United States

By the early 1960s, with the explosion of the new art form called Pop art, the engagement of painting and drawing with popular culture seemed so explicit as to be almost overwhelming and, at times, risked losing any sense of private life and personal inflection at all—it risked becoming all street and no studio. Artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg took the styles and objects of popular culture—everything from comic books to lipstick tubes—and treated them with the absorption and grave seriousness previously reserved for religious icons. But this art too had its secrets, as well as its strong individual voices and visions. In his series of drawings called Proposals for Monumental Buildings, 1965–69, Oldenburg drew ordinary things—fire hydrants, ice-cream bars, bananas—as though they were as big as skyscrapers. His pictures combined a virtuoso’s gift for drawing with a vision, at once celebratory and satirical, of the P.T. Barnum spirit of American life. Warhol silk-screened images of popular movie stars and Campbell’s soup cans; in replicating them, he suggested that their reiteration by mass production had emptied them of their humanity but also given them a kind of hieratic immortality. Lichtenstein used the techniques of comic-book illustration to paraphrase some of the monuments of modern painting, making a coolly witty art in which Henri Matisse danced with Captain Marvel.

But these artists who self-consciously chose to make their art out of popular materials and images were not the only ones who had something to say about the traffic between mass and elite culture. The so-called Minimalists, who made abstract art out of simple and usually hard-edged geometric forms, from one point of view carried on the tradition of austere abstraction. But it was also the Minimalists, as art historians have pointed out, who carried over the vocabulary of the new International Style of unornamented architecture into the world of the fine arts; Minimalism imagined the dialogue between street and studio in terms of hard edges and simple forms rather than in terms of imagery, but it took part in the same dialogue. In some cases, the play between high and low has been carried out as a dialogue between Pop and Minimalist styles themselves. Frank Stella, thought by many to be the preeminent American painter of the late 20th century, began as a Minimalist, making extremely simple paintings of black chevrons from which everything was banished except the barest minimum of painterly cues. Yet in his subsequent work he became almost extravagantly “maximalist” and, as he began to make bas-reliefs, added to the stark elegance of his early paintings wild, Pop-art elements of outthrusting spirals and Day-Glo colors—even sequins and glitter—that deliberately suggested the invigorating vulgarity of the Las Vegas Strip. Stella’s flamboyant reliefs combine the spare elegance of abstraction with the greedy vitality of the American street.

In the 1980s and ’90s, it was in the visual arts, however, that the debates over postmodern marginality and the construction of a fixed canon became, perhaps, most fierce—yet, oddly, were at the same time least eloquent, or least fully realized in emotionally potent works of art. Pictures and objects do not “argue” particularly well, so the tone of much contemporary American art became debased, with the cryptic languages of high abstraction and conceptual art put in the service of narrow ideological arguments. It became a standard practice in American avant-garde art of the 1980s and ’90s to experience an installation in which an inarguable social message—for instance, that there should be fewer homeless people in the streets—was encoded in a highly oblique, Surrealist manner, with the duty of the viewer then reduced to decoding the manner back into the message. The long journey of American art in the 20th century away from socially “responsible” art that lacked intense artistic originality seemed to have been short-circuited, without necessarily producing much of a gain in clarity or accessibility.

No subject or idea has been as powerful, or as controversial, in American arts and letters at the end of the 20th century and into the new millennium as the idea of the “postmodern,” and in no sphere has the argument been as lively as in that of the plastic arts. The idea of the postmodern has been powerful in the United States exactly because the idea of the modern was so powerful; where Europe has struggled with the idea of modernity, in the United States it has been largely triumphant, thus leaving the question of “what comes next” all the more problematic. Since the 1960s, the ascendance of postmodern culture has been argued—now it is even sometimes said that a “post-postmodern” epoch has begun, but what exactly that means is remarkably vague.