The fact that most modern and contemporary art is art produced with the intention of ending up in the museum is so natural to us that we can hardly think of the relationship between museum and artist as anything other than a kind of productive symbiosis. We assume that the artist creates and that the museum preserves what is created, and it does not occur to us to consider that the relationship between the two can be established in less pleasant but more real terms, such as aggression, rejection or mutual parasitism.

The fact is that modern museums are filled, above all, with the art that artists have made against the museum, because the dialectic between the museum as an institution and the artist as an individual belongs to the intrinsic logic of the development of art since the beginning of the modern era. For if the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century imposed on themselves the obligation to create something new, it is obvious that they had to begin (and they did so, with greater or lesser energy) by vigorously denouncing the past and claiming the need to shed it. This opposition to previous art had as its primary effect the confrontation of the artist, who came from the future, with the institutional space in charge of preserving the past, that is, the museum. And so the history of art can be told as the history of the encounters and disagreements that have taken place between artists and the museum, an ambiguous and complex game in which the winners and losers have continually exchanged roles.

The irascibles: Painters Against the Museum (New York, 1950) deals with one of the most relevant episodes of that history, one of which a document as precise as a photograph is preserved. At the end of 1950, the Russian-born photographer Nina Leen took a snapshot for Life magazine that would eventually become the unofficial portrait of the painters who would later become known as the New York School. It features William Baziotes, James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Jimmy Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still and Bradley Walker Tomlin. All of them, together with Fritz Bultman, Hans Hofmann and Weldon Kees, who were unable to attend, make up the eighteen painters who protested that year against the jury of the competition American Painting Today: 1950, an exhibition organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The outrage of the group of artists was due to the fact that, in their opinion, the jury of that exhibition was reluctant to the art that was being produced at that time in the United States, that is, the art that they were all making. Therefore, led by Gottlieb, they decided to send an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan, Roland R. Redmond, signed by the painters, as well as by many other sculptors who supported the cause. The editors of Life wanted the magazine to echo the controversy and commissioned the photograph, which was published on January 15, 1951, under the headline "Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show." Since then, the image has become an icon.

Nina Leen’s photograph is not an isolated document: it is a frame of a single-shot sequence, that of the logic of the dialectic relationship of the modern and contemporary artist with the museum. A hasty glance at the history of modern art—with its succession of salonniers and rejects—could lead us to take for a journalistic anecdote what is really a very exemplary case of the institutional mechanics of modern art from the historical avant-garde, taken in flagrante in one of the most striking moments of those confrontations against the established. The irascibles were very aware of what they were defending—the new—and that their claims would have a future effect on the way of understanding the art of their time and, therefore, also of the art that would follow. An effect that—in an only apparent paradox—if it is alive since then is also due to the undeniable presence of their works in the same museum that once rejected them.

Fundación Juan March