WHEN PATRICIA AND PHILLIP FROST, IN THE EARLY 1980s, BEGAN ACQUIRING ART created by the members of the American Abstract Artists group, they showed a sophistication and intellectual proclivity that is unusual in beginning collectors. Abstract art is still difficult for many people to love and rarely forms the sole focus of collections even though it has now enjoyed decades of critical praise. The structured, densely formal abstractions of the 1930s and 1940s are an especially unusual first romance because they avoid the easy allure of fluid brushwork and luscious color. This is a laboratory art---a disassembling of the gears and wires of image-making, and an engineering blueprint for the construction of a new kind of visual expression.

The Frosts recognized, however, that seeing these rigorously analytical paintings, drawings, constructions, sculptures, and collages together creates a rare excitement rather like an intense argument among close friends. This is what critic Clement Greenberg alluded to in 1942 when he reviewed the sixth exhibition of the American Abstract Artists, speaking of the "exhilaration peculiar to well-housed shows of abstract art." This is not an art of finished commodities made for a luxury market, but a groping toward the language of the future at a moment when that future was clouded by economic chaos and war. "Here was art in movement, new possibilities . . . that burst the confines of the set easel-picture and sculptured piece," continued Greenberg. "Upon this future a lot depends."

Apart from Greenberg, not many saw the relevance of experiments in abstraction in a time of souplines or war mobilization. The 1936 Artists Congress had rallied painters and sculptors to the cause of a social art explicitly engaged in economic, labor, and political reform. No less a critic than Meyer Schapiro spoke pessimistically of the "apparent isolation of the modern artist . . . detached from practical and collective interests . . . helpless to act on the world." Lewis Mumford was typical of many speakers in sounding an alarm and call to action, saying "We are in the midst of what is plainly a world catastrophe, and we have to realize what our position is, and do our best to put our hands to the oar and do whatever else is necessary to face this emergency."

Artists devoted to abstraction had to be rugged individualists to withstand such pressures for explicit social relevance, but even individualists found stimulation in collective activity in the leftist climate of the mid 1930s. The year after the Artists Congress they banded together to form the American Abstract Artists, seeking reinforcement in their common belief that art maintains its own special engagement with the world even in the face of catastrophe.

Despite the rift that developed in the 1930s between the various artistic camps, the art of the abstractionists like that of the social realists was less an expression of private visions than a search for a new order. The rigorous nature of their visual experiments---their primary concern for interlocking compositional structures and the frequent banishment of autographic marks and bright colors---reflects a preoccupation with new organizational principles and a rejection of the "cult of personality and the senses," as a Marxist of the period might have phrased it.

In the postwar climate of the late 1940s, the sense of world catastrophe gave way to triumph and celebration; a looser, freer, more brilliant and virtuosic abstraction based on the artist's inner life emerged to fit the new national self-confidence. The American Abstract Artists were overshadowed and finally displaced by a generation of younger painters whose heroism centered in personal psychic struggle and transcendence. Two generations of collectors and critics have embraced the Abstract Expressionists as the high priests of modernism, relegating earlier abstractionists to the role of forerunners if they are noticed at all.

Fortunately, Patricia and Phillip Frost were not blinded by prevailing preferences and so were able to assemble an exceptional collection of the earlier and very different experimentations in nonobjective art. They clearly perceived the "laboratory" nature of their work, taking care to represent in their collection not only major canvases but also the studies, collages, constructions, sketches, and sculptures through which these artists so often solved their formal problems. The Frosts are especially sensitive to the new combinations of materials used to test the limits of traditional formats, so that in their collection we can clearly recapture the "art in movement, new possibilities" of which Clement Greenberg wrote.

Dr. and Mrs. Frost were ideally suited to rediscover this lost generation of experimentalists, for Phillip Frost, a dermatologist, has had a career as an innovater in academic medicine and in the pharmaceutical industry. Patricia Frost, an educator, is the principal of West Laboratory School, the educational research facility for the University of Miami and the Dade County Public Schools. Their professional lives have been dedicated to the frontiers of research and to the proposition that intellectual independence leads to social progress. Just as essential for their collecting, the Frosts feel the "exhilaration" in the presence of art that Greenberg spoke of---an intuitive recognition of the spark given off by ideas in visual form.

The Frosts created their collection for the express purpose of giving it to a public institution. By generously donating these 113 remarkable objects to the nation, they have ensured that this seminal movement will never again be obscured in the history of American art. The members of the American Abstract Artists will be remembered for the testimony they brought to bear in the most difficult of times---a statement of faith that the language of art, even in its purest, irreducible form, speaks of the most essential concerns of society and culture.

Elizabeth Broun
Director
National Museum of American Art