An Americanization of Modern Art?

I agree with Guilbaut’s claim that one of the reasons why American after war avant-garde’s taking the abstract form, is that the artists were pursuing a depoliticization style equally aloof from the right and the left. He elaborates it in the second chapter:
They used these elements (Trotskyism, surrealism and other movements) to establish a theoretical justification of their own position, with which they could respond to the new social situation. If they deformed the texts from which they borrowed, the reason was not that they failed to understand them, but rather that they were sick of politics and therefore thought they were sick of history as well. By using primitive imagery and myths to cut themselves off from the historical reality of their own time, they hope to protect themselves from the manipulation and disillusionment they had suffered previously. (77)

Though from a different standpoint, Adorno had a similar claim in his Aesthetic Theory. For him, modern art resists the administered art and the self-evidence of empirical reality. He praised writer Samuel Beckett, whose difficult works he viewed as specific responses to the historical and social conditions of modernity.:”Beckett's oeuvre gives the frightful answer to art that, by its starting point, by its distance from any praxis, art in the face of mortal threat becomes ideology through the harmlessness of its mere form, regardless of its content.” (Aesthetic Theory 250)
To some extent, the creation of Beckett and the French New Novel can be seen as a parallel movement to abstract expressionism in Paris in the field of literature. Beckett went through WWII in Paris and joined the French Resistance in 1940. He started to write in French in 1946. His works and the New Novel in the 1950s are also considered as avant-garde, and featured by experimental styles which were diverged from classical literary genres—like abstract expressionism, they switched from the traditional realism to an avant-garde manner that mainly deal with the form and genre.

This comparison makes me to think whether it is valid to say New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris. Or Guilbaut’s work on American abstract expressionism is just a situation-specific account on the modern art from a broader cross-country phenomenon. (the broader tradition might be suggested by MOMA’s first director Alfred Barr’s diagram on the development of modern art) I tried to look for his expound on some distinguishing features of the works of abstract expressionism that only speak to the American background. However, Guilbaut goes on too much about the political details in the whole book, while for the art works and artists themselves, he mentioned nothing more than “using primitive imagery and myths” and did not elaborate.

To say “the fall of Paris” in the cultural aspect might be a little assertive. Think about the literary scene at that time in France. Perhaps it’s merely the fact that art creation is more likely to be affected with the market than literary creation does. The establishment of Museum of Modern Art relied on the director Alfred Barr’s idea not so much as the Rockefeller’s money. For me, the Americanization of modern art described in this book has a lot more to do with government’s financing and organizing the art movement.