Paris, myth and decline/ New York, the nineteenth century of the future

Abstract

The present essay focuses on two moments of the Western modern art: in the first, Paris appears as the myth, built by books, of the nineteenth century culture; the city in which Walter Benjamin and Nestor Victor perambulate, the flaneur and the dandy, characters who cross and counterpose the crowd that crams the streets. In the second, New York appears in the post-war period as a new capital of the West, a city whose modernist design and straight lines disappearing in the horizon make dizzy an European visitor as Jean-Paul Sartre. It is there that Clement Greenberg theorizes about the abstract expressionism, and where Murilo Mendes sees "the nineteenth century of the future."