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When ‘New Art’ Made New York the Culture Capital

New York Times

July 21, 2022

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The Rebecca, a painting with a black ground and its title painted in white stenciled letters across the bottom of the canvas. Above the text is a large circle, at the center of which is a blue eight within a white ring with a the black text "Port of New York," within a red compass rose within a blue circle. Surrounding this is another white ring, containing the text, in black, "The American Slave Company."

When I was a kid in the early 1960s, my Eisenhower-Republican physician-father always had the latest copies of his favored subscription publications on his home office desk: Time, Life, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Mad magazine.

To me, Time and Life pegged him an engaged citizen; JAMA, as a conscientious professional. But Mad? With its Alfred E. Neuman mascot and anarchic, sacred cow-skewering humor? It signaled some whole other kind of reader, one with a taste for cultural weirdness akin to the one I was developing.

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Installation view of New York: 1962-1964 at the Jewish Museum featuring five works, including Indiana's bronze sculpture Eat and the painting The Rebecca

Installation view of New York: 1962-1964 at the Jewish Museum, July 22, 2022-January 8, 2023. © Frederick Charles, fcharles.com