Politics, Protest, and the Avant-Garde

Must avant-garde art manifest a radical aim? Does it require a collective identity? Is it the product of an “ideological community”? To each of these questions, Harold Rosenberg—coiner of the term “Action Painting” for the abstract art of de Kooning, Pollock, and the rest—answered yes. He took stock of the avant-garde in the politically charged climate of 1968, the year Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated, students seized five buildings at Columbia, and protesters had their heads bashed in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “No matter how radical its effects, an action is not avant-garde without an ideology to characterize it,” Rosenberg argued. Art that lacks “the will to change...