The Origin of the American Work of Art

Abstract

This essay revisits a topic of conversation from the last century—the question of how to characterize American art as distinctly American. That conversation itself was effectively reenacting (in the mode of criticism, on the one hand, and historiography, on the other) conversations from the century before. But the question—what is American about American art?—has made no sense for a few decades now in the face of other questions: just what do you mean by American? (What about José Marti's America, for example?) And what do you mean by art? (What about quilts, baskets, pewter cups, billboards, &c.?) My title thus aims to prompt a slightly different question.1 That question could be: where and when does American art begin? And you could provide two quite good, quite simple answers (at least with regard to one medium): American art begins with the eighth-millennium Toquepala cave paintings (in modern Peru). Or it begins with Jackson Pollock's Mural (1943), the so-called breakthrough painting that helped to catalyze abstract expressionism, a body of work appropriated (within the decade) by postwar liberalism and deployed by the US government to wage the cultural Cold War.2 Still, those good answers (among others) respond to a question that is not quite the question I aim to prompt.3

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