"The Club (1949–1957 and 1959–1970) has been called 'a schoolhouse of sorts ... as well as a theater, gallery space, and a dancehall....' Created by abstract expressionist sculptor Philip Pavia, The Club grew out of the informal gatherings among dozens of painters and sculptors who all had art studios in Lower Manhattan between 8th and 12th streets and Firstand Sixth Avenues during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Membership included many of New York's most important mid-century artists and thinkers, predominantly painters and sculptors like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Isamu Noguchi, John Ferren, and Robert Motherwell, as well as nearly all the artists later called the New York School. But other celebrated artists, cultural figures and major 20th-century thinkers attended meetings, including philosopher Joseph Campbell, composer John Cage and political theorist Hannah Arendt. Structured to facilitate the growth and dissemination of ideas about art by artists for artists, especially abstract expressionist art, The Club lent New York's art scene the vitality and international influence Paris had long monopolized, and U.S. artists had long craved. Called an 'outspoken avant-garde thinker' by The Boston Globe, Pavia decided to organize regular gatherings of artists, writers and thinkers to socialize and discuss modern art in 1948. The result, inspired by the salons of Paris, the ethnic groups that then proliferated in Greenwich Village and a post-war desire for art that wasn't borrowed from Europe, was the 8th Street Club, known as 'the Club,' and its 1959–1970 successor group, also known as the '23rd Street Workshop Club.' In 1958, Pavia extended the Club's work into a journal, with the short-lived but influential It is. A Magazine for Abstract Art. Originally envisioned as a regular debate about issues in art during twice-weekly lectures, members-only panel conversations and other events, as the Club was also, in part, a response to American artists intimidated by the modernists who had taken refuge in New York after the war. ... The New Yorker's Louis Menand makes another point entirely when he writes about the sheer quantity of 'formal experimentation and theoretical ferment there was in New York art between 1952 (the year by which the Abstract Expressionists had established themselves) and 1965.... You can see these downtown artists attempting solve a problem inherent in the term 'Abstract Expressionism' itself', which he points out is an 'oxymoron: if something is abstract, it can't express,' which explains why 'there arose a push-pull between abstract forms and figuration (the same thing was happening in Europe) that yielded a rich variety of original work. ..."
W - The Club
When "the Club" Ruled the Art World from East 8th Street
[PDF] MoMA - Abstract Expressionism's Counterculture: The Club, the Cold War, and the New Sensibility by Valerie Hellstein
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