"In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute"
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Hodgkin points to how American modern art built a framework that could make a scene look unified. After World War II, New York supplanted Paris as the center of gravity, and a powerful network of museums, critics, dealers, and magazines assembled a story around a new avant-garde. The New York School appeared to be a movement with a shared creed: large canvases, gestural urgency, existential seriousness, and the mythic drama of the studio. Exhibitions and essays gave that ethos a name, and for a while the circulation of images and ideas made it feel like a single, forward thrust.
The sly qualifier for a minute punctures that certainty. Even at its height, so-called Abstract Expressionism contained starkly different temperaments and aims: Pollock’s poured turbulence, Rothko’s meditative fields, de Kooning’s muscular figuration, Newman’s ascetic zips. Critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg helped concentrate attention, but the artists themselves were restless individualists. Friction, divergence, and rapid change soon splintered any sense of one coherent program. Within a few years, color field painting, Pop, and Minimalism jolted the narrative, and New York’s strength became not a single school but a fast-moving plurality.
There is also a wry outsider’s angle in Hodgkin’s voice. As a British painter devoted to intimate, memory-charged abstraction, he was wary of doctrinaire labels and wary of how institutions manufacture coherence. Structure can be enabling, giving artists visibility and momentum, yet it also flattens difference and turns a messy, contradictory set of practices into a brand. His observation acknowledges both truths: the United States excelled at creating a persuasive framework for modern art, and that framework briefly made the New York School look like a unified phenomenon.
What endures is not the label but the energy of disparate artists pushing in neighboring directions, then veering off. The art world craves tidy schools; art itself keeps slipping the net.
The sly qualifier for a minute punctures that certainty. Even at its height, so-called Abstract Expressionism contained starkly different temperaments and aims: Pollock’s poured turbulence, Rothko’s meditative fields, de Kooning’s muscular figuration, Newman’s ascetic zips. Critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg helped concentrate attention, but the artists themselves were restless individualists. Friction, divergence, and rapid change soon splintered any sense of one coherent program. Within a few years, color field painting, Pop, and Minimalism jolted the narrative, and New York’s strength became not a single school but a fast-moving plurality.
There is also a wry outsider’s angle in Hodgkin’s voice. As a British painter devoted to intimate, memory-charged abstraction, he was wary of doctrinaire labels and wary of how institutions manufacture coherence. Structure can be enabling, giving artists visibility and momentum, yet it also flattens difference and turns a messy, contradictory set of practices into a brand. His observation acknowledges both truths: the United States excelled at creating a persuasive framework for modern art, and that framework briefly made the New York School look like a unified phenomenon.
What endures is not the label but the energy of disparate artists pushing in neighboring directions, then veering off. The art world craves tidy schools; art itself keeps slipping the net.
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| Topic | Art |
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