Robert Rosenblum: What is American art about?
From the Lube Lecture, given by the curator of the Guggenheim, New York
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Your support makes all the difference.If we think that Americans are only interested in what they can buy in the supermarket or on eBay these days we also discover that, side by side, runs something that, for want of a better word, might be called "highly spiritual" or, if one used a more specific historical word, we would call it "luminism".
The study of Mark Rothko, in fact, has often reached back into the history of art on American shores as well as on European, and it can be related to a movement, if it can be called that, or a phenomenon of the 19th century, that was dubbed luminism around 1950 by John Bower, a historian of American art.
Mr Bower was attempting to define – and this was a symptom of the tendency of the time – what was American about American art. He seemed to notice that in so much 19th-century American painting, such as a sunset from the 1860s by [John Frederick] Kensett, is this mysterious pervasive light. And this can be continued to be discussed in terms of people like the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Or working on a much gloomier vein, quite a few artists in the 1920s and 30s, sometimes called Transcendental Abstractionists, lived – mainly in the south-west – where they could no longer be polluted by the horrors of civilisation, especially American civilisation. They could look up at their absolutely pure night skies or day skies and immerse themselves into the mysteries of sunlight or the light of stars and a sky over Arizona.
Americans seem to have an almost polar experience of city and country, the new world and something prehistoric.
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