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  • American Artists Paint the City:Katharine Kuh, the 1956 Venice Biennale, and New York's Place in the Cold War Art World
  • Mary Caroline Simpson (bio)

"Though it is common practice to consider the Middle West more American in appearance and feeling than New York, still most artists use this, the largest metropolis, as their symbol." Katharine Kuh (1904-1994), curator of modern art for the Art Institute of Chicago, made this remarkably frank and controversial observation as she promoted American Artists Paint the City in 1956. Held in the American pavilion during the 28th Venice Biennale, and so positioned as a showcase for the nation's best and brightest talents, the exhibition united paintings by early twentieth-century realists, those in Alfred Stieglitz's circle, and Abstract Expressionists around thematic representations of New York City by artists who worked there. By linking the New York School to a diverse array of domestic artists, Kuh hoped to cement its place in an American modernist canon that her exhibition would help to define. Sadly, Lawrence Alloway's historical analysis of the Venice Biennale, published in 1968 and the sole account for so many decades, failed to acknowledge the curator's contributions and her vision of continuity among twentieth-century American art movements was effectively buried for decades. Kuh's forgotten role in mediating representations of American art deserves rehabilitation because by heralding New York painters as the ambassadors for an American national art, she prefigured an achievement widely credited to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).1

American Artists Paint the City positioned the New York School as inheritors of a new world modernist heritage in the mid-1950s, a view only recently [End Page 31] taken up by revisionist art historians. By grounding her exhibition concept in American exceptionalism and uniting it thematically around the iconic American city, Katherine Kuh appeared to reinforce the case for an American modernist pantheon. Yet, despite its compatibility with cold war exceptionalism, widespread public interest in America's cultural identity, and the popularity of stylistic pluralism among domestic curators in 1956, Kuh's Biennale show precipitated widespread criticism and elicited powerful opposition from established interests. Her diverse, historically infused program antagonized those domestic dealers and collectors most eager to identify a mature and singularly American brand of modernism emerging out of the world's newest cultural center, Manhattan. Her juxtaposition of realist and abstract canvases confused and upset many artists and critics, who doubted that the urban theme could meaningfully connect such varied techniques. The exhibition especially enraged Chicago's art community, which had long struggled against its marginalized place in the art world and perceptions that regional painting was too idiosyncratic to exemplify the shared artistic values of the nation. Above all, Kuh's American modernist continuum struck most international jurors as a chauvinistic and pretentious effort to undermine European ascendancy in the transatlantic art world.

By antagonizing significant segments of the art world, Katharine Kuh opened the door for other champions of Abstract Expressionism to align it with a broader international narrative. Just two years after the 1956 Venice Biennale, several touring and domestic exhibitions actively promoted a small group of New York School painters including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as the culmination of a European-inspired, American-produced aesthetic embodying universal values. Intellectually bolstered by Clement Greenberg and promoted actively by MoMA, this interpretation of Abstract Expressionism quickly crowded out alternative voices. In the end, Greenberg's formalist, internationalist interpretation of Abstract Expressionism proved much more flexible in negotiating and reconciling many—though not all—the competing interests of the western art establishment. Its rapid dominance of art historiography, facilitated by the cold war utility of international modernism as a tool with which to win over the moderate European left, obscures the importance of institutional politics in shaping canonical aesthetic priorities. The fate of American Artists Paint the City reveals this hidden history.2

International competitive juried exhibitions like the Venice Biennale are sites where innumerable individuals—artists, curators, jurors, critics, and spectators —participate in the creation of canons that over extended periods of evaluation and reevaluation are either supported and upheld or challenged...

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