NOW/THEN/AGAIN: Contemporary Art in Dallas 1949-1989 Page: 19
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Purchased through the Roberta
Coke Camp Fund, The 500, Inc.,
and Mr. and Mrs. Mark Shepherd,
Jr., Robert Rauschenberg's monu-
mental Skyway (in the center) was
originally created for the 1964
World's Fair in New Yorkthe collection is from the group of Abstract painters who, in the late 1940s, developed
a fiercely independent American art that is now regarded as the true heir to the
avant-garde traditions of France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This
tradition, which starts with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Robert
Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, and Hans Hofmann, was predominantly a
New York-based school in which the artists communicated intensely with each other
and with a small group of collectors and critics in the uneasy years of post-War
America. Although their achievement is known to every serious student of American
art, it has not been accepted into mass American culture in the same way as have
earlier avant-garde movements such as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and
Cubism. The fact that the Dallas Museum of Art has formed a small, but superb
collection of works by this group of painters can be seen as proof of the sophistica-
tion of its patrons, directors, and curators. Indeed, the gift of Jackson Pollock's 1947
CATHEDRAL in 1950 was something of a milestone in American museum collecting.
However, the museum did not follow that gift with any important purchases of
Abstract Expressionist painting until the mid and latter 1960s, when the greatest
works by these seminal artists entered the museum as recognized masterpieces.
The Abstract Expressionist School was joined in the late 1950s by an imagist
tradition in which popular visual culture was transformed by artists to create works
which became known as Pop Art. This movement, along with the work of other anti-
abstract movement artists, is very well represented in the museum's collection with
major works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Tom
Wesselmann, and Pop Art's only major sculptor, Claes Oldenburg. Missing are critical
works by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
This Pop Art tradition, and the coeval abstract trends of Minimalism and Color
Field painting, are all celebrated in the Dallas collection, but realist painting in
America, which continued throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s before regaining critical
acclaim in the 1980s, is very poorly represented in the collection. Absent are major
works by Milton Avery, Philip Pearlstein, Chuck Close, Alfred Leslie, or any of a
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Brettell, Richard R. NOW/THEN/AGAIN: Contemporary Art in Dallas 1949-1989, book, 1989; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth307668/m1/24/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Museum of Art.