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NEW ART HISTORY

NEW ART HISTORY Part One General histories may respond to millennia, but art history moves along by decades; and it is always a question how to get from one decade to another, especially since they are not — not really — sequential. If an artist’s life is threescore years and ten, as biblically prescribed, it might pass through five decade-cultures but “essentially” be a life of, let us say, the 1940s. How then to demarcate in that artist’s work the 1940s from the 1950s? And how to end the fifties other than by announcing, “next came the sixties”? In 1950 the key innovators were not youths: Willem de Kooning was fortysix, Franz Kline was forty, and Jackson Pollock was thirty-eight. The old lifecycle theories that persist in some academic minds do not work when addressing art movements that are short and coincidental rather than serial or sequential, as they are in texts where the archaic youth of art grows into the maturity of classicism, leaving old age and degeneracy for Roman artists to fall into. Jed Perl writes a different sort of art history — a result, perhaps, and an advantage, certainly, of 16:1 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2009-085 © 2010 by Duke University http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

NEW ART HISTORY

Andersen, Wayne
Common Knowledge , Volume 16 (1) – Jan 1, 2010
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2010 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-2009-085
Publisher site
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Abstract

Part One General histories may respond to millennia, but art history moves along by decades; and it is always a question how to get from one decade to another, especially since they are not — not really — sequential. If an artist’s life is threescore years and ten, as biblically prescribed, it might pass through five decade-cultures but “essentially” be a life of, let us say, the 1940s. How then to demarcate in that artist’s work the 1940s from the 1950s? And how to end the fifties other than by announcing, “next came the sixties”? In 1950 the key innovators were not youths: Willem de Kooning was fortysix, Franz Kline was forty, and Jackson Pollock was thirty-eight. The old lifecycle theories that persist in some academic minds do not work when addressing art movements that are short and coincidental rather than serial or sequential, as they are in texts where the archaic youth of art grows into the maturity of classicism, leaving old age and degeneracy for Roman artists to fall into. Jed Perl writes a different sort of art history — a result, perhaps, and an advantage, certainly, of 16:1 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2009-085 © 2010 by Duke University

Journal

Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2010

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