Highbrow to Lowbrow: American Art & Culture in the 1950s

Elvis, TV, suburbia, highways, & Marilyn Monroe.

McCarthyism, the Korean war, Kefauver hearings & THE BOMB.

What Life magazine has called “the Nifty Fifties” was a period of intense growth for our country. Marked by a culture of fear, conformity and repression, as well as prolific expansion economically and militarily, this decade also saw the birth of the first real countercultures and dissident groups in the United States.

In art, the height of abstract expressionism gave way to the emergence of pop; and the nascency of many future “movements” appeared in experimental film, dance, performance and technology-based art. Visual culture was changed forever by the ubiquity of television and advertising imagery. Cultural pundit Dwight MacDonald conveniently categorized the arts into “high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow,” sparking renewed interest in debates about the quality and scope of American culture—a culture that was all too rapidly evolving (and consuming the world stage) in the post-war decade.

This course examines the diversity of artistic output within the cultural, political and social climate of the 1950s. We will study not only the “high-brow” abstract expressionists and neo-dadaists, but other significant movements and artists not normally considered part of the avant-garde canon such as the Beats, Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. There will be a strong focus on understanding the social and historical climate of the 1950s.