Frank O’Hara and the end of the ‘American Century’
The poet and curator was at the forefront of US efforts to project its high art as forcefully as its military might abroad — an idea that now looks dead
Frank O’Hara was born on March 27 1926. For much of his life, however, he celebrated his birthday on the wrong day. O’Hara was born into an emotionally complicated household in Massachusetts, to parents who were overwhelmed by Catholic guilt about sex before marriage and decided that a later date, June 27, would be for the best.
The mistake has a certain irony for a poet famous for his attentiveness to the marking of occasions both special and ordinary: birthdays, deaths, homecoming parties, farewell lunches, weddings, rendezvous kept and missed, a jazz concert at the Five Spot and a performance at the New York City Ballet. Even brunch (especially brunch). In one of his best-known “I do this, I do that” poems, “The Day Lady Died”, a shoeshine is pinned to an exact moment: “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday/three days after Bastille Day, yes/it is 1959”. The lines carry the echo of the French Revolution; as if private time were always brushing up against historical time, as if any day might contain the possibility of dramatic change or self-reinvention.
However we reckon the date of his birth, this year marks O’Hara’s centenary. His fixation on the present moment, “beautiful, and interesting, and modern”, was not merely temperamental.
It belonged to a wider atmosphere in which American life was accelerating, as the country began to imagine its culture in outward-facing terms — a nation projecting its high art as forcefully as its military might abroad. In 1941, the publishing magnate Henry Luce had termed this confident, expansive vision the “American Century”.
Today, at a moment when it feels as though those ideas are in decline, O’Hara’s work returns us to that atmosphere of charged immediacy. To read him now is to see how differently we live, as the openness of his America gives way to a more inward 21st-century culture, shaped by digital mediation and a waning belief in the soft power of art to serve US interests overseas.
O’Hara was one of the leading lights of the poetry scene in mid-century New York. He moved in the orbit of the abstract expressionist painters, but he had a more complicated history. After serving as a sonarman for the US Navy in the Pacific, he entered Harvard University on the GI Bill and met the poet John Ashbery, who encouraged him to move to New York in 1951. There, O’Hara became an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and a familiar presence in the lofts and studios of New York’s artists, inspiring portraits by Alex Katz, Alice Neel and Elaine de Kooning.
The 1950s were a time of cold war tensions abroad and postwar prosperity at home. McCarthyism had coaxed a national paranoia into public life, stifling dissent and chilling political discourse in the process. Against that climate of suspicion, O’Hara and his artistic circle pushed back, celebrating intimacy, friendship and the ordinary textures of the city, refusing the era’s pressures to declare and conform. In the years before the 1969 Stonewall riots, when police could arrest people for wearing fewer than three articles of clothing deemed appropriate to their sex, O’Hara’s open homosexuality was itself a quiet form of defiance. He fell in love often and exuberantly, most deeply with the Canadian ballet dancer Vincent Warren, whose beautiful sense of movement O’Hara once claimed made the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and the impressionists entirely dispensable.
Instead of politics or religion (he had quickly abandoned his youthful Catholicism, which he later described as “at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment”), O’Hara placed his faith in painting, and in the metropolitan pleasures of New York. “In a capitalist country,” he once remarked, “fun is everything.” If poets of another age had sought idyllic pastures far from the city’s corrupting distractions and grime, O’Hara’s poems embraced what Ashbery called his “creatively messy New York environment” with its “scent of garbage, patchouli, and carbon monoxide” — and its endless possibilities. “One need never leave the confines of New York,” O’Hara reflected in his prose-poem “Meditations in an Emergency”, “to get all the greenery one wishes — I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”
This is pure O’Hara: regret, usually a backward-looking feeling, becomes a spur to live fully in the present. He was “a priest who got into a different business”, recalled Katz who, in 1960, completed a nearly life-sized portrait of his friend: “Even on his sixth martini, second pack of cigarettes and while calling a friend ‘a bag of shit’, and roaring off into the night, Frank’s business was being an active intellectual . . . He was out to improve the world whether we liked it or not . . . the frightening amount of energy he invested in our art, and our lives often made me feel like a miser.” And, in that regard, he personified the spirit of the age.
Something else was happening in Manhattan in the 1950s. The city was undergoing a decisive shift in cultural gravity, as the meridian of modern art, long anchored in Paris, moved across the Atlantic. Critics and collectors came to see the work of the abstract expressionists, or the “New York School”, as somehow embodying the pressures and possibilities of American life. Their paintings were positioned as the antithesis of the doctrinaire socialist realism sanctioned by the Soviet Union. Where Soviet art sought heroic images of workers and party leaders, the mural-scale canvases of the New York painters could be presented as the product of artistic individualism: improvised, resistant to centralised control and marked by an anxiety that could only arise where artists were left to choose for themselves.
The movement’s emphasis on personal expression and freedom came to stand, however imperfectly, for the values of American democracy.
If the US was going to win the cold war, it would need to demonstrate that it possessed an advanced culture of its own, not merely the capacity to furnish Europeans with affordable washing machines. Abstract expressionism was presented as a distinctly modern American art — one capable of speaking back to Europe on equal terms.
The American critic Eve Cockroft put it like this: “It is ironic but not contradictory that in a society . . . in which political repression weighed as heavily as it did in the United States, Abstract Expressionism was for many the expression of freedom . . . of artists completely without fetters.”
MoMA positioned itself at the centre of this new world. In July 1952, Nelson Rockefeller, the museum’s chairman, established an International Program to promote American modern art abroad. Rockefeller, who moved effortlessly through the revolving doors of culture, politics and finance, and would later become governor of New York, was the son of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of the three “adamantine ladies” who had founded the museum in 1929. Both New York men of wealth and appetite, Rockefeller and President Donald Trump could not be more different in their cultural instincts: Rockefeller believed art conferred legitimacy on power; Trump believes power confers legitimacy on everything, art included.
Rockefeller conceived the initiative as both a cultural undertaking and an instrument shaped by cold war politics. For its champions and critics, the International Program was a “Marshall Plan in the field of ideas”.
It was into this new world of art and international ambition that O’Hara would step, moving easily between cramped downtown studios and the more formal channels of cultural diplomacy.
In 1951, as a 25-year-old, O’Hara had arrived in Manhattan at just the right time. The triangle of blocks below 14th Street, stretching from the Lower East Side across Greenwich Village to the waterfront bars of the West Village, was a romantic enclave of cheap digs in which the penniless avant-garde stayed warm with “tomato soup” made from free hot water and ketchup at the Waldorf Cafeteria — and made the first great paintings in American modern art. On many nights at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, one could find Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell arguing loudly over whiskey and beer beneath the bar’s dim lights.
Modern poets tended to have rather boring day jobs. T S Eliot was a bank clerk who spent his late twenties shuffling paperwork in the foreign transactions department at Lloyds Bank; Wallace Stevens merrily slogged through 40 years as an executive in the suburban Connecticut insurance industry; Philip Larkin was a librarian in Hull. O’Hara, by contrast, worked at MoMA just as New York was becoming the capital of modern art, shepherding major acquisitions and writing catalogue essays that helped define some of the most radical art of his time.
O’Hara’s swift ascent through the ranks of MoMA would today make any professional curator, armed with specialised degrees in art history, wince. Having started out selling postcards on the front desk in 1951 (he got the job so that he could see a Henri Matisse retrospective every day for free), O’Hara left the museum in 1953 for a couple of years to write criticism for Art News before returning to a plum curatorial position in 1955. Walter Rasmussen, a close friend and MoMA colleague, noted that he was soon “under suspicion as a gifted amateur”, with his “very closeness to the artists . . . questioned as a danger to critical objectivity”.
Championing these artists was a plucky generation of exiled dealers and entrepreneurial gallerists, such as Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, but the abstract expressionists’ success was also the product of a new postwar order. As American capitalism expanded, the New York art scene did too. For the Trotskyite critic turned militant anti-communist Clement Greenberg, the self-appointed flag-bearer of the abstract expressionists, the implications were clear. The “main premises of western art”, he announced, had at last “migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power”.
Manhattan was becoming the future and now its painters had a new kind of art to match. By 1949, Luce’s Life magazine was asking whether Pollock might be “the greatest living painter in the United States”. Two years later, society photographer Cecil Beaton staged a Vogue photo shoot for Dior in front of Pollock’s “drip” paintings. What had begun as the unruly energy of downtown bohemia was quickly absorbed into the circuits of fashion, media and money that defined the new cultural capital.
O’Hara worked within this emerging nexus of art and political and economic power, even as his instincts pulled in another direction. Much of his work for MoMA — especially after he joined the International Program in 1955 — took place overseas, drawing him into the murky, clandestine world of cold war cultural politics. The same art that circulated through the bars and studios below 14th Street was to be enlisted in a wider campaign of cultural projection.
With Dorothy Miller, O’Hara co-curated The New American Painting, a 1958-59 landmark exhibition of 81 works by 17 abstract expressionists that travelled to major European cities. In London, the show drew the highest-paying attendance in the history of the Arts Council’s exhibitions at the Tate Gallery. Nevile Wallis of The Observer argued that American painters had found forms equal to an era of dread and technological upheaval, their canvases “clearly attuned to the phenomena of our time” and charged with a “mysterious and universal import”. In 1958, O’Hara co-curated the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale — the art world’s Olympics — where Mark Tobey became the first American since James McNeill Whistler in 1895 to win the International Prize for Painting.
Today, the Pavilion remains a site of national self-imagination but just duller. Last week, I saw the relatively little-known sculptor Alma Allen’s display at the 2026 Biennale: works that might not be gaudy-neoclassical enough for Mar-a-Lago but would be happily at home in an anonymous lobby of one of Trump’s more provincial hotels — Pine Hill, New Jersey, for instance. Recent funding cuts and the withdrawal of support for cultural programmes under the Trump administration have underscored that belief in art and ideas as instruments of American soft power is waning. In March 2025, following Elon Musk’s dismissal of the international broadcaster Voice of America as a “relic of the past” that “nobody listens to” any more, Trump ordered the US Agency for Global Media — the body that oversees VOA — to be reduced to the minimum level required by law. What resulted was not simply a diminished US cultural presence abroad, but a nation less certain of the value of projecting one at all. A US federal judge subsequently ruled that the effective shutdown violated the Administrative Procedure Act, ordering the agency’s operations, staffing and broadcasting activities to be fully restored.
O’Hara was not a very political person — or at least he liked to seem that way. Even during the activist decade of the 1960s, and as a close friend of figures like Allen Ginsberg, he found loud ideological declarations gauche and preferred the freedom to change his mind. Yet he was a progressive at heart and a life-long anti-fascist ever since he resented being made to pray for Franco’s success in grade school.
He never doubted the abstract expressionists’ bona fides or their authenticity. For him, it was inconceivable that their work would serve merely as window-dressing or chic decoration for Upper West Side penthouses. It was raw and real, built from the residue of everyday life. In an uncertain and anxious moment in American history, their painting offered a model of commitment that he found irresistible. This conviction is evident in his 1959 monograph on Pollock — the first devoted to the artist — published in the same year that O’Hara organised Pollock’s memorial retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. (Pollock had died three years earlier in a drunken car crash in Springs, Long Island.)
In the book, O’Hara lingers over Pollock’s “classical period”, pausing before the painting “Full Fathom Five”, with its familiar drips and splattered paint marks — the “linear trailings of black, flowery-white and aluminum” that have come to stand for Pollock’s brief but monumental achievement. Yet O’Hara looked closer, attending less to the gesture than to the debris caught on the surface: “a number of extraneous objects . . . like souvenirs of accident: a cigarette, half its paper torn off to expose the tobacco, two keys, nails, a cluster of tacks, and paint-tube tops making little blind eyes here and there”. For O’Hara, these fragments registered the contingencies of making itself, the small physical traces of a struggle between accident and intuitive decision-making. It was these qualities that he sought to cultivate in his poetry. Pollock, he concluded, exemplified “the affirmation of an artist who was totally conscious of risk, defeat and triumph. He lived the first, defied the second and achieved the last.”
Now a 30-year-old, and allegedly a day after Pollock’s funeral, O’Hara wrote “A Step Away from Them”, a poem that records a frenetic carousel of images captured on his break from the museum: “It’s my lunch hour, so I go/for a walk among the hum-colored/cabs . . .” before reaching Times Square “where the sign/blows smoke over my head”.
As O’Hara moved through the city streets, the plentiful distractions of a consumerist metropolis — a cheeseburger on the corner, neon in daylight, magazines with nudes, more cigarettes — unfolds with the quickened sense of attention that would become his signature style. Yet beneath the poem’s buoyant surface runs a quieter awareness of mortality. Pollock’s death shadows the walk, briefly surfacing in a passing line before dissolving again into the flow of the afternoon.
Many of O’Hara’s poems read less like escapes from work than dispatches from inside it. In the poem “Radio”, O’Hara bemoans a working week of trudging “fatiguingly/from desk to desk in the museum”, but his Saturday afternoon is redeemed by listening to classical music and having “my beautiful de Kooning” — the painting “Summer Couch”, which O’Hara owned and hung on the wall of his apartment at 326 East 49th Street — to “aspire to”. Spending time with paintings was a busman’s holiday for him, and that was the way he liked it. While some museum bureaucracy was unavoidable, he succeeded in his position because, as his friend the critic Irving Sandler put it, “What was really important about his public role was that it augmented his private role, that of the friend of the artists.”
It was O’Hara’s own death in 1966 that prevented him from curating the first major survey of de Kooning at MoMA. The Rotterdam-born painter, who had arrived in New York as a stowaway in 1926, believed O’Hara was the only American he could trust to undertake the project.
O’Hara died at the age of 40, in July 1966, after a 23-year-old accidentally careered a White Cap Taxi Company jeep into him on a Fire Island beach in the early hours after a party. At his funeral, Larry Rivers — painter, jazz saxophonist and notorious philanderer — gave the eulogy for his longtime collaborator and one-time lover. He declared: “Frank O’Hara was my best friend. There are at least 60 people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.” The poet’s absence left a noticeable gap in postwar American culture: few figures had moved so easily between the studio, the museum, the poem and the street.
O’Hara’s most enduring advice for anyone looking to art for guidance amid the confusions of the present can be found in his 1964 interview with David Smith on the TV series Art: New York, in which he reflects on the sculptor’s wrought iron and stainless steel works. For O’Hara, they were not merely objects to be admired but occasions for a certain discipline of attention — a reminder that the seriousness of art lies in the alertness it demands from those who encounter it.
As he commented: “They present a total attention, and they are telling you that that is the way to be: on guard. In a sense, they are benign, because they offer themselves for your pleasure. But beneath that kindness is a warning: don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.”
More than 60 years later, the warning has acquired a different kind of edge. The America O’Hara moved through — anxious and conformist but still convinced that its culture was something worth sending into the world — has given way to one less certain of that proposition. Rockefeller’s International Program, the American Pavilion at Venice, The New American Painting at the Tate: all were expressions of a belief, however cynically administered, that the US had something to say, and that painting was one way of saying it. The apparatus still exists, just about. But the vision that once sustained a programme of American high art abroad is being dismantled with conviction, not disinterested neglect. The imagery America now projects most fluently is AI-generated: optimised, authorless — the president rendered as Christ healing the sick.
O’Hara’s poems were only accidentally interested in America as an idea — they were actively concerned with what the people he loved did on a Friday lunchtime before the long weekend. But that insistence on the local and the particular was itself a form of political argument: here was an art rooted in individual freedom, in the unglamorous ecstasy of the present moment. It was an art whose every impulse was towards the immediate rather than the instrumental.
His poems capture the passing of hours and the conditions under which those hours are lived: the pressures of conformity, the allure of freedom, the small, stubborn acts of attention through which a life takes shape. In an age where experience is parcelled out through screens, artificial intelligence and algorithms, O’Hara’s commitment to marking the energy of the moment — to all those lunch breaks, paintings, friends and chance encounters — carries an unexpectedly political charge. It locates culture not in what a nation chooses to project, or not, abroad, but in what can be seen, felt and shared within the fabric of everyday life. He was born, officially, on the wrong day. He spent his life making the right one matter.