It had clearly been Johnny Myers’s intention to create such a stir on that occasion, for he knew very well that public controversy would have the effect of making some of the figurative painters he represented better known to the art world. It was therefore inevitable that Barr’s provocative pronouncement-and indeed, the very subject of the panel-would be greeted with a vociferous mixture of skepticism and hostility. The Artists Club had been founded, of course, as a forum dedicated to the advancement of Abstract Expressionism. The occasion was a panel discussion on what was then called the “New Realism.” It was organized by John Bernard Myers, the irrepressible director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which represented a number of the painters under discussion-among them, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, and Grace Hartigan. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, announced that the age of abstraction was drawing to a close and would now be succeeded by, of all things, a revival of history painting. I have a particularly vivid memory of an evening in 1954 at the Artists Club in New York when no less an eminence than the late Alfred H. Over the course of time, in fact, debate about the future of abstract art has been an equal-opportunity enterprise to which the smart and the dumb, the advanced and the reactionary, the informed and the misinformed have all been eager to make a contribution. There are highly accomplished artists and critics who have taken sides on the question, as well as respected museum curators, art collectors, and art dealers. Many good minds have raised such doubts, and many benighted minds have done so as well. No sooner did abstract art-particularly abstract painting-make its initial appearance on the international art scene in the second decade of the twentieth century than the doubts about its future course began to be heard. Historically, the question of abstraction’s future is as old as abstraction itself, for the birth of abstract art some ninety years or so ago immediately prompted many doubts about its artistic viability. The question of abstraction’s future has been raised many times in the past. It must be acknowledged at the outset of these observations that the question of whether abstract art has a future is anything but new. It is hard to tell if abstract painting actually got worse, if it merely stagnated, or if it simply looked bad in comparison to the hopes its own accomplishments had raised.
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