The 1950s as high-water mark in American arts

From my current column for The Desert Advocate:

"In the myth that has been created to assure us we must be living in the culturally most exciting of times, the 1950s are generally portrayed as dull, unadventurous and unimportant, except for the first stirrings of rock ‘n’ roll.

"Maybe small‑town America was asleep then, but her urban artists weren’t. The 1950s were a peak time for the American arts. In the years following our country’s emergence as a superpower after World War II, we produced advances in music, theater, literature, painting and dance we never equaled, before or after. In music, jazz burst into bebop, stretching the musical language in previously undreamed‑of directions, while in the concert hall, works by the pioneering Charles Ives at last were allowed to enter, and to influence, a new generation of composers. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams arrived on the theater scene to tell us more about ourselves than some wanted to know, and the musical, born as cheap entertainment, attained maturity.

"Jackson Pollock decided to drip paint on canvases and helped spark the brazen new aesthetic of abstract expressionism. George Balanchine reinvented European ballet with new, sharp, American accents, while Martha Graham took modern dance technique to its furthest reaches. The “beats”– Jack Kerouac among them, but also including the poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso ‑ emulated jazz in the written word and spun whole new galaxies of experience.

"For invention and innovation, no other time in our country's artistic history even touches the era from 1946 to 1963."

To read the entire column, go to:

http://www.thedesertadvocate.com/082207/arts/foothills.htm