The New York School vs. the School of Paris: Who Really Made the Most Important Art After World War II? / David Galenson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Galenson, David.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w9149.

NBER working paper series no. w9149

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

The New York School vs. the School of Paris

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2002.

Summary:

American historians of modern art routinely assume that after World War II New York replaced Paris as the center of the western art world. An analysis of the illustrations in French textbooks shows that French art scholars disagree: they rate Jean Dubuffet as the most important painter of the era, ahead of Jackson Pollock, and they consider Yves Klein's anthropometries of 1960 as the greatest contribution of a single year, in front of Andy Warhol's innovations in Pop Art. Yet the French texts also show that the French artists' practices and conceptions of art paralleled those of the Americans. Thus while French and American scholars disagree over the relative importance of their nations' artists, there is no disagreement that the most important art of the 1950s was produced by experimental seekers, and that of the 60s by conceptual finders.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2002.