Art in the 1950s
"To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is critical."
-excerpt from a letter to the New York Times by Gottlieb, Rothke, and Newman, expounding a new vivacity in art.
The dominant art movements of the Post-War era --Abstract Expressionism, Beat Poetry and hard bob jazz - devalued craftsmanship in favor of improvisation and the raw, unmediated gesture.
Of course, not everyone understood Pollock or the Abstract Expressionism as Norman Rockwell's The Connoiseur
so cleverly demonstrates.