The following podcast contains no explicit language whatsoever. Our apologies.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest Church of High Modernism and Puppies edition.

It's Wednesday, February 16th, 2011. On today's program, Abstract Expressionism gets the large treatment at the

Museum of Modern Art. We're joined for that segment by Slate's own Fred Kaplan. Nixon and China

gets treated similarly by the Met. We're joined for that segment by Justin Davidson,

music, and I'm told, architecture, and probably both music and architecture critic of New York

magazine. Rumor has it. And finally, the Westminster Dog Show with Slate's own John Swansberg.

Joining me today, our Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. So nice to see you in

Midtown. And our film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Steve. And Fred Kaplan. hey, Fred. Thanks so much for coming and joining us. This is your first appearance on the show. We're so psyched to have you. It's been too long, but hopefully this is a precedent. Oh, it's good to be here in MoMA doing this. Let me read briefly from Peggy Guggenheim's wonderfully dishy memoir, confessions of an artict. She says that in 1941, she's just moved to the United States from Europe. I decided to try out what she had done previously in London, which is Holda Salon, which had a jury. The jury consisted of Alfred Barr, who was then the head of MoMA, Mondrian Duchamp, and Peggy Guggenheim herself. She says, she writes, the first year it worked very well, and out of the pickings, we had a very fine show of about 40 paintings.

The stars who emerged were Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and William Baziote's.

They had all three shown their work in a previous show of collages in my gallery.

The young American artist, much inspired by the European abstract

and surrealist artists who had taken refuge in New York, started an entirely new school of painting,

which Robert Coates, art critic for the New Yorker, named Abstract Expressionism. Fred, we're here

at MoMA. We're surrounded by some of the most iconic paintings of abstract expressionism.

This is the movement, obviously, that gave birth to American post-war painting,

most prominently William Tecunning, Mark Rothko, Robert Matherwell,

and Jackson Pollock.

We've just walked through the exhibit,

and I'd love to hear your impressions of seeing this art all in one place all at one time.

Well, you know, it's pretty overwhelming, I think. You know, you quoted that line from

Guggenheim. There was a, the really revolutionary thing about abstract expressionism was that,

...