PhD Dissertation

Modern Art for Middle America: American Abstraction in Mass Magazines, 1946-1960

My dissertation examines how mass magazines framed American abstraction for a broad public during the years following the Second World War.  While art historians have devoted much attention to the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the New York art world and its international promotion, the presentation of this and other postwar art to the American public has been largely overlooked.  Most Americans who did not frequent museums and galleries or read art journals experienced art primarily in mass magazines such as Life, Time, Look, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post.  By analyzing representations of American abstraction in such magazines, I consider meanings this art was made to carry in relation to cultural hierarchies, consumerism, and Cold War political rhetoric.  I investigate how mass magazines defined modern art and its role in postwar American culture for their millions of readers.

Representations of modern art in mass magazines changed dramatically in the years following the Second World War.  During the late 1940s American abstraction was framed by mass magazines largely in relation to cultural hierarchies.  At this time of transition in American art, politics, and society, modern art was portrayed as a culturally divisive issue.  A number of articles, such as the now famous Life feature on Jackson Pollock in 1949, ridiculed American abstraction, describing it as a mediocre European derivation that required no skill and questioning whether it was art at all or actually a highbrow hoax on middle America.  This hostility towards modern art illustrated a perceived cultural gap between intellectuals and middlebrow magazine readers and editors.  Avant-garde abstraction was presented in mass magazines as a development that aspirational Americans should be informed about even if they did not enjoy it.  However, as American abstraction gained support from the art establishment, and the nation entered a new political era in the 1950s, mass magazine polemic against modern art dissipated.

Throughout most of the 1950s, abstract art was portrayed as commonplace, accessible, and consumerist.  Magazine articles mocking modern artists were replaced by stories about the art market, collectors, and the amateur painting industry.  Images of abstract paintings also appeared in the background of magazine articles and advertisements that were not ostensibly about art.  In this context of consumption, American abstraction was framed as one of several stylistic choices that could express a consumer’s personality and taste.  Cold War political rhetoric, reproduced in mass magazines in a variety of articles and ads, depicted this kind of consumer choice as a demonstration of American freedom and democracy.  Hence choosing a painting could be seen as an act of patriotism.

In the last years of the 1950s Abstract Expressionism was characterized as a weapon of the Cold War.  At this time, a wave of articles swept the mass magazines in which abstract art was portrayed as a great American asset in the cultural Cold War.  Reports on exhibitions abroad described American abstraction as the leading international style and a symbol of freedom throughout the world.  Articles about abstract artists depicted them as American heroes, icons of free thinking, originality, and individualism.  American abstraction was presented as the embodiment of the American values that were thought necessary to triumph over Communism, while Soviet realism was portrayed as backward and unoriginal.  Yet letters to the editors reveal that readers were still not convinced of the value of abstract art.

By providing a forum for such cultural debates in their articles and letters to the editors, mass magazines formed a sort of national art community, a broad public interested in the role of modern art in modern America.  Thus mass magazines constructed both a national culture and an audience for it, a public image and a public for American abstraction.  Because of mass magazines, modern art meant something to middle America.