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IntroductIon A Genealogy of Postwar American Modernism I n April 1949, the San Francisco Art Association held a three-day “Western Round Table on Modern Art,” bringing together an eclectic group of artists, critics, and curators to discuss the state of modernism in America . Held at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the round table was designed “to bring a representation of the best informed opinion of the time to bear on questions about art today,” with the goal of achieving progress “in the exposure of hidden assumptions, in the uprooting of obsolete ideas, and in the framing of new questions.”1 The boldness of this agenda was matched by the boldness of the participants, which included art historian Robert Goldwater, artists Marcel Duchamp and Mark Tobey, composer Arnold Schoenberg, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. While the organizers of the conference tried to structure the discussion around specific themes such as the function of the artist, the roles of the critic and the collector, and the purpose of the museum, the participants, regardless of the topic, tended to return their comments to a statement made by Marcel Duchamp early in the proceedings in which he distinguished between “taste” and what he referred to as the “aesthetic echo.” According to the famed artist and provocateur, taste simply referred to the commonplace “likes and dislikes” of the average consumer, while the aesthetic echo referred to the willingness to forgo the familiar for the mysterious or unknown. “While many people have taste,” argued Duchamp, “only a few are equipped with aesthetic receptivity.”2 For Duchamp, the popular attacks against modern art in the postwar period signaled that most individuals lacked both the education and temperament to appreciate the work that he and his fellow artists were producing. 2 Introduction While not all participants were willing to echo Duchamp’s unabashed elitism , most agreed that, because of the nature of mass society and mass culture, the goal of the modern artist was to carve out a realm to safeguard the work of art from the distorting hands of an ungrateful public. Modernism, in other words, needed safekeeping. One participant, however, grumbled numerous complaints against this consensus. Throughout the proceedings, literary critic Kenneth Burke, who had recently achieved academic fame for his 1945 book of literary criticism A Grammar of Motives, wondered aloud if his fellow discussants had not in fact distorted the project of art in general. A veteran of the avant-garde movements in Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 1930s and a poet and fiction writer in his own right, Burke had obvious modernist credentials. But he spent three days in San Francisco trying to convince his fellow artists and critics that they had gone astray in their aesthetic projects. Specifically, Burke took a stand against what he saw as the two opposed but equally untenable approaches to modern art. On the one hand, several commentators including Robert Goldwater argued that the artwork at its essence was an external manifestation of the artist’s true being and therefore needed protection from the public at large. As Goldwater explained, the modern artist had to struggle to ensure that nothing disturbed “the integral expression of his own personality as he conceives it—be it dealers, be it patrons, be it the concept of society in general.”3 Modernism, according to such a definition , was the medium through which the artist discovered himself outside the concerns of the world at large. On the other hand, several commentators such as Marcel Duchamp and Frank Lloyd Wright argued that the work of art had little to do with the intentions or feelings of the artist and existed as an ontologically distinct statement in and of itself. “We don’t emphasize enough that the work of art is independent of the artist,” asserted Duchamp; “the work of art lives by itself, and the artist who happened to make it is like an irresponsible medium.”4 For Duchamp, the imperative was to shield the artwork from any interpretive or cognitive distortion, guaranteeing in some sense its sacredness. Although the two camps disagreed on the origins of the artwork, they agreed, as Arnold Schoenberg declared, that such work should “never bow to the taste of the mediocre.”5 Burke cringed at such language, continuously interrupting his colleagues to question their claims and their motives. Of course Burke was not rejecting the project of modernism overall. He was just as committed as the others at the table to the belief that...

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