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.

Jackson Pollock

Of course, not everyone understood Pollock or the Abstract Expressionism as Norman Rockwell's The Connoiseur

so cleverly demonstrates.