Hans-Jürgen Papies, “Pluralism at Play in the Visual Arts? On the 1960s Art Scene in the United States,” translated from German by Richard George Elliott, originally published as “Praktizierter Pluralismus bildkünstlerischer Tendenzen? Zur künstlerischen Situation in den USA während der sechziger Jahre,” in Bildende Kunst 8 (1973): 402–404

doi:10.4324/9781003009979-137111

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Hans-Jürgen Papies, “Pluralism at Play in the Visual Arts? On the 1960s Art Scene in the United States,” translated from German by Richard George Elliott, originally published as “Praktizierter Pluralismus bildkünstlerischer Tendenzen? Zur künstlerischen Situation in den USA während der sechziger Jahre,” in Bildende Kunst 8 (1973): 402–404

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ABSTRACT

Late-bourgeois art theory has been unanimous in presenting the change of scene that occurred in the late-bourgeois art of the United States at the beginning of the 1960s as if it had occurred completely spontaneously, as an art-immanent reaction to the “empty rhetoric” of Abstract Expressionism. No doubt art-immanent factors also played a part in the development of the artistic trends themselves. Although all the artistic preconditions for an art-immanent reaction to Abstract Expressionism had thus been met by the American “pioneers” in the mid-1950s, there was no initial impact. Proper notice was not taken by the late-bourgeois art world until the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, when a series of “test” exhibitions explored the artistic possibilities that would correspond to the reoriented intentions of that world. Late-bourgeois art theory claimed, however, that it had reason to speak of pluralism at play in the late-bourgeois art world in another respect as well.