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Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate Gallery since 1938, spent more than six months on official business in the United States. It had been a decade since he had lived there while a professor of art history and in this article he shows genuine appreciation of the country’s flourishing art scene. Although an early proponent of American art, he had been cautious about its quality in the late 1920s but was now impressed by the public art produced under the auspices of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, and recognised the birth of what appeared to be uniquely American artistic styles, including regionalism and social realism.

Rothenstein describes here the recent growth of public art commissions in the US. President Roosevelt, he explained in what was originally a radio talk, had passed legislation to support artists and to require federally-funded new public buildings to devote one per cent of their budgets to art. This has caused art ‘to have escaped from the studio into the railway station, the law-court, the town hall, and the post office’. All this was in stark contrast to the situation in the UK and Rothenstein presumably felt it was part of his role as Director of the Tate Gallery to point to what he saw as the enlightened approach of the US, notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, the country’s pre-eminence in industry and business. In just a few years contemporary art had become the concern of the ‘American man in the street’.

John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate Gallery, provided an overview, as seen from the British side of the Atlantic, of American art in the catalogue for the exhibition American Painting: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day. It was the first show the gallery staged after the end of the Second World War, and was symbolically important in cementing cultural links between the two allies. Here Rothenstein focused on well-established artists of past centuries and, when it came to contemporary art, conceded that the ‘overwhelming variety’ of new painting in America made ‘bald generalisations’ impossible. To account for the ‘fascination’ of the ‘rapidly developing school of painting’, he contented himself with simply drawing attention to what he saw as the ‘peculiar freshness’ of the intellectual and artistic climate in the United States.

Tate hoped to host an exhibition of contemporary art from the United States soon after its first major show of American art in 1946 but a decade passed before this ambition could be realised. Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art signalled a closer relationship between Tate and the Museum of Modern Art, and acknowledged a growing international interest in the ‘full range’ of contemporary art from the United States. The lead catalogue essay by Holger Cahill, a leading arts administrator, harked back to European concepts and models. But such was the growing currency of the idea of the US’s rise to self-determination in the visual arts that it concluded defiantly, ‘Whatever direction American art is to take, it will be taken primarily in relation to the American situation. After its long tutelage to Europe and its turn toward Asia, American art today has the courage and the will to choose itself.’

Three years after the exhibition Modern Art in the United States, Tate collaborated once more with New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to present The New American Painting in 1959. This exhibition was devoted to work of the circle of artists known as the New York School. In the space of a year the show was seen in eight different countries and generated a huge amount of press comment. In the catalogue foreword MoMA’s Director noted that the exhibition had been organised at the request of European institutions for a show devoted specifically to abstract expressionism and that the museum had not previously undertaken so comprehensive a survey, even in New York. The accompanying essay by Alfred Barr, a senior figure within MoMA, explored the theme of the individualism of each of the artists within the context of the movement’s shared concepts and values.

As Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery from 1965 until his retirement in 1986, Ronald Alley proved a vocal advocate for expanding the gallery’s holdings of modern American art. His enthusiasm for the paintings of the New York School in particular is evident in his essay in Recent American Art, the first title in Tate’s ‘Little Book’ series to be dedicated to a non-British subject. The volume celebrated Tate’s growing collection of American art, which at the time comprised around fifty works, and Alley’s text was accompanied by reproductions of thirty-one of these. Director Norman Reid, however, noted in the foreword that Tate badly needed to acquire additional works in order to achieve its aim ‘eventually to have the best representation of American painting outside the United States’. Alley’s book was published to coincide with the exhibition An Aspect of American Painting and Sculpture 1948–1968, organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and comprising fifty-four works, the vast majority of which were lent by US public collections. Although held at the Tate Gallery, the exhibition highlighted the modesty of the British national collection of American art as no Tate-owned works were included.

E.C. Goossen was a leading American critic and curator with in-depth knowledge of the contemporary art scene. Known for his clear style of writing, he set out in this essay to explain the different ways that the new abstract painting shown in the 1969 Tate exhibition expressed aspects of reality but, crucially, not its appearances. Although a champion of artists such as Morris Louis and Ellsworth Kelly, he concluded by wondering how long this form-based approach to making art could be sustained.

Michael Compton joined Tate as Assistant Curator in 1965 and five years later took on a new role as Keeper of Exhibitions and Education. His approach was not that of an art historian but of someone who collaborated with artists and wanted to engage with the discourse of contemporary art. In his catalogue essay for the 1970 exhibition Three Artists from Los Angeles he focused neither on the artists in question (Larry Bell, Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler) nor on their works (their contributions to the show were not yet known). Instead, he addressed, in somewhat convoluted terms, what he saw as the key conditions for perceiving the works, and only towards the end of the essay did he discuss how the culture and context of Los Angeles might have affected the art. His text was preceded by a short warning that the essay was simply his attempt ‘to think around my reaction’ to the artists, and by a foreword by the Director Norman Reid which highlighted the groundbreaking nature of both the concept and the content of the show.