The center moves to New York

For ninety years modern art had meant Paris. Then Hitler emptied Europe of its avant-garde — driven out as “degenerate,” or Jewish, or simply unsafe — and a great many of them washed up in New York, where a generation of young American painters had been waiting and watching. For a century Americans had sailed to Paris to learn how to paint; now, abruptly, the traffic ran the other way. When the war ended, for the first time the center of gravity of Western art sat on the far side of the Atlantic.

What the Americans built was Abstract Expressionism — huge, ambitious, completely abstract. Jackson Pollock took the Surrealists’ chance and automatism at its word: he laid the canvas on the floor and flung and dripped skeins of ordinary house paint across it, so the finished picture is a frozen record of the dance that made it. Mark Rothko went the opposite way — two or three soft-edged rectangles of luminous color stacked on a tall canvas, the edges bleeding and breathing so the color seems to hover and glow, meant to be stood close to like an altarpiece until it swallows your whole field of view. Willem de Kooning kept a slashing, half-buried human figure in the mix. It was the first art movement the world looked to America to lead.

It helped that the timing was political. In the Cold War, an art of total individual freedom made a useful advertisement for the free world against Soviet socialist realism, and critics like Clement Greenberg — plus, it later emerged, some quiet government money behind the touring exhibitions — helped push American abstraction onto the world stage. New York did not just inherit modern art; it was sold, hard.

Abstract Expressionism grew so grand and so solemn that the next move was almost inevitable: puncture it. Pop Art walked the supermarket and the comic strip straight into the museum — Andy Warhol’s silkscreened soup cans and repeated Marilyns, Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book panels blown up huge, printer’s dots and all. Where the Abstract Expressionists had agonised over the unique, soulful, handmade mark, Warhol courted the mechanical and the mass-produced and said, flatly, that he wanted to be a machine. There is a hard little joke buried in the reversal: the Abstract Expressionists mostly drank and suffered and died not rich, chasing authenticity; Warhol faked the factory and got famous and wealthy doing it. It was Duchamp’s 1917 urinal question coming back — in color, at scale, and very much for sale.

By the late 1960s a younger crowd was stripping even Pop’s jokes away — the Minimalists, reducing art to a plain metal box or a row of bricks, daring you to ask whether that counted. Which is right where “modern” quietly hands off to “contemporary,” the next era along. The whole century-long argument that began with Courbet’s tent had come full circle, because it was never really about cubes or color or drips. It was always the same question the Salon jury thought it had settled for good: who gets to decide what counts as art, and what is it for? By 1970 the answer was wide open — which is the most modern thing about it.