AS LATE AS 1825, seats of learning with the Gothic aspect of some of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were unknown anywhere in the New World. Yet as the nineteenth century unfolded, many American universities began to embrace a Gothic style that looked backwards in time and eastward in direction, and the lynchpin was the building of a new university in New York. Archival research has permitted a reconstruction of the complex history of the New York University commission for the first time.

IN THEIR MURAL painted in 1934–35 in the Museo Michoacano housed in the state university in Morelia, Mexico, three American compatriots – Philip Guston, Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner – attempted to find a revolutionary art form that at the same time would be capable of yielding a powerful socially conscious theme (Figs.14 and 15). The dynamic trio began their mural in a crucial year for organised labour, energised primarily by Communist activists. It was a year characterised by a number of major strikes across the United States that set the stage for John L. Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers, to organise the federation of industrial unions known as the CIO in the autumn of the following year. At the same time, there would have been a receptive climate for the mural in Morelia. In 1934 Lázaro Cárdenas, president-elect of Mexico, convoked an unprecedented convention for workers and employers that became known as the First Mexican Industrial Congress with themes that included collective bargaining, strikes, peasant labour, arbitration and social security. Cárdenas and his supporters embraced the idea of the Marxist class struggle as inherent in the capitalist system of production, and acted on the belief that the function of modern government was to regulate it on behalf of labour as the weaker of the two entities. He openly spoke of the need for a popular ‘socialistic education’ as a means of ensuring ‘true individual liberty’. Finally, to bring it all closer to home, the then rector of the University of Michoacán, Gustavo Corona, ultimately responsible for authorising the mural, committed himself and his institution to the radical ideology espoused by Cárdenas. That Guston, Kadish and Langsner were in touch with these political events is evident from the fact that the trio travelled to Mexico City in time for the inauguration of Cárdenas on 1st December.

SET AMID THE bronze horses of San Marco, a self-portrait of Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly in Venice is superimposed with ancient spolia from Constantinople, Gothic columns and capitals, and the Renaissance Torre dell’Orologio (Fig.25). A photographic double exposure of the two young American artists presents a historical and artistic palimpsest that engulfs the subjects. This accidental layering of imagery perhaps initially appears little different from countless other snapshots that are taken each year at the same place. What differentiates this particular photograph, apart from the notability of the sitters, is its iconic significance in embodying Rauschenberg’s and Twombly’s own shared exposure to a variety of cultures and influences during their formative ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe and North Africa that continued to inform their art for many years afterwards.

JOHN STEUART CURRY (1897–1946), one of the leading Regionalist painters and printmakers of the 1930s, was born on a farm in Kansas to hard-working Scottish Presbyterian parents. His upbringing in the Midwest informed his work as an artist, and his earliest work was illustrating cowboy stories for popular magazines. His work as a painter gained critical acclaim after the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York bought Baptism in Kansas, his first major Regionalist painting executed in 1928. By the early 1930s, along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, he was hailed by the press as one of the Regionalist triumvirate. One of Curry’s most startling images is his 1939 lithograph of John Brown, the nineteenth-century anti-slavery campaigner (Fig.42). In 1859 Brown had led a raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His aim was to incite an uprising by arming the slaves, but he was captured by the local militia, found guilty of treason and hanged on 2nd December 1859.

THE AMERICAN ABSTRACTIONIST Stuart Davis (1892–1964) began his career as a member of the Ash Can School of artists and specialised in representational images of New York until 1913 when his work changed under the influence of Modernism. As he developed his own Cubist-based style, he retained an interest in signs and advertisements that were part of urban living, and he is often remembered for paintings that include words. Late in his life, the artist singled out his 1921 tobacco pictures, which included easily recognisable trademarks and logos, as pivotal works in his career. I have argued elsewhere that Davis found similarities between the identities of the brands that he painted and his own interests and aims. In the 1930s the artist continued to incorporate tobacco images into his art, and one such painting, Composition (1935; Fig.43), is the focus of this article.

THIS ARTICLE CLARIFIES, and offers new information about, Barnett Newman’s early exhibition history. It presents evidence about a hitherto unidentified painting in Newman’s first solo exhibition – a painting known only as ‘No.20’ – and supports the existing tentative identification of Abraham (1949) as another of the paintings in that show. It also presents evidence that two of Newman’s paintings were exhibited in 1952, a year during which he is generally thought to have exhibited nothing, and identifies as Genetic moment the painting that Newman contributed to a group show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1948.