In The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s, Catherine Dossin challenges the now-mythic perception of New York as the undisputed center of the art world between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a position of power that brought the city prestige, money, and historical recognition. Dossin reconstructs the concrete factors that led to the shift of international attention from Paris to New York in the 1950s, and documents how ’peripheries’ such as Italy, Belgium, and West Germany exerted a decisive influence on this displacement of power. As the US economy sank into recession in the 1970s, however, American artists and dealers became increasingly dependent on the support of Western Europeans, and cities like Cologne and Turin emerged as major commercial and artistic hubs - a development that enabled European artists to return to the forefront of the international art scene in the 1980s. Dossin analyses in detail these changing distributions of geopolitical and symbolic power in the Western art worlds - a story that spans two continents, forty years, and hundreds of actors. Her transnational and interdisciplinary study provides an original and welcome supplement to more traditional formal and national readings of the period.

This book challenges the perception of New York as the undisputed center of the art world between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a position of power that brought the city prestige, money, and historical recognition. In her transnational and interdisciplinary study, Dossin analyses changing distributions of geopolitical and symbolic power in the Western art worlds - a story that spans two continents, forty years, and hundreds of actors.

Richard Dadd is a trickster, a pre-post-modern enigma wrapped in a Shakespearean Midsummer Night’s Dream; an Elizabethan Puck living in a smothering Victorian insane asylum, foreshadowing and, in brilliant, Mad Hatter conundrums, entering the fragmented shards of today’s nightmarish oxymorons long before the artists currently trying to give them the joker’s ephemeral maps of discourse. The author thinks of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” that cryptic refusal to reduce the warped mirrors of reality to prosaic lies, or, perhaps “All Along the Watchtower” or “Mr Tambourine Man.” Even more than Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which curiously enough comes off as overly esoteric, too studied, too conscious, Dadd’s entire existence foreshadows the forbidden entrance into the numinous, the realization of the inexplicable labyrinths of contemporary existence, that wonderfully rich Marcel Duchamp landscape of puns and satiric paradigms, that surrealistic parallax of the brilliant gamester Salvador Dali, that smirking irony of the works of Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Robert Indiana; that fragmented, meta-fictional struggle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. John Lennon certainly sensed it and couldn’t help but push into meta-real worlds in his own lyrics. Think of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” and the more self-conscious “Revolution Number 9.” In “Yer Blues,” he even refers to Dylan’s main character, Mr Jones from “Ballad of a Thin Man.” If Lennon’s song is taken seriously, literally, then it is a dark crying out by a suicidal man, “Lord, I’m lonely, wanna die”; or, if taken as a metaphor for a lover’s lost feelings about his unfulfilled love, it falls into the romantic rant of a typical blues or teenage rock-and-roll song. However, even on this level, it has an irony about it, a sense of laughing at itself and at Dylan’s Mr Jones, who knows something is going on but just not what it is, and then, by extension, all of us who have awakened to the fact that the studied Western world doesn’t make sense, all of us who struggle to find meaning in the nonsense images, characters, and happenings in the song, and perhaps, coming to a conclusion that the nonsense is the sense.

Exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pollock's first major European exhibit. The exhibit brings together many of the 23 works from the 1950 exhibit, along with other examples from major museums and private collections from around the world. 1950 exhibit as marking the start of a transition period in Pollock's life where he began to explore the use of the action art. The current exhibition, organized by the Centro Italiano per le Arti e la Cultura and the Musei Civici Venezia, continue through June and span Pollock's career.