Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
The term New York School is usually applied to a number of American visual artists working in and around Manhattan from the early 1940s through to the late 1950s. The group included abstract expressionists, abstract impressionists and action painters; among its leading lights were Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Franz Kline. The typical features of New York School art were innovative individual expression and a rejection of past tradition. And while this led to the development of a number of independent styles, rather than a single group style, the overall result was a characteristic American avant-garde approach to art which had much influence internationally.
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2 1950–1 is suggested by Feldman (see next quotation). Revill, David, in The Roaring Silence – John Cage: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1992) gives 1950 (see pages 138–140)Google Scholar but in a source note on page 321 concedes that “there is a chance it was 1951.” Tomkins, Calvin, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin, 1976), however, implies 1952 (see pages 115–6)Google Scholar; and this last date is given assertively by both Ewen's, DavidAmerican Composers: a biographical dictionary (London: Robert Hale, 1983, 96)Google Scholar and the article on Brown, in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (London: Macmillan, 1986)Google Scholar. The important point in all this is that Brown's work was unaffected by the innovations of Feldman and Cage until the autumn of 1952.
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17 From the note accompanying the published score (New York: Associated Music Publishers, Inc., 1961).Google Scholar
18 Quoted in American Composers, 96.Google Scholar
19 Quoted in accompanying note to recording CRI SD 330.
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