Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting

By Christa Noel Robbins

With Artist as Author, Christa Noel Robbins provides the first extended study of authorship in mid-20th century abstract painting in the US. Taking a close look at this influential period of art history, Robbins describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting to advance their own claims about the role that they believed authorship should play in dictating the value, significance, and social impact of the art object. Robbins tracks the subject across two definitive periods: the “New York School” as it was consolidated in the 1950s and “Post Painterly Abstraction” in the 1960s. Through many deep dives into key artist archives, Robbins brings to the page the minds and voices of painters Arshile Gorky, Jack Tworkov, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin along with those of critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Rosalind Krauss. While these are all important characters in the polemical histories of American modernism, this is the first time they are placed together in a single study and treated with equal measure, as peers participating in the shared late modernist moment.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226753003

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Artist as Author

Artist as Author

Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting

Christa Noel Robbins

The University of Chicago Press    Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by Christa Noel Robbins

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75295-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75300-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226753003.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robbins, Christa Noel, author.

Title: Artist as author : action and intent in late-modernist American painting / Christa Noel Robbins.

Other titles: Action and intent in late-modernist American painting

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020040704 | ISBN 9780226752952 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226753003 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Painting, American—20th century. | Modernism (Art)—United States—History—20th century. | Art, Abstract—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC ND212.5.M63 R63 2021 | DDC 759.13/0904—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040704

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction. The Artist as Author

Part I

1. The Act-Painting

2. The Expressive Fallacy

3. Rhetoric of Motives

Part II

4. Self-Discipline

5. Event as Painting

6. Conclusion: Gridlocked

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Color Gallery

Introduction: The Artist as Author

What is the standard by which we disown or accept the self?

—W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy (1946)

The evening, by most accounts, was a disaster. Gathered at the Ninety-Second Street YMHA one night in late February 1967, an audience of New York sophisticates was confronted with a visually and audibly chaotic event. Film projections above and to the sides of the audience’s seats, television cameras, monitors, and intermittent performances all swirled around a finely set dinner table at which were seated seven artists (and one dance critic) dressed in formal attire (fig. 0.1). With four of the artists seated with their backs to the audience, the evening’s program was synchronized with a five-course dinner, apparently planned by the art critic Michael Fried, and served to the artists by tuxedoed waiters.¹ Though each of the diners was miked, with the intention of broadcasting their dinner conversation to the audience, so were the cutlery and dinner settings. The auditorium was filled with an increasingly disorienting din, which caused the audience to first grow restless and then to openly revolt.

The lack of context for what it was witnessing must have added to the audience’s frustration. A modest advertisement in the New York Times promoted the evening as an illustrated discussion. It promised an encounter with seven contemporary artists: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, the poet Robert Creeley, the New York School painter Jack Tworkov, the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, and the electronics artists Billy Klüver and Len Lye. While the Ninety-Second Street YMHA was known as a venue for advanced art practice, only Cunningham would have been a familiar figure to regular attendees. They might have seen him dancing with Martha Graham’s company. But this anarchic spectacle was a far cry from Graham’s minimalist choreography.

Titled TV Dinner—Homage to E.A.T. (Food for Thought), the dinner-cum-performance was the final event in the traveling program Contemporary Voices in the Arts, which had been organized by the New York State Council on the Arts. Described by Grace Glueck as the most exotic intellectual road show ever to hit the College Belt, the program visited college campuses around the state in order to promote dialogue across the arts and to cultivate an interest in new media.² Creeley, who wrote a report on the program for Arts Magazine, describes the difficulties faced at each performance, including the conflicting goals of the seven artists and a perpetual struggle with equipment and facilities. According to Creeley, however, the most continual limit was the intransigent habits . . . of the audience, as the traveling group insistently defied audience expectations of both performance and professionalism. The final event at the Y, with a crowd made up of neither students nor faculty, but, rather, of sophisticated Manhattan art patrons, was no exception. They met the Contemporary Voices group, as Creeley reports, with a fairly discreet rage.³

Figure 0.1. Jack Tworkov, TV Dinner—Homage to E. A. T. (Food for Thought), final event of Contemporary Voices in the Arts, sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts, at the 92nd Street YWHA in New York, February 25, 1967. On stage a five-course dinner was served, at which the performers’ voices and the clinking of the silverware were electrically amplified. Tworkov’s painting Barrier No. 4 hung above the table. Seated at the table, clockwise starting with Stan VanDerBeek in the background left, are Jack Tworkov, Billy Kluver, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Creeley, David Vaughn (who managed the group’s tour), and Len Lye. © Adelaide de Menil; courtesy Estate of Jack Tworkov.

Suspended above it all, like a banner signaling a newly banded league, was Jack Tworkov’s large-scale Abstract Expressionist painting Barrier No. 4 (1961; pl. 1). In this context, the expressionist canvas may have been read as announcing the evening’s purpose: to proclaim, once and for all, that such all-engrossing, uncomposed, and performative experiences were the true legacy of Jackson Pollock, as Allan Kaprow had put it a decade before.⁴ Indeed, the evening’s indeterminate boundaries and cultivated chaos would have looked a lot like a happening, the art form that Kaprow predicted would take the place of painting in Pollock’s wake and which had, that very month, turned up as a cover story by Barry Ferrell in Life Magazine. Happenings, according to Ferrell’s report, exist only as experiences, moments in which art is torn away from the context of culture to become a part of life. They defy our compulsion to always discover a craftsman or artisan behind the art object—indeed, they defy our compulsion to discover an object in art at all.⁵ That much was clear from the hectic feedback that grew out of the evening’s antics, which rendered the TV Dinner production increasingly incomprehensible to its audience and ever more absorbing for its artist-participants—I don’t think I ever had a better piece of meat, Creeley concluded.⁶

It was Tworkov’s suggestion that the program culminate in an onstage dinner, in the hope that the format—part discussion, part performance—would offer a compromise between the participants’ divergent aesthetic commitments. A close friend of Willem de Kooning’s and a first generation New York School painter, Tworkov admits in his journals to often feeling at odds with the other artists. On the tour, he was reluctant to show his paintings, which were occasionally projected as slides, worrying that they appeared staid and static when set against the visual and oral excitement that characterized the series.⁷ That worry was realized with a kind of hurting clarity when Tworkov first saw Barrier No. 4 installed above the stage for the final evening’s performance. Upon entering the auditorium as it was being prepped for the dinner, Tworkov discovered VanDerBeek and Klüver hauling in electronic equipment in anticipation of another new-media extravaganza. Tworkov, imagining how the evening might unfold, was filled with doubt: My painting . . . was hanging like a stage prop ready to be lowered or raised. It looked dirty and needed to be cleaned and varnished. What possible relation can this modest painting have to this happening?⁸

The static quality with which the energetic Barrier No. 4 presented itself to Tworkov seems to be the product of painting’s inability to synchronize with a shift in the terms of artistic temporality. That shift was exemplified in the Contemporary Voices program by John Cage’s commitment to an aesthetics of indeterminacy. Cage stressed the process of performed composition in a manner that stood apart from what he called the object in time. Such an object—a musical recording, for example—could be nothing but a token of a past experience. The important thing was not to look back, according to Cage, in an effort to preserve the known, but to rest in non-knowledge, the not yet happened, the indeterminate.⁹ In relation to Cage’s celebration of indeterminate process over and above the static object, Barrier No. 4 could not help but appear to be the residue of a past event, an object frozen and circumscribed by its static frame—the thin wooden edge constructed around its exterior—as much as by its identity as a self-consciously Modernist work of art. More than ever, it struck Tworkov that painting and performance are two deeply divergent practices. Painting is feeble as a performing art, Tworkov writes. It hardly has any role as such. It is rarely shaped by any conscious intention to produce an effect. When it is we recoil from it. . . . It is a narrow medium—limited in range of expression. Tworkov, who bemoaned the publication of the happenings essay in Life ahead of the YMHA event, was hard-pressed to continue to assert those limits in the context of the Contemporary Voices series: Every art can only say what its medium allows it to say.¹⁰

The shift that the juxtaposition of Barrier No. 4 and Cagian indeterminacy revealed was not, of course, limited to happenings and performance. It was at the heart of the most advanced practices that would come to be identified as the neo-avant-garde, the overarching period-style under which art historians group happenings, performance art, the neo-Dada practices of Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as the minimalist and conceptual experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. Tworkov’s presence in the Contemporary Voices series and the awkward inclusion of his Abstract Expressionist painting in the final performance initially struck me as a perfect illustration of the bifurcated commitments of the New York art scene in the late 1960s.

The most emphatic difference that emerged from this scene was the definition and presentation of authored action, which was necessarily revised once indeterminacy and temporality were embraced. Tworkov’s description of Barrier No. 4 as modest points to this revision. At more than 12 × 7 feet, Barrier No. 4 is anything but modest. A robust, labor-intensive painting, it is a testament to the hard work of the man who made it. But in the context of the event-structure of TV Dinner, all that labor is forced into the past, rendering the painting punctual, to use Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s term.¹¹ By contrast, the new-media experiments and performances put on by the other Contemporary Voices participants refused the break that results from the punctuality of authored action. Placed next to Tworkov’s finished painting, their ongoing, open-ended practice recalls Tony Smith’s oft-quoted 1966 interview with Samuel Wagstaff wherein he recounts his experience of driving with a group of students on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. The immediacy and expansiveness of the unfolding event, which Smith relates when characterizing the shifting aesthetics of the 1960s, defied any easy framing: Most paintings look pretty pictorial after that, Smith concluded.¹² Tworkov’s continued allegiance to pictorial limits, to this particularly narrow medium, may seem to have secured his outsider status as a participant in the Contemporary Voices program. But attending more carefully to the concerns Tworkov voiced, which orbit around questions of intention, effect, and temporality, also reveals something held in common across that scene: a concern with the question of authorship and a commitment to investigating its significance in and as practice. Looked at with more care, the differences we are quick to see between neo-avant-garde and Modernist practice are less ideological than technical. That is to say, such differences are best located in the means by which questions such as authorship arise, rather than in the questions themselves. This book makes this clear by looking carefully at Modernist painters working in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to Tworkov, a careful consideration of Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin demonstrates that Modernist painters, like their neo-avant-garde contemporaries, were involved in a critical inquiry into the question of the artist as author.

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The same year that Tworkov and Cage shared the stage at the TV Dinner event, Roland Barthes’s essay The Death of the Author was published for the first time.¹³ Appearing in Aspen’s 1967 Minimalism Issue, the essay was solicited by the artist and critic Brian O’Doherty, who was acting as guest editor. Wanting to focus on the notion that art, writing, etc., was produced by a kind of anti-self that had nothing to do with whoever ‘me’ was, O’Doherty approached Barthes and asked for a contribution.¹⁴ Barthes responded by submitting The Death of the Author. Aspen was a particularly appropriate forum for Barthes’s essay, which Seán Burke describes as the single most influential meditation on the question of authorship in modern times.¹⁵ A decentered assemblage of art works and texts, which O’Doherty requested from a host of neo-avant-garde artists, including Cage, Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, Tony Smith, Mel Bochner, and Sol LeWitt, the Minimalism Issue established a link early on between the neo-avant-garde and the death of the author thesis (fig. 0.2).¹⁶ Any ordering of the magazine’s contents has to be arrived at via the activity of the reader/viewer alone, offering a material analogue to Barthes’s essay with its vision of the text without an author as a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.¹⁷

The link between Barthes’s essay and the neo-avant-garde has only strengthened in the years since, and few art historians have been more influential in binding them together than Rosalind Krauss. Krauss argued early in her career that the works of artists like Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra took a conscious stance against a picture of the self as private, which was ostensibly promoted in certain naïve receptions of Abstract Expressionism. By demonstrating that meaning is a product of such public structures as institutional setting and the situatedness of viewers both as bodies in space and socially constituted subjects, such artists exposed and defeated the monadic self at the heart of certain strains of Modernist practice and criticism. As Krauss phrased it in her 1977 primer Passages in Modernist Sculpture, a text that positions minimalism as the apotheosis of a Modernist sculptural critique of the self as private:

The ambition of minimalism was to relocate the origins of a sculpture’s meaning to the outside, no longer modeling its structure on the privacy of psychological space but on the public, conventional nature of what we might call cultural space.¹⁸

By privacy of psychological space Krauss means the intentional, mental space of authorship, and by cultural space she means something akin to Barthes’s notion of language when he writes that it is language which speaks, not the author.¹⁹ Krauss’s cultural space, this is to say, is a structure into which and out of which practice emerges and which can never be said to find its origins in the artist alone.

Figure 0.2. Issue 5+6 of Aspen (1967), edited and designed by Brian O’Doherty. Pictured here are the issue’s various items, including, on the far left, cardboard cutouts designed by Tony Smith that can be made into a model of his sculptural installation Maze, and the white box O’Doherty designed to house the magazine’s contents. On the right are phonographic recordings of Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, and Richard Huelsenbeck, as well as a reel of Super 8 film featuring clips of works by Hans Richter, László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, and Stan VanDerBeek. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

Krauss’s claim that minimalism unseated an idealistic picture of the self as private and originary has been extremely influential, but other scholars have been less careful in distinguishing the claims made by individual works of art from their reception.²⁰ Krauss argued that it was a mistake to read Abstract Expressionist paintings, for example, as uniformly expressionistic—a reading that Krauss argues gave rise to superficial stylistic distinctions.

The early views of [Jackson Pollock’s and Willem de Kooning’s] work proceeded from the very logic of expression, seeing every mark on their canvases as asking to be read in the context of a private self from which the intention to make that mark has been directed. In that sense, the public surface of the work seemed to demand that one see it as a map from which could be read the privately held crosscurrents of personality—the artist’s inviolable Self.²¹

Such a reading of art promotes a theory of authorship that starts with a false notion of the artist as unmediated self. The viewer then takes up the painting itself as evidence of an originary and ultimately private intent. But it is important to acknowledge that Krauss was not criticizing Pollock’s and de Kooning’s paintings here. Rather, she was criticizing a mistaken reading of those paintings. In Krauss’s view, minimalism’s critique of the private self was not new; it was a project initiated early in the history of Modernist practice, reaching back at least to the late nineteenth century, carrying through the Modernist paintings and sculptures of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and into the experiments of the neo-avant-garde.²²

Krauss’s tracing of the deep history of the critique of the private self in experimental art practice throughout the twentieth century stands opposed to the presentation of minimalism as a reaction against and break with a Modernist painting thoroughly under the sway of the author.²³ In his highly influential essay The Crux of Minimalism, for example, Hal Foster presents minimalism as a "contemporary crux, a paradigm shift toward postmodernist practices.²⁴ In regarding minimalism as a crux, Foster helpfully relates the practice to its Modernist precedents, but even as he does so, he drives an ideological wedge between them. He argues that minimalism continues Modernist painting’s commitment to the perceiving subject.²⁵ As such, Foster presents Modernist painting as retaining a residual idealism in its clinging to the first-person perspective of the phenomenological I perceive.²⁶ Foster regards minimalism as promising an escape from that idealism. In placing the perceiving body at the interface of art and the institutional spaces of viewership, the minimalist object opens the door out of the ostensible privacy of Modernist making and viewing, and into a structuralist publicity. In this way, Foster writes, the stake of minimalism is the nature of meaning and the status of the subject, both of which are held to be public, not private, produced in the physical interface with the actual world, not in the mental space of idealist conception."²⁷ In such a narrative, neo-avant-garde artists like Carl Andre and Donald Judd are said to have initiated a rejection of Modernist painting’s commitment to the artist as sole crafter of meaning, as well as the attendant idea that meaning issues from the privacy of interior thought.²⁸

It strikes me as no coincidence that the most ardent dismissals of authorial presence in Modernist painting followed fast on the heels of a stringent critique of so-called Neo-Expressionism in the early 1980s. In late 1982, for example, Art in America published the first of a two-part special issue dedicated to what the editors termed the expressionism question. The question was provoked by a seeming tidal shift away from the poststudio practices of conceptualism and minimalism, and toward a renewed interest in an emotionally expressive mode of painting, typified in the works of Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Eric Fischl.²⁹ In part a cataloguing of the field of Neo-Expressionism, the two issues also featured polemical essays by Craig Owens, Carter Ratcliff, and Foster, the main goal of which was to expose the false consciousness at the heart of this new, ostensibly market-driven trend. In these critical essays, Neo-Expressionists were accused of cynicism and complicity (by Owens), insincerity and bad faith (by Ratcliff), and ideological confusion (by Foster). Most of the criticism was aimed at the insincerity of an expressionist ethos that denied its rhetorical nature and, in its celebration of immediacy, promoted a false picture of the self as originary.³⁰ In ignoring the many social and historical mediations³¹ that stand between the self and its signification, these scholars concluded, Neo-Expressionism was a gross capitulation to the machinations of power, as Owens put it.³²

For art historians, such as Owens and Foster, committed to the critical avant-garde, the turn toward traditional media and the lack of concern with the influence of private markets seemed like nothing less than a rappel à l’ordre, as Benjamin Buchloh dubbed it in a 1981 special issue of October called Art World Follies.³³ As in the Art in America issues of the following year, the majority of the follies identified by the October scholars were located in and around the exhibition and interpretation of painting, which seemed to proceed as though the theoretical and political gains earned in the 1960s—gains that were understood to have been produced in and around the neo-avant-garde—had never occurred. In the face of what appeared a horrifying reversal of the hard-won battles of the 1960s and 1970s, contributors to journals such as Art in America and October felt the need to confront head-on what Tom Hayden later termed antisixties neoconservatives on both the cultural and political fronts.³⁴ It was bad enough that advanced culture had retreated to the safe haven of capital exchange. But in addition, Neo-Expressionists appeared to recenter the self, offering its viewers and buyers a comforting picture of the self as private, contained, and autonomous.³⁵

The dominant art theory of the late 1990s grew out of this moment in the early 1980s. I moved from painting to art history around the same time—in my early twenties. The critical vanguard was represented by Douglas Crimp’s On the Museum in Ruins (1993), the publication of Craig Owens’s collected essays in 1994, and Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996).³⁶ These texts formed a kind of neo-avant-garde canon.³⁷ Together, they showed me that painting, Modernism, and expressionism were all dead. Each of those deaths was a side effect of the much more important death of the author, which, as each of these scholars argued, had repeatedly perished throughout the twentieth century. While this discourse was influenced by texts such as Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986), her nuanced claims about twentieth-century engagements with theories of the self became a far simpler narrative of the 1960s as breaking away from a vision of art as limited to authorial control. And certainly, if you subscribe to the picture of 1960s practice as enacting a definitive methodological and epistemological break,³⁸ paradigm shift,³⁹ or turn⁴⁰ away from a Modernist metaphysics, then the supposed return to expressionism and painting in the 1980s will appear to threaten or retreat from the radicalism of that moment. But the opposition functioning in such historical narratives is not necessary. We do not have to understand this history as a simple march from one form of figuring the self (as private, individuated, autonomous, and authorial) to a radically different one (as public, contingent, and in-process). In this book, I focus, instead, on the moment when late-Modernist painting and neo-avant-garde practice shared questions and preoccupations. Part I traces the interrogation of the question of authorship to the very heart of the New York School in the 1950s. In Part II, I follow the development of that investigation into the High Modernist paintings of the 1960s, when the Modernist idiom is often said to have purged all traces of the self through a rigorously formal and restrictive technical development.

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While multiple studies have been written about the neo-avant-garde’s critical engagement with the question of the artist as author, few studies have been offered that present Modernist painters as similarly critical, which is to say, as self-conscious agents taking up the question of authorship in order to investigate its terms.⁴¹ This is surprising, considering the amount of attention explicitly dedicated to the concept in the discursive field out of which Modernist painting developed in New York following World War II. Crucially, the very term authorship entered pictorial discourse in response to the attribution of the name Abstract Expressionism to the paintings of postwar American Modernists. In a spirit of critical and historical assessment not unlike that of the 1980s and 1990s, the circulation of this phrase, along with a newfound public and market interest in contemporary American art, spurred an open discussion among artists and critics concerning the stakes of making Modernist art and what the role of the artist as author is or should be with respect to their publics. One document of this discussion is a report and partial transcript of debates that took place in 1952 at The Club, an organization for New York City painters, sculptors, and art writers committed to experimental Modernist practice.⁴² At issue was art critic Thomas Hess’s characterization of American Modernist painters as abstract Expressionist, a phrase that combined two modes of production that had previously been viewed as radically divergent: abstract, a nonreferential, often hard-edge, geometrical mode of painting; and expressist, a looser mode, which included external reference.⁴³

In his retrospective account of these debates, Philip Pavia, The Club’s de facto manager, claimed that the communal interrogation of the respective values of abstraction and expression allowed for a new space to emerge: an art space that could embody authorship directly, without symbols or narrative.⁴⁴ This new authorship space, as Pavia named it, was the war booty resulting from the internecine wars between the abstractionists and the expressionists at the Club.⁴⁵ This is a fascinating claim. Essentially, Pavia argues that, through the involved conversations over the relation between abstraction and expression, a new space was opened up, not just in artists’ thinking, but in their practice. In that new space, the question of authorship could be interrogated as a central concern in the construction of a pictorial problem.

The debates over authorship at The Club were part of a larger discussion among artists and art writers concerning the public framing of American Modernist painting and its growing market success. By 1948, the year The Club was founded, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock both had solo exhibitions that received a great deal of critical attention. The Life magazine feature on Pollock, which asked if he could be the greatest living painter in the United States, was a continuation and escalation of that attention.⁴⁶ Exhibitions at the increasingly successful Kootz Gallery, such as the Intrasubjectives (curated by Samuel Kootz and Harold Rosenberg in 1949) and New Talent (curated by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro in 1950), were well received and helped to define a loose community of artists as a coherent New York School, as well as to propel American artists into the national and international spotlight. In November 1950 the New York School group identity was further formalized when Life published a photograph of the Irascible Group.⁴⁷ As Irving Sandler said, by 1952, the year The Club held debates about Abstract Expressionism, the battle for modernism was won—at least as far as the public and the markets were concerned.⁴⁸ The question of authorship emerged out of the exigencies of this moment, as the highly localized gathering of confederates in downtown Manhattan evolved into a publicly recognized school.⁴⁹ This book returns to this moment in the history of US Modernism, when artists were impelled toward a self-conscious consideration of their roles as the authors of both their own individual works and the Modernist field that granted those works an identity.

In my determination to treat Modernist painters as self-aware actors, I mean to offer an alternative to the tendency to view Modernist painting in the United States as little more than an effect or symptom of the shifting