ABC Art

Critic Barbara Rose died on December 25 at age eighty-four. We’re sharing the full text of her 1965 essay “ABC Art,” which identified a common sensibility in experimental dance, film, sculpture, painting, and literature. Rose discussed the downtown New York scene of ’60s and the conditions of the essay’s publication in a 2015 interview marking the text’s fiftieth anniversary. —Eds.
On the eve of the first World War, two artists, one in Moscow, the other