ABSTRACT
If the artist succeeds, his or her individual statement relates to that of his or her most relevant contemporaries. At every moment ambitious young artists—ambitious in that they do not want to merely imitate past styles—each face a “crisis.” The audience for new art recognizes a style by focusing attention on it and in so choosing disregards competing styles, generally exempting a few leading artists in each. In the fifties, it was generally accepted within the New York School that the major avant-garde style was gesture painting. Abstract painters saw in Frank Stella’s pictures an alternative to fifties painterly painting, that is, they were non-gestural; non-referential in image, color, and space; non-relational in design; and above all, non-illusionistic or flat. Jean Tinguely’s work most likely appealed to art officialdom and the world of fashion because it seemed to be a sophisticated spoof of assemblage and a familiar, eclectic fabrication in the vein of Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Stankiewicz.
