Neither Modernism nor Postmodernism is losing its staleness or its challenge, thanks to the other . The Guggenheim surveyed abstraction as something left for dead in 1960. At the same moment, living abstract artists gathered in an alternative space as if clinging for their lives. In the beauty of their work, they spoke of a confusing, often confused struggle with past and present. Okay, I oversimplify, yet again.
Abstraction has a specificity of meaning in the hands of a single artist.
In barely over a year, retrospectives have shown that for Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, two artists as close as man and wife. Still, amid art-world trends, one can easily forget something critical. Abstract art never meant anything, apart from individuals and their times. Abstract Expressionism emerged after decades of European abstraction, and textbooks still speak of a new beginning. Take some artists a bit less official than Krasner or Pollock, as if to let a space in history around them speak.