The Irascibles

~SHORTLY before Degas made Six Friends at Dieppe, Fantin exhibited his fifth and last group portrait at the Paris Salon: Around the Piano, 1885 (plate 5). By this point, Fantin’s career and critical reputation were well established and his break with the impressionists firmly entrenched. He was returning to group portraiture after a long hiatus—his last effort was Corner of a Table, 1872 (plate...

Despite continuing references in the scholarly and the popular press to the lasting artistic and cultural relevance of Abstract Expressionism, no comprehensive collection of essays related to this movement has been published since David and Cecile Shapiro’s Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record and Clifford Ross’s Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics appeared in 1990...

Mumford and Wylie, as quoted in the epigraphs above, were anything but voices in the wilderness. The imperative they articulated could be found in one form or another in the pages of a remarkable number of books and articles published in wartime (as well as prewar and postwar) New York. By the time of World War II, the quest for a new view of “human nature,” for a new form of human self-description, had become a high priority of middle-class culture in the United States. …

AS THE MYTH of Abstract Expressionism developed from the late forties through the fifties, it established the reputations of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and others. A rebellious movement, it aimed not only to revolutionize representation by superceding America’s regionalism, realism, and recognizably national styles like French Cubism, but in doing so also to oppose America’s isolationism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism. In its …