguin types is putting it in the best possible light.

  I had a very strong friendship with Richard Pousette-Dart, who was the youngest of the abstract expressionists and the only one of those painters who had something resembling what I would call a normal life. He didn’t have to revolt against anything to become an artist. His father was a painter and a writer, his mother a poet. He was a very happily married man. His two children are successful. When he died, I wrote in the Times that he was the only abstract expressionist who dressed up as Santa Claus to entertain his children at Christmas.

  But he paid a high price for that. He raised his family in Rockland County. He didn’t hang out at the Cedar Bar. Because he wasn’t part of that social circuit, he was written out of many of the books of that time.

  WALDO RASMUSSEN: When I began working at the Museum of Modern Art in 1954, it was the heyday of American abstract expressionism. The museum was still the original building then. It had not yet been enlarged so it had an intimate feel. But the collection was so broad that you could go from the work of the twenties and thirties, from great masterpieces like Matisse’s, which were difficult but easier to respond to, up to the abstract expressionists. The general public, though, came for Picasso—Guernica was the most famous picture in the world.

  What I was most attracted to was the work of the second generation of the abstract expressionists, and somehow I felt a special connection with a number of the women artists—Helen Frankenthaler, Juan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan. I got to know them through Frank O’Hara.

  Before Frank came to work at the Museum of Modern Art, he was already part of the gallery world and a critic for Art News. He was also a wonderful poet. We met in 1955. He became the greatest friend of my life, and I loved him very deeply.

  Frank’s contemporaries, like Frankenthaler and Larry Rivers, were crazy about him. They had a snappy relationship, were very verbal, quick on the uptake with each other. I was quite shy, and some of the art scene was quite daunting to me. I remember going to a Frankenthaler show feeling kind of lost, swamped by it all. But Frank was a great help about that.

  Although not a trained art historian, Frank was so brilliant that he could cope with the more scholarly exhibitions as well as the contemporary. He wasn’t discerning and analytical; he was more an enthusiast. And we became conspirators in a mission to prove the quality of American art. It was the second generation Frank was mostly involved with, the younger artists who were just happening, whose pictures were so strange, they didn’t look like anything recognizable.

  He was small and skinny with a broken nose and a slightly nasal voice, tough, cocky, very funny, and more openly gay than anyone I had ever met, which kind of shocked me at first. He was also a great drinker. The Cedar Bar was his home away from home. Quite often we’d have drinks after work. After two martinis, I’d have to go home in a taxicab and breathe fresh air. But Frank could down quite a few.

  He was wildly sentimental, a true Irish romantic with an appetite for all the arts, almost every kind of music. He didn’t distinguish between high and low art. It could be a Laurel and Hardy movie or King Lear. He adored campy opera stars and movie stars. When James Dean was killed, he was absolutely crushed. He took James Dean as seriously as he took Mark Rothko.

  The one artist I knew before I came to New York was David Smith, and the first work of art I ever bought was a Smith drawing, which cost $125. I paid it in installments of $10 a month when I had the $10. Frank and I were working on a great David Smith retrospective in 1966, but shortly before it opened in Europe, David was killed in an automobile accident.

  A few months later, Frank was coming back from a bar on Fire Island where, ironically, cars are not allowed. I think he was blinded by the lights of the Jeep that hit him. The David Smith retrospective opened. I was in charge of it. But the two people I loved the most were not around to see it.

  HILTON KRAMER: I think abstract expressionism will be seen as one of the last important developments in the history of modernist art. It’s a movement that to me represents the end rather than the beginning of something. It followed in the footsteps of the European avant-garde. In a way, it is one of the final chapters in European modernism given a new lease on life with American energy and ambition. For one thing, it changed the scale of painting by abandoning small-scale easel painting for large-scale wall painting that isn’t mural painting; it’s still canvas stretched on a wooden stretcher. And that influenced everybody in the world.

  The New York School, the abstract expressionists, succeeded in putting modern American art on the international map in a way that nothing prior to that generation of painters did. It was tremendously important, although I never believed Pollock was equal to Picasso or Rothko to Matisse.

  When Picasso died, I was still working for the Times. It was a Sunday, and I was in Connecticut. I got a call from CBS news. “Mr. Kramer, you probably heard Pablo Picasso died.”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Was he, in your opinion, the greatest artist of the twentieth century?”

  “Actually, I think Matisse was.”

  “That’s very interesting. We’ll get back to you.”

  However, almost every critic I respect agrees. It was like the tortoise and the hare. Picasso made the most noise, but Matisse was the greater master.

  JOAN WASHBURN: Although I studied art history in college, I never expected to end up in the art world. But after I graduated in 1951, I had a hundred dollars left over from a scholarship and used it to take a six-week course in shorthand. Afterwards I was so terrified I’d forget all I learned, I came to New York looking for a job and ended up in an employment agency where I was told, “We have a job for you in an art gallery. There won’t be much social life, and you’ll have to work for a woman.” That was it. I started to work for Antoinette Kraushaar—answering the phone, taking let
ters—and I’ve been in the field ever since.

  Antoinette’s gallery was one of the oldest in New York. It had a complete range of art. Her family had been in the business since 1905 and managed to get through the Depression—which separated the men from the boys. She had a marvelous reputation and a lot of knowledge.

  It was Antoinette who took me to my first opening, which was also the last exhibition at the old Whitney Museum on 8th Street. It was the John Sloan Memorial Retrospective, and Kraushaar Galleries had represented John Sloan for many years. Antoinette had the painting Charma Running Red by Sloan in her gallery for sale at six thousand dollars. One day someone came in, wrote a check out for three thousand dollars, and then ripped it up. Since I was alone in the gallery at that time and wasn’t allowed to accept offers anyway, it didn’t matter. Still, that painting today would be worth six figures.

  I found it startling to come across modern art. At first I was totally confused. I had no background for it. But working for Antoinette, I learned what modern art was about and how to look at it while it was happening. It takes a while to fall in love with paintings of such a different nature.

  That postwar period was a breakout time in art. At the same time, because of its small size, the art world was very immediate. Everything was on 57th Street. Kraushaar Galleries was at number 32. Curt Valentin, one of the major figures responsible for bringing European art here after the war, was in the building. There were dealers in old masters. You could see a Cezanne watercolor show at Knoedler’s and go across to Betty Parsons and see Pollock or de Kooning. Charlie Egan was in business across the street. Exhibitions usually lasted three weeks. You could easily see everything by going between Park and Sixth Avenues along 57th Street. There weren’t huge crowds, and people were fairly informed.

  When Lou Pollock, the very much loved owner of the Peridot Gallery, died in 1970, Alan Gussow, one of the artists in that gallery, came to see me with the idea that I should take the gallery over. “Oh, no, I can’t afford it,” I said. “I have small children. I can’t handle the hours.”

  A few months later, Alan came by again with Lou’s cousin, who was a lawyer and accountant. “You really should take this over,” he said. “We’ll do anything we can to make it financially possible for you.”

  I hesitated, but then I went for it, and it was a rather seamless move because by then I had worked in the business for so many years. The difference was now I had to worry whether the paintings sold or not. The art business is the sport of kings, so to speak, and I am not a princess.

  HILTON KRAMER: The art world was getting bigger, the art public was getting bigger. There were more and more courses, more and more galleries. The museum public was expanding, museums were expanding.

  HOWARD KISSEL: When I first saw the Guggenheim on a high school trip to New York in 1959, I had a great sense of discovery of the building and the abstract art.

  The Guggenheim Museum under construction in 1957.

  GILLES LARRAÍN: The space of the Guggenheim is a great work of art, the most beautiful sculpture. And it was so unique at the time it came up, when everything else was straight and perpendicular. But it doesn’t respect the art. Walking up the spirals, it is difficult to balance yourself and look at the art.

  WALDO RASMUSSEN: The Guggenheim was an architectural experience and very shocking in the first days, such a nutty, fascinating building. The combination of a sloping floor and my fear of heights made me have a very hard time with it.

  HILTON KRAMER: Frank Lloyd Wright had always been vocal in his denunciation of painting; he hated easel painting. He was determined to build a building where he was the most important artist, and he did. In the Guggenheim, nothing could compete with Frank Lloyd Wright.

  JOAN WASHBURN: We all watched the Whitney Museum go up and the art world move uptown around 78th and 79th Streets. There was a lot of activity because of the proximity to the Whitney and the Met. Abstract expressionism was ascending to meteoric heights, while the beginning of pop art started up at Leo Castelli’s in the 1960s.

  HILTON KRAMER: One of the most important consequences of the pop art movement was that it brought a whole new kind of art public into the art world. The public that responded to abstract expressionism was interested in the interior life of art, in art as a kind of expression of the interior life. It was complex; it had certain metaphysical implications, and it had a certain element of mystery.

  Pop art was a kind of release for people who had never been able to connect with abstract expressionism. Here it was: familiar images from the supermarket, the Hollywood screen, the comics. It was cheerful, easy, accessible. There were no metaphysical implications, no psychological twists. And the public came running. Pop art was the first movement that was an instant success in the media, universities, the art market, the museums. It had taken two decades for abstract expressionism to acquire a mainstream public; it took pop art about two years.

  Andy Warhol did the drawings for I. Miller Shoes and was a very gifted illustrator. But his real genius, I think, was in public relations, not art. He created the artist as celebrity.

  When I lived on 12th Street, the Whitney was still in the old studio building at 8 West 8th Street. They closed after that and moved to West 54th Street in a building that opened to the back of the Museum of Modern Art. Once they were there, they realized they would never be anything but the tail on the back of MoMA. Later they built the building on 75th and Madison, which looks like a fascist bunker although the exhibition space is better than the Guggenheim’s.

  The first “artist as celebrity,” Andy Warhol is shown here with Tennessee Williams in 1967.

  MARCIA TUCKER: In late 1968, the Whitney hired me and James Monte as curators. They took a chance, a big chance. We were two young people. I was an art historian and a writer; Jim was a painter. In those days there were no curatorial schools. In addition, I was the first woman curator at the Whitney. Up till then, women were the donors and secretaries.

  The first show I did was a small exhibition of the work of Nancy Graves, the life-sized camels she was making at the time. It was totally controversial, which I never expected. Now they are icons of art history. My second show was done together with Jim. It focused on how the process itself would dictate the final form of the object. That was an opposite tack to Greenberg’s formalism, to Greenberg’s painting reduced to nothing but itself. It was the first museum show Eva Hesse was ever in. It had Richard Serra’s splashes, the work of Joel Shapiro and Bruce Nauman. Rafael Ferrer did a wonderful piece where he filled a moat with ice and hay. The ice melted over time.

  The show was controversial, the crowd was mistrustful, and there was a lot of hostility. A lot of people said, “This isn’t art.” Hilton Kramer, who was writing for the Times, was vituperative. I tore the reviews into small squares and hung them on a hook in the bathroom like the French do. I’ve had a really good career based on bad reviews.

  The Whitney was run by the most amazing person—Jack Baur, a person of such honor. He was completely supportive. But when Tom Armstrong came into the Whitney in ’76, I knew my time there would be at an end. By then, however, I had plans for a new museum.

  The New Museum was characterized by experimentation, openness, risk taking, and rooted in the understanding that art is a vital social force, and that art and life are connected in inextricable and totally critical ways. It was also really democratic and collaborative internally.

  While I was at the Whitney, I had never thought too much about the audience. Then one day I saw a couple look at Lichtenstein’s painting of Picasso’s woman in a flowered hat. And the guy says, “So, Ethel, you see that upside-down donkey?”

  She says, “Oh, yes, amazing, that’s what it is.”

  Then they move over to Lichtenstein’s Golf Ball, and she says, “You know I think that’s a golf ball.”

  And the husband says, “You’re right. It’s a golf ball.”

  That totally changed my head around. I realized we had done
nothing, nothing to help people see what was up there. And I couldn’t do much about that until I was at the New Museum.

  Somebody described me as antiauthoritarian. “Authority” is a bad word for me. In my role as a director, it was not about authority but responsibility. I’m sure a lot of those ideas come from the sixties.

  HILTON KRAMER: When I got the offer to be art critic for the New York Times, my wife, who was an editor at Art News then, was slightly upset. “Are you considering it?” she asked. The Times art coverage had such a bad reputation in the art world that I think my wife worried whether anybody would speak to us again if I worked there.

  I came in to meet Clifton Daniel, who was managing editor, and Turner Catledge, who was executive editor. They asked me what I thought of the paper’s art criticism. I said I thought it was very superficial. Daniel said, “Well, that’s why we’re offering you this job.”

  The chief art critic of the Times then was John Canaday. He was hostile to the work that was going on. He hated Pollock, he hated Frankenthaler, he basically hated abstract art, and he was an avowed enemy of the New York School. John Canaday had many good qualities; his real interest was writing detective stories under the name of Matthew Head. But if John had to spend more than an hour writing a column, he’d just wind it up. He was very fast, dismissive of anything he didn’t already know.

  Turner Catledge said, “The way we used to hire critics on the Times was when their other jobs had become too strenuous, we’d give them a job as a critic. But our readers are too smart for that now.”

  The very first week I was on the Times, when I knew absolutely nobody, Clifton Daniel’s secretary came to see me in the newsroom and asked if I could stop by Mr. Daniel’s office at the end of the day to have a drink with him. He invited Craig Claiborne, the food editor, and Drew Middleton, the military editor, in to meet the new person. I can tell you that meant a lot. Both men became good friends of mine.