When New York ruled the world

This is where I came in. A spectacular historical art and documentation exhibit, “New York: 1962-1964,” at the Jewish Museum, addresses the exact years of my ragged arrival from the Midwest as an ambitious poet, a hard-working journalist, and a madman. of Tyro art. I gravitated through the poor Lower East Side poetry scene of the time into the burgeoning but not yet oligarchic art world. Artists, writers, merchants, patrons, and a variety of intellectuals, attentive to momentous changes in the world at large, rubbed shoulders at parties that were far more exhilarating than the ones my second-generation New York School clique attended.

It was an era of season-by-season, sometimes almost monthly or weekly, breakthroughs in painting, sculpture, photography, dance, music, design, fashion, and hybrid shenanigans like “happenings.” The exhibition also pays homage to poetry, displaying some of the small, mostly mimeographed magazines that contended for the vernacular in verse, anchored by a copy of Frank O’Hara’s definitive book, “Lunch Poems” (1964 ), and piped into logged reads. My favorites were and still are Ron Padgett and the late exquisitely laconic artist-poet Joe Brainard, both from Oklahoma.

With pop art and minimalism nascent, New York artists were turning the solemnly histrionic abstract expressionism on its head, which had established our city as the new wheelhouse of creative origin throughout the world. Instrumental for the moment was a brilliant critic and curator, Alan Solomon, who died too soon, at the age of forty-nine, in 1970. As director of the Jewish Museum during the years in parentheses in the present exhibition, he cemented what he called “The New Art,” staging the first museum retrospectives of pioneers Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and elevating fledgling pop phenoms like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist alongside radically formalist and aggressively large-scale abstract painters like Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland. Solomon organized the American exhibition at the 1964 Venice Biennale, where Rauschenberg received the Grand Prize for painting, a coup that cemented New York’s rise. If you weren’t here, you suddenly risked looking provincial.

Poor Paris, where I spent most of a disillusioning year spanning 1964 and 1965, was slow to recover from a tantrum of (to apply the appropriate phrase) lèse-majesté. As late as 1983, a noted book by French-born art historian Serge Guilbaut, “How New York Stole the Idea of ​​Modern Art,” dodged the truth that, after World War II, “the idea” had been at stake. . . (Finders Keepers.) Guilbaut attributed the transatlantic theft to conspiratorial interventions by the US government, some of which undoubtedly viewed American freedom of expression as a soft weapon in the Cold War and supported its exposure abroad. , sometimes covertly. That’s accurate enough as far as it goes, but it was just one of many converging circumstances.

Indeed, New York rainmakers like Solomon, resourceful merchant Sidney Janis, and the European émigré power couple of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, whose separation, in 1959, resulted in separate galleries (one in Manhattan, one in Paris ) that amplified the domain of their complementary, bold and demanding tastes, they needed neither capes nor daggers to negotiate the artistry that made each decisive case for itself. Young Germans, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Latin Americans, Asians, and even certain open-minded French artists were electrified. An influx of foreign talent to New York that had begun by chance during wartime turned into an invasion. Some, like the Bulgarian-born Christo and his French wife, Jeanne-Claude, became stars. Others encountered difficult sledding. In 1973, after fifteen eventful but lean years, the sultry, often environmentalist Japanese sculptor Yayoi Kusama retired to her homeland and began a rise to international eminence that is still ongoing.

“New York: 1962-1964” was conceived by the globetrotting Italian critical macher Germano Celant, before his death in 2020, as a display of exemplary works surrounded by pictorial and written evidence of coincidental political and social contingencies. A curatorial team from the Jewish Museum, together with Celant’s studio, has carried out his eclectic scheme. Civil rights campaigns, the sexual revolution, emerging second-wave feminism, the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, forebodings of disaster in Vietnam, and much more, plucked from the headlines of the time, They make their pressures felt. (He might have thought he was done shedding tears at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, but a wall-sized projection on the show proved otherwise.) Global contexts rhyme in energy if not in direct relevance to an insurgent avant-garde in New York that, while rarely controversial (art for art’s sake remained a persistent ideal), rejected modernist detachment to engage with lived realities. As Solomon observed, “TV commercials, comic strips, hot dog stands, billboards, junk stores, hamburger joints, used car parks, slot machines, slot machines, and supermarkets,” channel “probably the most aesthetic experience to 99 percent of Americans,” became reigning almost overnight.

Emblematic of this, on the show, are items from “The Store” (December 1961), by the recently deceased and lamented Claes Oldenburg: a pop-up store emporium, on East Second Street, of consumer goods rendered in lumpy plaster and paint sloppy Poetized by futility, the work marries gee-whiz delight and sardonic irony, seeming at once to brag and complain about the virulently commercialized culture that was crowning and slamming America’s ultimate power, prosperity, and, let’s face it, arrogance. . I must admit that I have a false memory, now that I reflect on it, of seeing “The Store” and several moving exhibitions of Solomon in person. I was too disorganized even as I absorbed the torrential emotions of the time, soundtracked by Bob Dylan and Motown, at first indirectly and then through a nascent career I had never imagined for myself.

The eruption in the early 1960s launched many people on all kinds of trajectories. After intriguing for a moment, some quickly fizzled out or stalled, suggesting a theory, which I kept to myself, of temporal meaning in art: Get it while it’s hot or you’ll miss it forever, at the cost of your sophistication. Others, regardless of fame, hung on fire for unfairly late recognition, as evidenced in this program by the achievements of Grupo Espiral, a group of black artists who came together in 1963 and were guided down different but equally fantastic stylistic paths by the the populist collage specialist Romare Bearden and the extraordinarily versatile abstractionist Norman Lewis. The group achieved some renown in the art world, but it was fleeting. Meanwhile, few women at the time received their due, what should be their due in hindsight. New to me is a striking 1963 relief painting by the little-known Marjorie Strider of a glamorous girl munching on a huge red radish, which could serve as an icon of pop glee and sexual impertinence crossed with proto-feminist vexation.

Highlights of the show include recorded performances by revolutionary dance Merce Cunningham; photographs of irrepressible live-action provocateur Carolee Schneemann, who liked to frolic in the nude to oddly ennobling effect; and the orgiastic, often officially censored film, Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” (1963). The latter pointed to a seething gay underground movement that Susan Sontag mentioned, the following year, in her depth-charging essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’ Apart from these highlights, I was annoyed at first by the surrounding profusion of non-art-historical material that I already knew very well. Of course, I had been present at the precipitating events, consuming newspapers (there were at least seven dailies in Manhattan at the time) and television (in black and white, befitting the fatherly charisma I miss so much of Walter cronkita).

I imagine, and hope, that numerous school groups of teenagers will visit the show and be presented with a timeline that underpins mundane and creative developments, fascinating or harrowing or both, over the next six decades. Personally, remembering the chaos of my existence in the early twenties tests my nostalgia for much of it. But I urge young people (pretty much everyone these days, relative to me) to explore the exhibit and imagine what it would have been like for you to experience the rampant stormy weather it invokes. ♦