The Kidnapping of Modern Art by the New Yorkers
68" x 64"
1985
Collection of John Parker Willis
In the 1980s a French critic named Serge Guilbaut wrote a book called How New
York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Provoked by such works as Irving Sandler's
famous The Triumph of American Painting, Guilbaut claimed that the postwar boom
in the New York art world was due to a sinister conspiracy led by the U.S. government,
with the aid of galleries and critics, to bring the center of the art world from
Paris to New York. They did it by making Abstract Expressionism a symbol of artistic
freedom and a weapon in the Cold War. I found this idea so appealing that I was
inspired to call on my favorite Baroque painting, Rubens' The Abduction of the
Daughters of Leucippus. To represent Modern Art, I replaced Rubens' weighty women
with two figures I freely adapted from Picasso's revolutionary painting Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon.
(Also see "Notes on the Kidnapping")
|
