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PROJECT FOR A REVOLUTION IN NEW YORK
BY MITCHELL ALGUS

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The first scene goes very fast. Evidently it has already been rehearsed several times: everyone knows his park by heart....
Then there is a gap, a blank space, a pause of indeterminate length during which nothing happens, not even the anticipation of what will come next.
And suddenly the action resumes, without warning, and the same scene occurs again...but which scene? 

Contemporary European art was little seen in New York during the 1960s and 1970s.  Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism, then Conceptual art and Photorealism, were American hegemonies.  Museums fostered the grand narrative:  World War II marked a passing of the torch across the Atlantic in which Surrealism was expunged, scale shifted, facture formalized, and the business of making art resumed.  Art magazines reinforced the fable.  The work in this exhibition was made outside the United States, mostly in France and Germany.  It is another history.

After World War II, the European art shown in New York was largely prewar and School of Paris.  A watershed moment came in 1962, when Sidney Janis presented The New Realists, curated by Pierre Restany.  With Harold Stevenson's The Eye of Lightning Billy, painted in Paris, as a centerpiece and a title that paralleled literature's Nouveau Roman and film's Nouvelle Vague, this show was the first high-profile exhibition of Neo-Dada and Pop art. As presented, the new tendencies were international in scope. But the following year, in Lawrence Alloway's early Pop show Six Painters and the Object at the Guggenheim, the Europeans were gone. Janis (who gave one show each to