New York in the 1950s: poetry, painting, music This interdisciplinary course focuses on a key moment in mid-20th c40 entury art and culture: the period when the New York Schools of poetry, painting and composition emerged in parallel. In the postwar period, the city took over from Paris as the centre of contemporary art. Abstract Expressionism quickly achieved global popularity, establishing MoMA as the world’s leading contemporary art museum. But other cultural currents too making a great impact on their respective disciplines. The witty, fast-moving work of the New York School Poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest and James Schuyler) challenged the hegemony of High Modernism in the field of poetry. The radical music of John Cage and Morton Feldman posed a similar challenge to the domination of composition by the serial techniques of Schoenberg, Boulez and others. The leading proponents of these tendencies did not work in isolation from other disciplines. The poets, for example, wrote about art (O’Hara was a curator at MoMA), and Cage and Feldman were both inspired, in different ways, by painters such as Rauschenberg and Guston. Numerous artists collaborated with O’Hara and Ashbery, and Rauschenberg designed sets for ballets that Cage produced with Merce Cunningham. Members of all three tendencies met and exchanged ideas at an informal forum known as The Club’. This course examines the three fields and the relations between them. The principal focus is on literature, but considerable time will also be devoted to both art and composition. We will study key works by O’Hara, Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch and Guest. We will tackle John Cage’s theories of chance and Feldman’s use of indeterminacy in his 1950s scores. We will examine the work of such painters as Rothko, Pollock, Guston, Hartigan, Rauschenberg and Johns. In each of the first 10 weeks we will focus on the work of either one or two practitioners. The second 10 weeks will be organised thematically (‘collaboration’; ‘duration’; ‘indeterminacy’, etc). In this way the course will move from discplinary specificity to examining the connections between disciplines. The first half of the course will focus on the work of particular artists. The second will take a thematic approach, examining work from distinct disciplines.