A Titanic What If

JSmith

Banned
Ok I dont know much about art history but here is a what if question posed in an article about the Titanic in the Denver Post for March 19,2012 by William Porter- wporter@denverpost.com.


Consider : if mining heir Benjamin Guggenheim had not gone down with the ship,his daughter Peggy would likely not have inherited $2.5 million on her 21st birthday in 1919. Without that,she would have been unable to underwrite future art masters such as Jackson Pollock, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Paul Klee. Would the midcentury cultual landscape have been altered?

If you are able-discuss.
 
This sounds quite interesting, so I'm going to keep a look out on this....unfortunately I myself don't know much about art history.
 
Ok I dont know much about art history but here is a what if question posed in an article about the Titanic in the Denver Post for March 19,2012 by William Porter- wporter@denverpost.com.


Consider : if mining heir Benjamin Guggenheim had not gone down with the ship,his daughter Peggy would likely not have inherited $2.5 million on her 21st birthday in 1919. Without that,she would have been unable to underwrite future art masters such as Jackson Pollock, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Paul Klee. Would the midcentury cultual landscape have been altered?

If you are able-discuss.

isnt it possible that he might die in the 7 years between 1912 and 1919 anyway?
 
So I checked and Peggy didn't start seriously collecting seriously until 1938, which means pre-war European art won't be substantially affected. What will be affected is whether a "New York school" develops and what it looks like; the artists who were in it IOTL were getting started by now but they might produce different work without the input of surrealism, which was absolutely crucial and which might not be as visible in the states without Peggy Guggenheim. I could see American modernism staying defined by precisionism and sort of the vestiges of second-generation cubism mixed with some of the more vital strains of realist painting. If you want to work this out more exactly, I'd try to see what Arshile Gorky's career looks like. If Gorky produces similar work with this PoD then we're going to have abex probably, but if not it won't really be the same. The other big issue is that not having Peggy Guggenheim around might mean that New York abex(and later minimalism) doesn't define "modern art" for a lot of people the way it did, which could mean both good and bad things.

Now this does give me a much more radical idea: Can you prevent the Stien family, and especially Gertrude and Leo Stien, from setting up shop in paris? They were involved enough in supporting and artists and putting them in a position to work off each other(and in spotting talent in the exact right generation to do that) that if you do that you will unleash mothra-sized butterflies on 20th-century art.
 
Top