United States

Carver, who died in 1988, and the great novelist and man of letters John Updike, who died in 2009, were perhaps the last undisputed masters of literature in the high American sense that emerged with Ernest Hemingway and Faulkner. Yet in no area of the American arts, perhaps, have the claims of the marginal to take their place at the centre of the table been so fruitful, subtle, or varied as in literature. Perhaps because writing is inescapably personal, the trap of turning art into mere ideology has been most deftly avoided in its realm. This can be seen in the dramatically expanded horizons of the feminist and minority writers whose work first appeared in the 1970s and ’80s, including the Chinese American Amy Tan. A new freedom to write about human erotic experience previously considered strange or even deviant shaped much new writing, from the comic obsessive novels of Nicholson Baker through the work of those short-story writers and novelists, including Edmund White and David Leavitt, who have made art out of previously repressed and unnarrated areas of homoerotic experience. Literature is above all the narrative medium of the arts, the one that still best relates What Happened to Me, and American literature, at least, has only been enriched by new “mes” and new narratives. (See also American literature.) Adam Gopnik The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

The visual arts and postmodernism

Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the loudest, event in American cultural life since World War II was what the critic Irving Sandler has called “The Triumph of American Painting”—the emergence of a new form of art that allowed American painting to dominate the world. This dominance lasted for at least 40 years, from the birth of the so-called New York school, or Abstract Expressionism, around l945 until at least the mid-1980s, and it took in many different kinds of art and artists. In its first flowering, in the epic-scaled abstractions of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and the other members of the New York school, this new painting seemed abstract, rarefied, and constructed from a series of negations, from saying “no!” to everything except the purest elements of painting. Abstract Expressionism seemed to stand at the farthest possible remove from the common life of American culture and particularly from the life of American popular culture. Even this painting, however, later came under a new and perhaps less-austere scrutiny; and the art historian Robert Rosenblum has persuasively argued that many of the elements of Abstract Expressionism, for all their apparent hermetic distance from common experience, are inspired by the scale and light of the American landscape and American 19th-century landscape painting—by elements that run deep and centrally in Americans’ sense of themselves and their country.

de Kooning, Willem: Woman IIWoman II, oil on canvas by Willem de Kooning, 1952; in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. 149.9 × 109.3 cm.Fine Art Images/SuperStock

It is certainly true that the next generation of painters, who throughout the 1950s continued the unparalleled dominance of American influence in the visual arts, made their art aggressively and unmistakably of the dialogue between the studio and the street. Jasper Johns, for instance, took as his subject the most common and even banal of American symbols—maps of the 48 continental states, the flag itself—and depicted the quickly read and immediately identifiable common icons with a slow, meditative, painterly scrutiny. His contemporary and occasional partner Robert Rauschenberg took up the same dialogue in a different form; his art consisted of dreamlike collages of images silk-screened from the mass media, combined with personal artifacts and personal symbols, all brought together in a mélange of jokes and deliberately perverse associations. In a remarkably similar spirit, the eccentric surrealistJoseph Cornell" class="md-crosslink"> Joseph Cornell made little shoe-box-like dioramas in which images taken from popular culture were made into a dreamlike language of nostalgia and poetic reverie. Although Cornell, like William Blake, whom he in many ways resembled, worked largely in isolation, his sense of the poetry that lurks unseen in even the most absurd everyday objects had a profound effect on other artists.

“Monogram,” combine painting (mixed media) by Robert Rauschenberg, 1959; in the Moderna Museet, StockholmModerna Museet, Stockholm/Photograph: Statens Konstmuseer