ABSTRACT
In the mid-1950's abstract expressionism was at its apogee. It had survived ridicule and adulation and had become an established style. It had achieved worldwide acceptance and success; the prices of abstract expressionist canvases were staggering. More than anything else the history of taste exhibits how we use history for our own purposes. The phenomenon of how a new source of visual gratification restructures one's perceptual processes is itself an instance of the irresolvable tension between subject and object which Tennyson, Carlyle, and Browning so struggled to grasp. Burne-Jones is now unfashionable; it is impossible, therefore, for the people of either stable or novel tastes to see that in some of his paintings he was doing things with an extraordinary similarity to what Cezanne, classic cubism, and Duchamp did. The brief economic struggle of the Pre-Raphaelites was followed by a period of success for almost all of them who stayed with it.
