In the years following World War II, modern artists made a frontal assault on the rules of art. The conventions and customs that had governed artistic creation since the Renaissance were steadily and thoroughly overturned, rejected, or ignored.
In 1945, even the most innovative artists still worked in traditional media; but 30 years later they were also erecting poles in the desert, copying news photographs, gluing themselves to trees, and selling kisses for money. Whatever an artist did, or whatever a gallery exhibited, became art. It was a restless and wildly creative period.
Many prominent European artists had fled from Nazi oppression to the United States, which emerged from the war economically strong and optimistic.Among the artists who settled in New York were Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and André Breton. They worked, taught, exhibited, and brought new ideas, opening new possibilities for American artists. This immigration made modernism no longer a distant, European phenomenon; many of its leading practitioners came to the United States.
Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros also exhibited and taught in New York during the 1930s, encouraging artists away from traditional easel painting. War had altered the consciousness of the developed world in subtle but profound ways. The Nazi genocide machine had taken human cruelty to a new low, and the atomic bomb gave humankind terrifying new powers: People were now living in a world they had the power to destroy in minutes. These conditions formed the background for art and life in Europe and the United States at the close of the war.
(exerpt from Prebles Artforms, 12ed)
