Modern art for middle America : American abstraction in mass magazines, 1946-1960
This thesis examines how mass magazines framed abstract art for a broad public during the years following the Second World War. While art historians have devoted much attention to Abstract Expressionism’s place within the New York art establishment and its international promotion, the presentation of this and other art to the American public has been largely overlooked. Most Americans who did not frequent museums and galleries or read art journals experienced art primarily in popular magazines such as Life, Time, Look, Newsweek, and The Saturday Evening Post. This thesis investigates how these magazines defined modern art and its role in postwar American culture for their millions of readers. During the late 1940s mass magazines portrayed modern art as a culturally divisive issue in articles that ridiculed abstraction, describing it as a mediocre European derivation that required no skill and questioning whether it was art at all or actually a highbrow hoax on middle America. As American abstraction gained support from art institutions and markets in the 1950s, magazines depicted modern art as commonplace consumer object, a stylistic choice that demonstrated both the consumer’s personality and capitalist freedom. By the end of the decade, mass magazines characterized Abstract Expressionism as the embodiment of American freedom and individualism, the leading international style, and an asset in the cultural Cold War. Yet letters to the editors reveal that readers were still not convinced of the value of abstract art. Mass magazine articles, advertisements, and letters to the editors combined to construct a national culture and a middle American audience for it, public image and a public for American abstraction.
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