Modernism's Last Stand

Last Stand, Caplin Cove, oil on board, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude

As Serge Guilbaut has argued, during and after WWII, abstraction became a signifier for the ‘Free World.’ The triumph of the individual and the universal was read into abstraction, especially that of Jackson Pollock and other members of the New York School, and used as a Cold War tool to combat not only to lurking memory of Hitler’s Fascism, but also the ‘red fear’ represented by the Soviet Union. Both Hitler and the USRR, had, after all, denounced abstract art and encouraged social realism as the only acceptable art. Many European artists chose to rally behind ‘the universal’ as an oppositional to ‘the national’ because nationalism was understood to have been responsible for German fascism. For American artists, ‘the univer-sal’ held out the hope that the United States could begin to put forward its own ‘High Culture’; as Guilbaut has observed, ‘America was now on the point of making the transition from colonized nation to colonizer.’ [1]
- Laura Cottingham



1- from Frieze Magazine; September- October 1992, issue 6

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS