Portal de Turismo de Castilla y León

Dates

March 23, 2026

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New York 1945–1968: Modernity as Scene, Market, and Rupture

Postwar New York transforms modernity into a battleground: institutions, galleries, universities, clubs, magazines, and alternative circuits compete to define what counts as "new." Painting shifts the symbolic center to Manhattan with Abstract Expressionism (the epic of gesture, the monumental scale), but it's wise to be wary of the triumphal narrative: this hegemony is also constructed through the market, criticism, and Cold War interests, leaving entire areas in shadow. In the sixties, the pendulum swings: Pop Art and mass culture, Minimalism and material reduction, Conceptualism and the primacy of the idea: art no longer promises inner depth, but rather protocols, surfaces, seriality. In literature, the city articulates an uneven constellation: the Beat Generation and Greenwich Village strain morality and language; the poets of the New York School experiment with a swift, conversational sensibility, permeated by painting, film, and the street. In music, jazz—from bebop to hard bop and free jazz—functions as a laboratory of form and politics (improvisation, body, community), while the downtown avant-garde (Cage, Feldman, happenings, Fluxus) erodes the finished work, and the minimalist emergence (Young, Reich, Glass) reprograms time. In this session, we will explore how, between 1945 and 1968, New York did not "embodi" modernity: it managed it, contested it, and exported it, sometimes with lucidity, sometimes with symbolic violence.

Talk by Carlos Gutiérrez Cajaraville