The originality and potency of American art from the years after World War II cannot be disputed. Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and David Smith, to name only a few of Abstract Expressionism’s giants, are today acclaimed as modern masters. Nor can the international influence of American post-war art be questioned, pace the persistent theory—unsupported by fact—that worldwide attention was paid to this work only because of a cia-headed propaganda campaign. Yet explanations of the origins of Abstract Expressionism can be misleading, although most are less extreme than Barnett Newman’s self-aggrandizing assertion, in a 1970 interview, that “about twenty-five years ago . . . painting was dead. . . . I had to start from scratch as if painting didn’t exist.” Usually, the history of post-war American art is recounted as the tale of a generation of gifted New York–based artists, the majority of them young, who translated the innovations of such important European predecessors as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Joan Miró into a radical, expansive language of emotionally charged abstraction. That is to say, the Americans invented an unprecedented kind of modernist painting and sculpture, and shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York.
The international influence of American post-war art cannot be questioned.
Little credit has been given to the formative influence of the Abstract Expressionists’ immediate precursors on this side of the Atlantic, the adventurous American artists who embraced and advanced modernist
