13 - Fascination, Ignorance, and Rejection - Changing Transatlantic Perspectives in the Visual Arts, 1945-1968

Summary

It seems to be assumed [in Europe] that since America has not yet produced anything very important in the way of art, there is little likelihood that it ever will.

- Clement Greenberg, 1950

By 1960, when Pop Art first came out in New York, the art scene here had so much going for it that even all the stiff European types had to finally admit we were a part of world culture.

- Andy Warhol, 1980

The special historical circumstances of the postwar period and the tenacity of century-old stereotypes in the evaluation of cultural production were ambivalent factors at work in the development of German-American relations in the art world after 1945. The powerful military, economic, and political presence of the American victor affected many segments of West German society. On the face of it, the occupation entailed a clearly defined relationship between ruler and ruled, of dominance and subordination. This relationship co-existed, however, with an assumption that European culture was superior, an idea that was the product of a long historical development and that had been internalized on both sides of the Atlantic. It had been a bedrock assumption for the “high” visual arts, a visible symbol of the Occidental intellectual tradition. Before 1945, artistic relations between the old and new world had, without exception, flowed in only one direction: the significant developments in European painting and sculpture served as models both for mainstream artistic production and for its reception in American art circles.