The Visual Arts 1955-1965

The visual arts in the decade past have been gaudy, sassy, and pleasantly raucous. It may be that the avant garde is, as the Bryn Mawr girl said, passé; what she meant is that a loop has come full circle and the fumigations and épatements of half a century back seem worth doing over. The scholars are already comparing the spliced bits of the loop. Kurt Schwitters, hero of the Merzbild, is now the father of the quoted comic-book page, since it turns out he was on to Pop when Roy Lichtenstein, the current master, was in rompers.

Thus a great deal of the decade’s energy is a discovery by the young that there was a revolution in the arts around 1906 that did not become Cubism or academic Surrealism. Picasso (Big Pabs) and Dali (Daddy Sal) have joined the society of Michelangelo and Hiroshige. The young turn back to the quaquaversal Francis Picabia (unknown to the Luce papers and fine arts departments and therefore still in fatigues and with smoking revolver), to the inscrutable Marcel Duchamp, and to that spirit among the Italian Futuristi and the German and Russian experimenters just before the First World War who saw in advertising, folk art, and the commercial ubiquity of groceries and hardware the symbols they could isolate and make eloquent.

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Guy Davenport

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The visual arts in the decade past have been gaudy, sassy, and pleasantly raucous. It may be that the avant garde is, as the Bryn Mawr girl said, passé; what she meant is that a loop has come full circle and the fumigations and épatements of half a century back seem worth doing over. The scholars are already comparing the spliced bits of the loop. Kurt Schwitters, hero of the Merzbild, is now the father of the quoted comic-book page, since it turns out he was on to Pop when Roy Lichtenstein, the current master, was in rompers.

Thus a great deal of the decade’s energy is a discovery by the young that there was a revolution in the arts around 1906 that did not become Cubism or academic Surrealism. Picasso (Big Pabs) and Dali (Daddy Sal) have joined the society of Michelangelo and Hiroshige. The young turn back to the quaquaversal Francis Picabia (unknown to the Luce papers and fine arts departments and therefore still in fatigues and with smoking revolver), to the inscrutable Marcel Duchamp, and to that spirit among the Italian Futuristi and the German and Russian experimenters just before the First World War who saw in advertising, folk art, and the commercial ubiquity of groceries and hardware the symbols they could isolate and make eloquent.