Modernism and the cold war can be regarded as the twin shaping forces on cultural production in the 1950s. When some ardent practitioners tried to move beyond modernist art, others retreated from it, but it remained the defining aesthetic paradigm of the decade. As historical mode modernism became institutionalised in the 1950s as established by the Nobel laureate trio comprising the modernist writers Faulkner, Eliot and Hemingway. Kitsch and modernism were deeply entangled during the period. Visual culture dominated the period with television, widescreen cinema and musical spectacle providing more opportunities for visual consumption. A visual revolution pervaded every field with picture windows of suburban houses, glossy ads for kitchen
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He made his proposition a decade earlier in his Marxist essay titled ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939) in which he argued that the economic profits of easily consumable Kitsch remained a temptation for serious artists and he claimed that ambitious artists and writers who came under the pressure of Kitsch modified their work and thus it became profusely entangled by the mid-1950s. There is a hidden warning that modernist artists should be wary of the contemporary pressures largely due to the ubiquity of visual culture in the 1950s (Halliwell 190). Mary Caputi rightly defined postwar period of modernity which in various ways was ‘filled with noise, activity, and change’ and it is difficult to view the decade nothing more than a ‘commotion’ of visual styles (Caputi 43). Modernism was a guiding force that facilitated the production of some visual arts like painting, photography, sculptre, design and multimedia products and discouraged others. When abstraction dominated the scene, regional painting and overtly politicized art became taboo in the early 1950s. The abstraction came to be evinced from car and aeronautical design to the clean lines of International Style architecture; from Charles Eames’s innovative chairs and sofas to experiments in clay and ceramics on the West Coast; from Ellsworth Kelly’s giant murals to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann and
He made his proposition a decade earlier in his Marxist essay titled ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939) in which he argued that the economic profits of easily consumable Kitsch remained a temptation for serious artists and he claimed that ambitious artists and writers who came under the pressure of Kitsch modified their work and thus it became profusely entangled by the mid-1950s. There is a hidden warning that modernist artists should be wary of the contemporary pressures largely due to the ubiquity of visual culture in the 1950s (Halliwell 190). Mary Caputi rightly defined postwar period of modernity which in various ways was ‘filled with noise, activity, and change’ and it is difficult to view the decade nothing more than a ‘commotion’ of visual styles (Caputi 43). Modernism was a guiding force that facilitated the production of some visual arts like painting, photography, sculptre, design and multimedia products and discouraged others. When abstraction dominated the scene, regional painting and overtly politicized art became taboo in the early 1950s. The abstraction came to be evinced from car and aeronautical design to the clean lines of International Style architecture; from Charles Eames’s innovative chairs and sofas to experiments in clay and ceramics on the West Coast; from Ellsworth Kelly’s giant murals to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann and