Abstract Nationalisms

This essay analyzes the nationalization of modernism in the United States through the art of Barnett Newman, Georges Mathieu, and Larry Rivers. Modernism became the official high culture of the United States—and, by extension, “the West”—during the 1950s and 1960s. Rivers and Mathieu sought to place modernist painting in touch with history painting and the national past, without sacrificing contemporaneity. The contradictions implied by this approach were part of the point. In the catalog to the exhibition 12 Americans (1956), Rivers is described in the introduction as a “reactionary,” while a few pages later he calls himself a “revolutionary.” Mathieu—a Don Quixote figure, a pseudo-aristocratic oddity, a self-anointed knight with one foot in the past and one in the future—lived such contradictions. Though often considered eccentric, these painters help us understand the development of postwar abstraction. Newman’s work in the 1950s reveals that he, too, was grappling with an attempt to place painting in touch with the national past.