A

THE 1950s: THE ARTS: OVERVIEW

A Quiet Rebellion

It may not have been clear at the time, but American society, which seemed so stable and prosperous on the surface, was being urged toward revolution in the wake of World War II by a brash generation of artists using bold works to test their ideas. As rebels always are, these young rebels were bitterly opposed by their elders, But as the 1950s progressed, the rebellion seemed to grow increasingly determined, and it became more threatening than it had ever been before.

Cold War Response

The cold war set the tone for the arts of the decade. Americans enjoyed their image as the most prosperous people in the most powerful nation in the world. Yet they dreaded the centralization of power and the impersonality of life in the atomic age. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), British novelist George Orwell's novel about a totalitarian government that imposed absolute uniformity of thought and action, was read as a warning about the future. "Big Brother is watching you," a refrain from the novel, became a slogan for people who feared the effect of a social organization so powerful that it could control thought and stifle creativity. The 1950s are remembered as a time of complacency. It was also the time when shrill, profane, and menacing voices of individualism and dissidence were raised—Elvis Presley, Jack Kerouac, Thelonious Monk, and Jackson Pollock; rock 'n' roll, the Beats, bebop, and abstract-expressionist art.

Alienation

Perhaps in reaction to cold-war tensions, perhaps in rebellion against the anxious conformity of a generation trying to settle into the comforts of middle-class life, American artists restlessly and aggressively defined themselves as outsiders. In 1950 the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art issued a manifesto called "Statement on Modern Art" opposing "any attempt to make art or opinion about art conform to a single point of view" and deploring "the reckless and ignorant use of political or moral terms in attacking modern art." Novelist Norman Mailer observed in 1952 that although "this period smacks of healthy manifestos … I wonder if there has been a time in the last fifty years when the American artist has felt more alienated." In 1955 and 1956 Carl Perkins and then Presley shouted their independence in separate hit recordings of a rock 'n' roll song that warned "You can do anything but lay off of my blue suede shoes,"

Abstract Expressionism

In the art world the rebellion against conformity took the name abstract expressionism. It was led by a group of painters and sculptors called the New York School, who sought to move away from the propagandist art of the 1930s. The bomb, government control, and greed seemed the most compelling issues confronting postwar Americans. The New York School reacted by emphasizing individual emotion and by presenting their emotive art with as little inhibition and as much confrontation as possible. They rebelled against restrictions.

A New Image

Avantgarde artists of the period redefined their roles. They defied the image of the crafter sitting at an easel and painting with a brush on a canvas designed for wall display. They painted on huge canvases, when they used canvas at all—just as often they worked with papier-mâché or in sculpture; they employed unconventional tools—sticks, trowels, spray cans; they incorporated whatever media was at hand in their art—sand, glass, toilet seats, garbage.

Confrontation/Response

Artists of the 1950s were not content with declaring their individuality; they wanted a response. Pollock's drip paintings, also called "the art of obliteration" because during one period they consisted of recognizable forms almost completely covered by random paint drippings, symbolized the spirit of the time: negate the past with spontaneous action in the present. Larry Rivers said his 1953 painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware was conceived as a "disgusting, dead, and absurd" painting of "a national cliche" calculated to outrage viewers. In the mid 1950s Robert Rauschenberg introduced his "combines"—artworks that incorporate everyday objects such as beds, umbrellas, and tires—designed to "fill the gap between art and life." Claes Oldenburg opened his first one-man show in 1959 by walking through the streets of New York in a papier-mâché elephant mask, taking his art into the streets "to invite public action and involvement."

Audience Response

To the dismay of the angry young artists, critics and viewers responded enthusiastically if with some bewilderment. One of Pollock's paintings sold for $13,600 in 1950; after his death in 1956, prices soared. A Mark Rothko painting brought $8,950 in 1950, a time when the standard price for a contemporary painting was $500, and in 1959 Rothko was commissioned to do a painting to hang in the posh Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. But even the successful rebels found reason for complaint. Both Pollock and Rothko were members of a group called "The Irascibles" whose 1951 boycott of a juried competition for eighty-five hundred dollars in prizes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was their declaration of war on the art-world establishment. The Irascibles complained that in the early 1950s the Met spent about four hundred thousand dollars each year on acquisitions, of which only about ten thousand went for contemporary art—not enough to buy a Pollock or a Willem de Kooning or a John Marin, who was by a vote of museum directors the most accomplished living artist in 1952.

Art for the People

Prosperity brings an appetite for culture, and during the 1950s Americans were hungry. They wanted to understand and appreciate art, particularly American art. A chain of New Jersey supermarkets attempted (with mixed success) to sell paintings by young American artists for prices ranging from $10 to $100. The Art Rental Gallery in Chicago loaned the work of local artists at fees a worker's family could afford. In Richmond, Virginia, local funds supported an artmobile to take art to the people. American audiences were almost as determined to understand and appreciate art as contemporary artists were to demonstrate contempt for them.

Music

The music world was in much the same situation, but the revolt took a different form. The music revolution was popular rather than elitist, and it signaled a social rather than an intellectual rebellion. A young untrained country singer and guitar player named Hank Williams captured the spirit of the time for what was called the hillbilly audience (rural and blue-collar) with his lonesome, lovesick wails about life gone sour. Despite being the first nationally popular country singer, hailed as a master of soulful expression, he was banned from the Grand Old Opry because of his hell-raising and womanizing—because he lived the songs he sang. Williams died of a drug overdose in the back seat of his Cadillac on the way to a performance in 1953. He was twenty-nine. Ernest Tubb, Jim Reeves, Porter Wag-goner, and a housepainter turned singer named George Jones took up where Williams had left off.

Jazz

In big-city nightclubs, black musicians played bebop, a syncopated, dissonant music that sounded far different but expressed the same stubborn individualism as hillbilly soul. Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Monk, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane were reacting against the traditional harmonies, predictable rhythms, and sentimentality of the swing era in small-group sessions that emphasized the improvisational abilities of the soloist and an appreciation for the unorthodox. Bebop was the music of isolation, black isolation in particular. Not unlike Pollock's drip paintings, it was a "music of obliteration" that frequently reinterpreted standard songs in a way that infuriated outsiders and delighted the closed bebop audience, which grew larger as the decade progressed—driving the bebop musicians to new levels of atonality and arrhythmia to maintain their separateness.

Classical

Even the classical music world reacted to the spirit of the time. A young conductor of unquestionable talent named Leonard Bernstein shocked purists when he wrote the music for West Side Story, a Broadway musical about gang life. The show directly confronted one of the most pervasive domestic fears of the time—juvenile delinquency and gangland violence—in a medium that rarely addressed social problems. West Side Story was a record-breaking hit, and two years later, in 1959, Bernstein was appointed to the most prestigious conductor's job in America as head of the New York Philharmonic. His first move was to try to broaden the Philharmonic's audience by appealing directly to a mass audience that wanted to know how to appreciate music properly. He became the most influential conductor in America as he alternately sponsored innovation for aficionados and spoon-fed the classics to untutored audiences. At the other extreme, composer John Cage seemed indifferent to the opinions of his audiences. He attracted more attention with his theories about music as pure sound and silence, the stuff of real life, than with his compositions, which emphasized random and chance occurrence of sounds. One of his pieces involves playing twelve radios tuned to various stations.

Rock 'n' Roll

The music that dominated the decade was called rock 'n' roll. It was music about sex, rebellion, and plain hip-shaking good times, introduced by young white musicians showing a distinctly black blues influence. Presley was the undisputed King of Rock 'n' Roll. No musician in American history had been so popular. Six months after his first nationally distributed record, Heartbreak Hotel, was released it had sold 8 million copies, and that was only the beginning. In the next two years twenty of his records sold over a million copies each, his total record sales were over 28 million, and his income was said to be more than $10 million a year. In his wake came hundreds of rock performers. Some, such as the piano-banging singer Jerry Lee Lewis, were more untamed on stage than Elvis himself; others, such as the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly, relied exclusively on music to express their feelings about adolescent life, love, and isolation.

Musical Integration

With the popularity of rock 'n' roll came an acceptance of black performers who had provided its inspiration. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Ray Charles gained popularity playing more or less traditional rhythm and blues (R&B) music. Black singing groups, such as the Coasters and the Drifters, brought to rock 'n' roll the sassy, sensual sound of urbanized black folk music. To the parents of rock 'n' roll fans, they brought the intemperate fear that their sons were being corrupted by rhythms communicating low values and that their daughters were being seduced by dark men with smooth voices.

Literature

American literary elders were accorded unprecedented international respect, while young writers adopted alienation as their theme and disdain for accepted social values as their attitude. Young writers after World War II reacted in much the same way as did artists and musicians, selling themselves against the dominant figures of the decade—writers past their primes being recognized for prewar achievements. William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1950 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for his novel A Fable, a symbol-laden story of a wartime separate peace that baffled readers and critics alike. He finished his ambitious Snopes trilogy with The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), but it was widely held that they did not live up to the promise of The Hamlet (1940). Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954 and enjoyed the status of the preeminent literary figure of the time. He wrote The Old Man and the Sea (1952) to prove he was not through as a writer, he told his editor. Though it was arguably the most popular literary novel of the decade—previewed memorably before book publication in Life magazine and on the best-seller list for half a year—critics agree that it lacks the substance of Hemingway's novels a quarter-century earlier.

The Elders

John Steinbeck did not receive his Nobel Prize until 1962, but his reputation and his bank account flourished in the 1950s. To critics, his East of Eden (1952), a multigenerational study of the biblical forces of good and evil, was his first major novel since The Grapes of Wrath (1936). To the average American it was a 1955 movie adapted from the novel starring James Dean, who was killed in a car crash just before the movie was released. John O'Hara routinely wrote a book a year and produced an admirable portrayal of life among the socially privileged in the East during the first half of the twentieth century. His Ten North Frederick (1955) won a Pulitzer Prize, and From the Terrace (1958) was widely praised.

War Response

Those who expected that World War II would be a stimulating literary theme, as World War I had been, were disappointed. Norman Mailer was hailed as the most important young writer after the war when The Naked and the Dead was published with great fanfare in 1948, but the subsequent status derived more from his reputation than from his achievement. What he did do better than any other writer of the decade was to promote himself as literary spokesman and heman artist-intellectual. His reputation soared based not on his literary achievement but on his ability to claim more convincingly than anyone else that he was the leading writer of the time. Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions (1948) and James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951) were also important novels about World War II that achieved critical and popular success, and throughout the decade they were considered among the most promising literary talents in America. Jones failed to deliver over the long term though, and Shaw succumbed to the forces of commercialism, many thought.

Young Writers

There was a wealth of young writers who chose to write about subjects other than war. Flannery O'Connor produced Wise Blood (1952), a southern-gothic tale about the narrow boundary between religious excess and the damnation of madness. William Styron was hailed as one of the brightest young writers in the country upon the publication of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), which preached the moral that white-middle-class life could be thoroughly degenerate. The fulfillment of his promise was at least a decade away, though. John Cheever had been writing short stories for the New Yorker for twenty years before his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), was published. The novel charts the development of two sons in an eccentric New England family as they make their own places in the world.

Jewish Writers

Mailer led an impressive group of Jewish authors who came to prominence during the 1950s, writing out of a sense of cultural urgency and religious identity. Saul Bellow's first two novels were published before the decade began, but The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), and Henderson the Rain King (1959) established him as a major novelist. Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952) and The Assistant (1957) and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (1959) marked the beginnings of distinguished careers.

Salinger

The most influential novel of the decade, for young readers at least, was J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a coming-of-age novel that uncompromisingly takes the side of the adolescent hero frustrated by the hypocrisy of adult values. Holden Caulfield was the spokesman for a generation trying to resist the corruption that age and experience seemed inevitably to bring.

Cozzens

If Salinger spoke for the young and innocent, James Gould Cozzens was the voice of adult responsbility.

His dense, meticulous prose was the talk of the literary world in 1957, the year By Love Possessed was published. No serious novel during the decade received more popular attention, and no author reacted to celebrity with more disdain.

The Beats

As rich as the writing of the 1950s was, the dominant literary group is remembered not so much for its talent as for its message, which was bitterly critical of American society. Allen Ginsberg complained in his 1956 poem Howl that he "saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness" "with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their bodies." When the poem was published by San Francisco poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, it prompted charges of obscenity. In a show trial, Ferlinghetti was found innocent.

Spontaneous Writing

Ginsberg's friends Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso were the most visible members of the Beats. Like the abstract expressionists, they wanted to bridge the gap between art and life, and they took to the roads in search of raw experience, to see for themselves what the country was like. Their hero was a fast-talking, free-living, nonwriting rogue named Neal Cassady, who exemplified the freedom of spirit they admired. Kerouac's On the Road (1957) was the defining work of the movement, whose philosophy can be reduced to one word: spontaneity. Individualism was cherished above all by the Beats, who clung to a simple reduction of the existentialist philosophy current among such French intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus: every person should seize the freedom to determine who he or she is and then act accordingly.

Freedom of Expression

In 1952 Lionel Trilling observed that "for the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is not to be conceived of as a priori the vulgarest and stupidest nation of the world. And this is not only because other nations are exercising as never before the inalienable right of nations to be stupid and vulgar." As the military and diplomatic power of the nation was accepted worldwide, creative people looked to America for an interpretation of what that power meant and how it affected life. The responses took various forms, but in the 1950s they reduced to a common theme: people are more important than nations; individuals are more precious than weapons; freedom of expression is the basic right, and it can be maintained only if it is exercised.